Star Wars: The Old Republic II: Hutts don't have feet!

[mistformsquirrl]

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A difference that makes no difference...

To be plain, you're supposed to be--as someone who has only played through the Republic side--uncomprehending of why Makeb wasn't destroyed. That is very much baked into the story; if you had played both halves of the story instead of just one, that would be clear. As it is, you've made an (incorrect) assumption about why Makeb wasn't destroyed (that it's so there can be a weekly area, despite the detriment to immersion). The problem is that instead of seeing a mystery and going, "That's a mystery," you're seeing a mystery and immediately screaming, "That's bad writing!" Like if you watched the first ten minutes of a Columbo episide, and spent the rest of the episode speculating unkindly about the writers' obviously-laughably-invalid reasons why the person who you had seen commit a murder hadn't been carted off to prison right after the introduction.

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Maybe it's just me, but it didn't feel like a mystery being set up to be solved at all - it felt like a handwave to justify a daily area.

A further refinement of my thought on the matter is basically this: It's not so much what they said; it's how they said it. The holo doesn't set up a mystery to be solved. In fact it rather implies the mystery isn't important - the entire focus is on getting the survivors off the surface - people they thought were already dead to begin with.

There's no sense of "Let's get to the bottom of this" - not even implied; just a flat "We have work to do" kind of thing. Morally that's the correct response, but in terms of storytelling it's not really that great a way to do it.

I mean let me put it from this angle: When you set up a mystery, it's the start of a story, not the end. That doesn't mean a mystery can't exist at the end of one story - but a mystery must necessarily lead to a story (either this or a subsequent one) if it's to be answered.*

Basically, this felt like an instant retcon of the impetus of the previous story, not the setting up of a follow on story.

Keep in mind, this isn't the first ten minutes of an hour long episode - this is the final 20 seconds of the story (or at least, at that point appears to be) - this is kind of like watching a film and seeing the survivors finish off the monster... only to be ambushed or menaced by it in some footage after the credits.

Finally - and I admit it was a bad assumption on my part, but again I really did figure "repeatable content = no story" - because that's how it works in the vast majority of MMOs. I'm not saying it's bad the subvert that - actually that's wonderful; but I don't think it's hard to understand why I'd feel that way.

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At any rate, this isn't an argument we need to be having, I said my piece and that's all I wanted to do. I did overall like the story quite a bit - I don't think Makeb was bad or anything; I just had some issues with it that I didn't have with my class story from 1-50.

*Now it's true in some stories, mysteries are presented and left unanswered; and that can be just fine - but these are often moral questions or questions of motivation or other things where one can reasonably ponder and argue "Why this?" - not inexplicably undoing the entire focus of the previous story.