Ziost Story Impression And Disappointments

Recently I’ve got to go through the second part of the Ziost story, on my Sage. And so far I like what Bioware did storywise. But I can’t help to feel like it lacked in content. Now, keep in mind that you have to finish your storyline on Yavin in order to get the mission-story arch for Ziost. Once you get to Ziost, you meet up with Lana/Theron (depending on which side you’re playing on), pick up a few missions and evacuate some citizens and fight mind controlled minions of the Emperor and are introduced to “The Sixth Line Jedi Order” (in some cases people are calling ‘The Grey Jedi Order’).

NOTE: May contain spoilers

Now as I’ve stated in a previous post, I did play through the first half Ziost on PTS and spacebarred not to ruin the story/cutscenes for when it went live. And I thought to myself, “Okay not too bad, I want to know what else happens”. So I waited until it hit live servers, cause I really wanted to see the whole thing through. One thing that I would make sure that you do, is while you’re doing the first part of Ziost, is to get all your achievements out of the way for you will NOT be able to go back to beginning area (but keep in mind that you can get the achievements going through with another character). So I would just say take your time, and don’t rush. Dulfy has a wonderful guide for reference.

Now the second part of Ziost after an interesting cutscene of the Emperor absorbing “all” the life from Ziost (which reminded me of the Revan book), I was in awe to see that the story went in that direction, bold move by the Bioware writers (awesome job). But finally getting on planet again and seeing the devastation and destruction of the Emperor’s power, made me realize that the follow up story (which should be June 15th) should be interesting. I honestly can’t wait for it.

Okay but now here’s what gets me, is that there’s a few dailies, secret achievements, one world boss and an instanced boss. Wait, what? That’s it? I mean seriously… I was looking under my keyboard thinking that some of the content might’ve slid under it. Nope, that’s it. Now, I mean I get that it’s not an expansion, but I wanted just a bit more. So we’re not that far off from June 15th, I hope this build up was worth it. I’m not disappointed with the story.

Let me back up a bit here, let’s go back to the “secret achievements”, …. so let me get this straight, Bioware is going to start to hide achievements from us? Whose brilliant idea was it to do that? I mean, maybe the team ran out of ideas or content that they said, “Hey, here’s an idea, let’s hide achievements from them to keep busy for hours on end.”. Not to mention that including myself, a few other players didn’t get credit for the secret droid achievement, that’s a little frustrating. I spent probably a couple or a few hours trying to get all four droids and only got credit for one. But you can only “get” these droids from doing one of the dailies, so I was having to reset my mission so that I didn’t complete for the purpose of trying to get all the droids. And honestly, no heroic mission dailies? Has the encouraging of grouping stopped? (Sigh) And let’s not forget that one has to jump over a Monolith with one of the missions speeder bike for another secret achievement.

Speculation has it that Nightmare mode has pretty much took a backseat as the instanced Colossal Monolith drops a 204 Rating mainhand. I will agree with certain people that adding a Nightmare mode is not adding content, and that it’s just recycling same content and adding a few more mechanics. Nightmare mode was introduced to Swtor players as the bugs for Shadow of Revan. It was a nightmare to get through Coratanni and a nightmare to get through Underlurker. Content should be fresh and new.

Granted some bugs have arisen with certain aspects with the Outfit designer (I’m having to apply and reapply my outfits so that my dye with take). Quick travel points for some not unlocking and actually having to click on them.

Stay tuned to The Balance Force.