So where do I come in?

My Bounty Hunter in The Old Republic asks this a lot. It's a good question.

Sometimes a game can struggle to come up with a reason why your character does the things they do. Why the player plays the game is obvious enough - it's fun (hopefully) - but not every game can justify your in-game alter ego's restless wanderings. Some don't even try.

For the two classes in SWTOR that exist outside of the Republic/Imperial heirarchy, the motivation is the promise of fame and/or fortune, with a revenge sideplot thrown in. It works, but if you've done Dromund Kaas on another character then the fact that your targets just happen to be in the same three locations does rather strain credibility. The story does put the work in to justify this and each stage has at least one good scene along the way, but it's still a stretch, and the class story never seems more than tangenitally connected to the world on which it's taking place.

(Interestingly, at least one of the non-Jedi classes - I can't recall which - averts this by going nowhere near the Jedi Temple on Coruscant. This may be the single most positive thing I've ever said about that world.)

Things weren't quite so neat on the next world, Balmorra. The class story here ties in  much more to the world, but at the same time it's oddly out of sync with the planetary story arc. While following the class story I wandered into the start of the final stage of the planet story - the attack on the arms factory - before I'd even completed the first stage. Admittedly I did wander off the path somewhat, but to echo what I said about Hutta, when a world in SWTOR is actually open enough that I can get lost I'm not going to complain.

So before I headed to the arms factory I doubled back and did the other stages of the Balmorra story, at which point I noticed that there's actually very little to it until you get to the finale. Prior to that all you do is shoot your way into a one room complex and blow up some generators, then go to a different location and shoot some guys in a field, then go to a third location and shoot some other guys in another field. Sure, the attack on the arms factory makes for a big finish, but pretty much everything memorable leading up to that - outwith the class story - is entirely optional. I didn't notice this the last time I was here because on my Warrior I was doing all the side missions. Here I'm only doing some and this, combined with doing the Balmorra story missions after I'd already done some exploration missions in the same areas, highlighted how little there is here.

The finale is good though. I'm fairly sure at least one encounter along the way has been nerfed. A Jedi Knight you encounter at one point used to be a boss - as I recall - but they no longer are and the sequence that introduces them lasts longer than the ensuing fight.

I did enjoy the class story. The client is a creep and very entertaining, and there's a nice twist that I only saw coming one scene before the reveal. I've only ever gone as far as Dromund Kaas on a Bounty Hunter prior to this run, so this has all been new to me, as will Nar Shaddaa which I'm on my way to next. I decided not to stick around on Balmorra for the bonus story, so between that and my pick and choose approach to side missions and Heroics, things are moving faster on this character than they have on any of the others so far.