Like every Thursday for a month now, the SWTOR teams held a livestream dedicated to the future expansion to come at the end of this month: Knights of the Eternal Throne. Today were Eric Musco (Community Manager), and Charles Boyd, artistic director for the story. Attention mini-spoilers to come in this article, if you don't want any at all, I advise you to limit yourself to the section Community Discussions.
I have to say the cat was in good shape today with lots of humorous questions like: Can we romanticize the Cenotaph? I laughed a lot.
Community Discussions
- The return of the companions: where are those who have not yet returned? No feedback during these chapters. One of the reasons is that player feedback found that the main story was not progressing fast enough, so no companion to focus on the story that was served in KotFE by finding these partners. They really want to be given the choice and focus on solving the story, even though they're not too happy that their return is missing. They also really want to develop these characters and give them their due.
- Opening of Command Crates: As promised they showed an opening and they also talked a bit more about the details about it.
- It seems that tier 3 only arrives at level 100 because even at level 98 it is tier 2 cash.
- The crates open in a special stack like the cartel crates now.
- A crate contains three to four items. In the three open crates, among other things, we saw jawa spare parts, blueprints, cosmetic items and reputation equipment and trophies.
- On each Operation boss we can recover boxes of command experience points.
- In two to three boxes of purple points we gain a command rank (level 96 so surely the same for level 100). Thus two cases will be possible per operation and therefore the chances of winning an item of equipment remain the same.
- If ever the items won are not useful to us, we can disintegrate them to gain more command experience points.
- By selecting objects, you can see exactly in the progress bar how many command experience points they will earn if you decide to disintegrate them.
- Looks like people want to have Tora as their chat mate ... and so does Kai Zykken when Musco said he would like to have her. For Tora they will think about it eventually.
Dominate the Galaxy Trailer.
They replayed the Dominate the Galaxy trailer released yesterday. Catch-up session for those who missed it and spoil it about it right after!
Warning spoiler
Charles was amazed that no one noticed who was down in the Eternal Throne Room. Looks like it's Theron, but they won't respond whether or not it is.
The story of KotET, without spoilers on what is to come but still spoils on KotFE
- The Alliance: The Stranger has become the commander of an alliance to kick Arcann out of the throne, and thanks to what has been accomplished in the chapters of KotFE, many ships, soldiers and others are rallying under your banner in the as you are the Galaxy's first hope for five years. But each faction risks trying to maneuver to counter you, in anticipation of the post-destruction of the Eternal Throne, just in case ...
- Vaylin: She took the head of the Eternal Throne and has SCORPIO as an advisor although her allegiance is still unclear, one should be fixed on this in the story.
- Senya and Arcann: They are on the run after Chapter 16. Senya hopes to heal him, both physically and spiritually, morally. Their fate will be totally your choice.
- The choices in KotET in general will be very important. We're going to be able to kill people as we choose, it's going to be their deadliest expansion so far.
- Valkorion: He will always have an important role. We will learn more about his past, how he went from Vitiate to Valkorion. We should know at the end of the story what his real purpose is, is he telling us the truth or not?
- Each class will have slightly different interactions / reactions to certain things.
- Voss will be the first planet we will visit. It may or may not be worth doing the Voss Star Fortress to see the impact it will have on the story.
- We can get our revenge on Koth if we want.
- It won't be possible to romanticize Arcann, at least not in this expansion. Maybe later according to our choices.
- Lucasfilm is working closely with Bioware to verify the story and give feedback.
- Bioware also works with experts from the Star Wars world at Lucasfilm.
- Drew Karpyshyn contributed to the story of this expansion.
- He also created a story in the form of a short story, about Senya and Vaylin, their relationship. This story focuses on how things went to get to the fight in the Betrayal cutscene. This story is now available for free on the official website.
New planets
There are two new planets in this expansion: Iokath and Nathema.
Iokath : totally new in the universe. It is a completely mechanical planet. It's actually a Dyson sphere. In summary, a Dyson sphere is a gigantic structure encompassing a star (the black star is therefore a baby next to it) to collect all the energy produced by it. Being well known in astrophysics, I would surely devote an article to the Dyson sphere.
- We will learn about the eternal fleet, scorpion, the Cenotaph ... It is the largest structure of The Old Republic from the point of view of the lore.
- The gigantic size of the structure can be seen in the photos. In which we will go elsewhere.
- There are various biomes with environments from multiple planets, such as the Green Garden. This allows you to explore different climates.
Nathema : known in the Star Wars universe. For those who have read the Revan novel, they know her well.
- This is the home planet of Vitiate / Valkorion, but Valkorion exterminated everything there.
- Despite how long it's happened, it's still scary and mentally compelling territory.
- One can use the Force on Nathema, but with difficulty. Most of all, the planet has a psychological impact on people.
- We will meet strange creatures on it, mixtures or deformations of other species.
- This is the planet in Betrayal, where Valkoryon transforms Vaylin and brings misfortune to him.
These are planets that focus on history, and therefore small like the latter like Zakuul. But why not extend them in the future like Tatooine for example.
Planning of lives, blogs and more
- Wednesday 23 November: KotET summary and question and answer session.
- In 12 days the "baby" is available for early access.
- The January livestream ... maybe coming before January, as soon as they're pretty sure it won't change the information on this anymore, they will.
To watch the live again, click!
So what do you think of all this? Thanks to Jagent for helping out with the summary!
