
You know what gets me to come back to an MMO? When I see a game (and its dev team/studio) working hard to get me to come back. And while I’ve been dismissive of Star Wars: The Old Republic in the year to date, it’s been getting increasingly hard to push it out of mind with the new content updates and the announcement of this fall’s expansion. So the thought started to bubble up in my brain that, yes, I think I might actually like to continue my old Operative’s story and actually see the rest of the content that I’ve been missing to date.

Of course, when the last time I played this character was May of 2017, it stands to reason that I’ve forgotten pretty much everything about the story and what she’d been doing. Thank goodness for my blog and this page, which neatly lays out the order of solo content progression.
Seeing as how I’m still in chapter 13 of the Fallen Empire expansion, I’ve got quite a ways to go to catch up! There’s the rest of the expansion, then the Eternal Throne expansion, then Iokath, then Ossus, then Dantooine (and all of the in-between patches). If it holds my attention — and here’s hoping — then that’s a good summer’s worth of content.

IN THIS WEEK’S EXCITING EPISODE… Gault (a Bounty Hunter companion) shows up to take me on a treasure hunt for a mysterious ship laden with money. Sounds legit, especially coming from a one-horned devil. But since I’ve always had a soft spot for Gault, I’m totally on board for whatever whackadoodle scheme he’s running.

About which time I started having some *fierce* deja vu, so I looked up my previous SWTOR posts, and sure enough, I recorded back in 2017 that I had already fully beaten this chapter. But it wasn’t that much of a bother to rerun it, seeing as how I needed to brush up on this character and both Gault and Vette were delights to be around.

After that I jumped into Chapter XIV: The Mandalore’s Revenge. I got the feeling by the middle of this expansion that SWTOR decided to feature which ever companion characters whose voice actors could be rounded up. Apparently it’s Very Important that we go find this GEMINI droid on Darvannis, as it can be used to access and enslave all of the droid captains of the Eternal Fleet.
That drops us in with the Mandalorians, which are a faction that I never really took a shine to in Star Wars. I’m kind of lukewarm on any warriors-are-the-best culture in fantasy and sci-fi, because that kind of posturing gets tiresome and the actual logistics of a functioning society of brawlers doesn’t make sense when you think about it. Klingons, I’m looking at you.

This chapter was…. fine, for all intents and purposes. I liked Darvannis, which was an oasis-themed desert world, but everything here felt like going through the motions. The little floaty round droids would summon skytroopers at the least provocation, and I have to agree with the Mandalorians that there’s little honor — or excitement — in battling robots. Honestly, it makes me feel that the bad guys are pretty much Arcann, his sister, about a dozen pseudo-Jedi knights, and then a bunch of bots. Fighting robots in the Terminator was one thing, this is far less.
What really got my attention is the growing unease that SCORPIO presents. As an Imperial Agent, I’ve had her around for a good long while and haven’t forgotten that she started out as my foe for the better part of an entire planet. Her design is very creepy and that voice… that voice gives me chills with the monotone malice that it presents.
It’s kind of clear that she’s not on the up-and-up with us, but no matter how many “I don’t trust you, you slinky robot!” dialogue options I make, she’s still allowed to come along for the next mission. But I don’t trust you, you slinky robot. Not at all. Of course, I romanced a bug-man at one point, so who am I to talk?