Though I didn’t really like Star Wars: The Old Republic and felt that the story for the Jedi Knight class was lacklustre, I still went back to it for quite a while. Obviously I’m a bit of a glutton for punishment and there’s something about standard MMO gameplay that makes it low-hanging fruit. It’s just so easy and convenient to boot it up for just one more session of mindless playing. But it’s also because I looked what most people consider to be the best class story in the game and it’s pretty much unanimously the Imperial Agent. I decided that I needed to check it out for myself.

And my verdict is that this really is so much better that it’s almost like a different game entirely. To be fair, one reason why I had a much better experience this time around is that I focused exclusively on the class arc and planet arc quests, ignoring all optional quests and even Heroic instances. This cut out a lot of the fluff and made the story much more coherent, though there were still problems with discrepancies between the class stories and the planet stories. The experience gaining rate from playing in this manner allowed me to pretty much stay in the level range of each of the visited planets, mostly eliminating the need for the level sync mechanic. It makes for a much tighter experience all around.

Another reason, and a more surprising one to me, is that I found I enjoyed the game mechanics of a Sniper-specialized Imperial Agent a lot more than a Jedi Knight that must necessarily fight in melee range almost all of the time. I found that melee range combat is a confusing mess so much so that I don’t even look at the graphics any more. I just ensure that I’m within range and then watch the action bars to look for abilities as they become active. The opposite is true for the Sniper. He’s a glass cannon and so he really wants the enemy to stay away. Add the cover mechanic and the option to open the fight with powerful but very slow to activate abilities means that I get to watch the action on-screen. Using a grenade to stun enemies and then watch them get mowed down by Suppressive Fire or Orbital Strike is so satisfying. Needing to play keep away with tools like Cover Pulse, Leg Shot and the final blast of Penetrating Shots makes me feel like I’m being a more active player than just trying to deal as much damage in combat as possible. The only downside is that the only companions who really work are those who can immediately jump in to melee range of enemies as a tank.

But the real draw of course is that the class story here really is so much better written. The story for the Jedi Knight is sort of boring because she does nothing more than keep fighting off big threats against the galaxy, over and over again. The Imperial Agent focuses more on fighting against internal threats to the Empire. Even better, right from the beginning the story deals with the tensions within the different factions that make up the Empire. The Sith are the undisputed masters of the Empire but the Intelligence division that you work for clearly see them as spoiled children with superpowers. They’re to be feared and at least on the surface their unpredictable whims catered to, but in the meantime it’s the coolly professional and efficient Intelligence and maybe the Military divisions that keep the everyday business of the Empire running along. Needless to say, this is a much more interesting base on which to build great stories.

I especially loved the second chapter of the game which has Intelligence assigning you as a double agent within the Republic’s equivalent SIS. The mind-games that result from this are simply delightful though I won’t spoil the details. I’m less of a fan of the final chapter which mostly takes you out of the fight between the Empire and the Republic to focus instead on a conspiracy that threatens both parties. I was however shocked that near the end of the game you have to go to such deep cover that the game forces you to marry a contact. I know that after murdering so many people, I should be more inured, but I found that to be a particularly heartless and cruel act. It’s also rather odd that nothing from Jedi Knight story shows up here. Surely the death of the Emperor should be a major event that reverberates across the entire Empire, but I don’t think it even rates a mention in the Agent’s story.

The excellence of the writing extends even to the Agent’s companions. I found the companions for the Jedi Knight to have been humdrum with Doc being positively obnoxious. There’s no particular theme to the companions and of them only Kira Carsen and Lord Scourge are connected to the story’s events. The Agent’s companions however have a very clear theme going for all of them and it’s one that is echoed in the Agent’s own story: ambiguous or divided loyalties. Kaliyo works only for money and at her own whim with no loyalty to even the Agent, let alone the empire; Vector Hyllis is torn between his role as an Imperial Diplomat and the Killik Hive which has assimilated him; Raina Temple seems like a loyal and well-adjusted officer, until one incident shows you just how fanatically loyal she is. Unfortunately the game forces you to keep all of your companions whereas it would make a lot more narrative sense if you had to kill or permanently kick out some of these companions.

Finally the male Imperial Agent has arguably the best voice actor in the entire game. Frankly I was sold on the character the moment he switches voices between a colloquial style used to pose as a pirate and the more formal style that he uses to communicate with his superiors at Imperial Intelligence. The actor, Bertie Carvel, is British and therefore uses his accent to full effect. This makes the Agent basically an evil version of James Bond, willing to seduce women to gain information and then immediately afterwards execute them when they’re no longer useful or sacrifice untold numbers of civilians to achieve mission objectives. It’s such an unusual and interesting character to play in any RPG.

I still don’t love the game enough to go through anything past the class story all over again. Since writing my previous post I’d actually went back to the Jedi Knight to finish off the content added by the expansions but became stymied by a bug in one of the Knights of the Fallen Empire chapters. The KoFE stuff is decent and appropriately cinematic but the stuff prior to it are forgettable with Shadow of Revan being just terrible for how much damage it does to the canon. But the KoFE stuff seems awfully linear and narrow no matter what class you are. Since I’ll be moving on to other games now, I doubt I’ll ever come back to it. Bye-bye SWTOR, it was interesting while it lasted.