The Funnel

The class stories make The Old Republic very alt friendly. Up to a point.

There comes a point in any MMORPG where the number of options for levelling content narrows down to one. How quickly this happens varies from game to game, and in SWTOR it happens in stages: the first of these being when the player leaves their starter world and heads to the Fleet, followed by their faction's capital world.

It's perhaps unsurprising that it was while I was on Coruscant that I started to have second thoughts about adding this second Republic character to my roster, because as I've said before, Coruscant is...

“...a whirlpool of mediocrity into which every character on the Republic side is inexorably sucked...”

There's a couple of briefly diverting side missions and a few good moments in the Consular story but the majority of Coruscant is just as I remember it – a bland, repetitive slog that feels like it was thrown together over the course of a weekend. This time around I did some of the side missions but skipped all of the Heroics and was on my way rather quicker than when I went through this world on my Trooper.

Thankfully the next world on the Republic itinerary, Taris, is a lot better. But it is still the world I have to do next, and that's how it'll go now – every Republic character is locked into the same worlds in the same order until the end of the class story, and the funnel only narrows further after that.

Of course this is inevitable – devs are reluctant to spend a disproportionate amount of time creating content that only a fraction of the playerbase will ever see, and post-launch there is always, sooner or later and usually sooner, a move toward content that every character will run. In this respect SWTOR is no different from say Secret World Legends or Final Fantasy XIV, but it's nonetheless much more noticeable in this game because neither of those games are that big on alts – FFXIV straight up discourages them – whereas in SWTOR the lure of the other seven class stories is going to exert a pull on even the most casual alt-er. It's enough to make me wish that there were a few more ways to change up the levelling experience, other than simply not doing some/all of the side missions and Heroics.