Satnav said:
I want to say that was in tie-novels, how much of that was in the game itself? Genuine question.
The details of what happened in the Revan novel aren't in the game, but that Revan went to face him and was captured and was tortured until he split into a good side and evil side is featured in a few
flashpoints in vanilla, and then is at the centre of an expansion, Shadow of Revan. That Revan is alive and now an insane fanatic who believes that he must destroy Vitiate at any cost is in the game.
That said TOR does not go into the events of KotOR I in great detail.
I vaguely remember something about one of the Sith Moffs (because of course they had GE ranks thousands of years early too!) spearheading their military buildup overdrive, or something? I think also the implication was they observed the Malak conflict and like to take notes.
Odile Vaiken, I believe. To be honest he sounded like an interesting person, and probably the most competent man in the Empire.
They tried, I think, to redo him somewhat with Valkorian or at least something beyond Uber Palpatine, but I don't disagree with you there. I stand by that the twist should've been that the mysterious and godlike Sith Emperor turns out to be a puppet figurehead made by the Sith Council as a unifying dread lord to keep the fractious dark lords in line, a la what Palpatine almost was like in very early drafts!
I feel like what they needed to do was clearly work out early on what they were doing with Vitiate, if anything.
Valkorion is all right because that entire story is about domestic abuse, right? Or at least emotional abuse. Valkorion, Senya, Arcann, Thexan, and Vaylin are this grossly dysfunctional family full of twisted love and hate and duty, and it does feel like they're trying to say something with it.
In a better world that might have been an evolution on material in core, because you can kind of see the outlines of where you've got themes of pain, vulnerability, and abuse going on with the Sith Empire? The Empire is supposed to be driven by fear and hatred; by the paranoid fear of the Republic which they believe wants to exterminate them, by the directionless anger that gives them, and then by the hateful quest for vengeance. They definitely have this running theme of, "they hurt us, so now we will hurt them back". When they bombard Coruscant there's a vicious glee to it, as if they're finally making the Republic feel what they felt when they were driven from Korriban and Ziost. When they destroy the Coruscant Jedi Temple, and the Jedi Order reconstitutes itself on the newly re-discovered Tython, you can tell the Sith are rubbing their hands together and thinking, "Good, now they know what it feels like to be driven from their home by a cruel conqueror!"
It's interesting in the context of Vitiate's name, I think? Vitiatus means "corrupted", which is appropriate for an evil Sith Lord, but it also means "damaged", "violated", or even "raped". (And yes, I am very much aware of how that feeds into some really horrible tropes about abuse victims. Sorry.) For the Sith Empire to devote themselves to following Emperor Rape Victim is... er, interesting. Presumably the intention is to translate 'Vitiate' as more like 'One Made Wicked', but I also like 'One Who Has Been Harmed' or 'One Who Has Been Wronged' as a name that feeds into the Empire's persecution complex - all quite oblivious to the fact that the Empire are themselves monstrous tyrants.
There are enough hints that you can wonder, I guess, about something more interesting with Vitiate? The Children of the Emperor have that whole possession/corruption/violation theme, and of course after Shadow of Revan Vitiate goes all-in on possessing people; and then in KotFE he possesses you. And you might plausibly read the way he constantly rants about his power, his immortality, his inviolability, etc., as being a overcorrection to perceived past vulnerability. Sadow and Kressh were fools and got his original domains destroyed, and then the Jedi and the Republic took everything, so now he wants to place himself beyond even the possibility of being harmed.
Unfortunately, the acting and writing just don't sell it, and what we eventually learn of Vitiate's actual origin as Tenebrae just hammers home that he was always a total monster and there is nothing interesting to him at all.
comradepitrovsky said:
I mean, yeah, it's not actually good. That's the basic problem with SWTOR. Some of the ideas are better then the other - I enjoyed the Agent storyline, and the Inquisitor storyline is about sixty percent good - but it's not actually that good. It's basically flawed on a fundamental level because it has to be an MMO where neither side can actually progress and all the characters need a chance to be equally good or evil, which means that you can have insane storylines like the good Inquisitor - who, let me remind you, EATS SOULS - or the Evil Consular.
It is really impressive how messed up TOR's morality system is. I recently replayed the end of Shadow of Revan and the Agent Kovach bit is just... bizarre.
Anyway, I don't think the MMO format was fatal. For all that we sometimes complain about WoW-style theme park MMOs, they can nonetheless be venues for quite good writing. FFXIV is the most famous proof of that, and I've often been impressed by LOTRO. TOR as a whole is a game that I can't really call successful, but it's enough of an interesting mess that I keep playing around with it, if that makes sense? It's not good, but it's close enough that I want to tinker with it.
IRUn said:
Well, if we're going off of the Galactic Timeline series of videos that came out before the game, then the Sith's shift from Tales of the Jedi style sword and sorcery style aesthetic, to just the Galactic Empire with the edges filed off took place over the course of their twenty year journey from the old Sith Empire to Drommund Kas, going from this:
To be fair, KotOR I made that change first, going from the Bronze Age god-king sorcerers to OT-style human shock troopers and spaceships. At least KotOR I had the justification that Revan and Malak's forces were rebellious Republic troops, which might explain a more modern appearance... except that Republic troops in Tales of the Jedi were also late Bronze Age in style, because everything in TotJ was drawn to evoke this kind of sword-and-sandal epic. So who knows what's going on?
