tl;dr Could we please have stories that have complete wrap ups at the time of release between the larger more complex story releases?
Apologies for the long post but I doubt the tl;dr really explains what I mean.
I've noticed a trend with the story telling since around KOTFE. It seems to me that the stories have become more complex and as a result they take more time to tell. While I like good thoughtful storytelling and well developed plotlines, I feel it's given rise to another trend: players not seeing the whole picture and losing patience.
The story around the Umbara flashpoint was really shocking at first. Initially it felt as though a certain character had gone completely out of character. However, after a while of refection, I realized that the story was largely a lot of foreshadowing of what is to come instead of resolving the traitor issue, but there is a reason the "traitor" is doing what their are doing.
In the aftermath, though, I saw a lot of griping, which I feel was misplaced. I think the real problem is not the writing. I was rather impressed when I saw where Charles laid out the story that should have made up KOTET. I know the stories look solid if you get the whole thing. The real problem seems to be timing. It takes so long for players to see plot elements come together, to feel the pay off, that several things start to happen:
- Players forget elements of the story between releases, especially subtle details
- they lose their enthusiasm for seeing the resolution and thus lose emotional attachment to the story
- they start to interpret every detail in the context of the latest release instead of the whole
- they lose patience with waiting for everything to come together
I remember Charles commenting in a livestream that the devs heard a lot of feedback that the story was taking to long. I kinda disagreed. I feel that the pacing was off but not in that it took too long overall. It was off in that there weren't enough little milestones where you got a small measure of closure along the way. It just took too long to feel like your character accomplished something. To me, it kinda felt like you were swinging at the wind until you finally had a showdown with Arcann.
Could we please have sub-stories that wrap up within say a month or go from start to complete when released? I believe this would give people enough logical stopping points to hold them over while waiting on the main story to release. Not to mention it would make it feel more like progress.
One good example is the Maanan story in the Allied Forced storyline or whichever one comes after level 55 and takes you to Rishi and Yavin. The Maanan story is not the grand sum of the story being told but it is a complete story on it’s own and you do get some resolution by the end of it. The same goes for Tython flashpoint story, Korriban, and basically all the of sub stories in the Allied Forces line. In the original chapters, the planetary arcs served that purpose. Each planet had its own complete story in the middle of the overall story being told.
