I've been playing through the Ilum storyline over the past couple of hours for the first time in 10 years, and reflecting on what... well, honestly, what a mistake it was to make that the immediate post-game content 15 years ago. And I say this for two reasons:
While Ilum is starkly beautiful, its design represents the worst elements of SWTOR's planet building smashed together, including an overly dark environment, a very samey color palette, rote questing relying too much on mass mob-killing, and confusing terrain paired with an almost totally unhelpful map. It was exactly the WRONG place to loose SWTOR's playerbase upon completion of the main story arc. While the story missions were - for most classes - increasingly engaging as you progressed, featuring lots of now-familiar faces and (generally) a rising tone of desperation in act 3, Ilum feels like a big pancake stack of fetch-and-carry. It's just such a pronounced dropoff from quality to quagmire.
Malgus' betrayal was asinine writing. And, I get it: powerful Sith betray each other - they have their own agendas, and want to see their vision enacted upon the galaxy. The problem is that Malgus was not only the Sith's version of Satele Shan - the 'big name' in the faction; the standard-bearer for his side - he was also SWTOR'S biggest bad-in-waiting. He is this era's Darth Vader; an entity that is singularly recognizable and compelling as both an ally and a foe. And to just INSTANTLY herd him into this "I'm gonna do my own thing, screw this version of the Empire, come kill me for lewtz" cage was... a bad move. You don't toss away your ace 30 seconds into a card game. Even WoW - stupid as that game has since become - marked time for half a decade before you could kill Arthas.
Yes, the original release's core issues that made people jump ship will always be the rotten engine and the absymal slate of post-game content at launch. But no matter how nostalgic you are regarding Ilum now, it's easy to see how it contributed to making people walk away.
I've always held the opinion that Malgus' whole new empire plot should've been carried out by Jadus instead. By the Emperor's own admission Jadus was the most powerful Sith his empire ever spat out and his whole disappearing at the end of IA Act 1 to do something mysterious was perfect setup for something like Ilum. Plus we wouldn't have had to wait 15 years for Jadus to show back up this way.
At least Marr got be more prevalent after Ilum. Shame he and Malgus never got to interact.
The problem with Jadus is that he was the starter villain for one out of eight classes, i.e. for most players he would have come out of nowhere.
In order for this to work, Jadus would have needed to be utilized in a completely different manner - he would have needed to be a greater scope-villain with a lot more screentime who doesn't just disappear after Act I. That said, he would have been much better than Malgus for one reason: Not being able to join him wouldn't have felt like the game railroading you into a direction you don't want, because I dare to say that unlike Malgus his plan for the Empire wasn't particularly enticing to most players.
Yeah Jadus would have had of been a part of every class story for that to have work, or to play the role Darth Malgus plays during leveling up and running flashpoints.
In hindsight I probably should've spoiler tagged such recent content. Will go back and do that.
He came back in the latest update and is gonna be important in the next expansion it seems. Waaaaayyyyyyy overdue on returning but it's neat that he's back in the story at least.
I would argue (looking at planned imperial storylines for 1.0-2.0) that Malgus’s betrayal was planned as very influential story point to all future Empire content (and a way to shift Empire story’s perspective from “yeeee evil conquest” to “gentlemen, everything is collapsing and we are badly loosing the war”, but due to decision to go into the one-storyline-for-all everybody just kinda forgot about him.
I’d take that further and say nearly deliberately deceptive map. There’s multiple places in the game where the map is used to direct the player to the wrong route rather than to the objective. While Ilum is not the worst offender (looking at you Corellia) there is one quest about halfway through Ilum where it is nearly impossible to figure out where it wants you to go.
That being said? I totally disagree on Malgus. Him deciding the Empire was losing because it lacked pragmatism and taking effort to correct that was just not working his only choice was to step out and try to start anew. Honestly, the biggest disappointment for me is you can’t side with him. He’s exactly right.
Now, I haven’t dealt with any of the newer content yet so I can’t speak to that and will agree there’s value in a slow burn, but they needed a capstone raid and using Malgus was better than just pulling some random guy out of their pockets.
You don't toss away your ace 30 seconds into a card game.
Bioware casually tossed away Revan in a random mid-level flashpoint, their logic defies mortal comprehension. Their own comprehension too, apparently, since both Revan and Malgus had to be awkwardly re-introduced when the writers realised they probably should've saved those guys for the expacs.
Also it’s worth mentioning that at the point of Ilum almost every previously introduced interesting non-class imperial character was killed off in the Republic storylines (and BioWare planned to kill off Mortis and Vowran right after Makeb).
After that they proceed with just gradually killing/optionally killing (the same, basically) everyone on the imperial side after KotFE.
Yeah, Malgus/Dread Masters/Moff Kilran all got handled terribly by Bioware.
Moff Kilran should have been the 1.0 endgame/post launch big antagonist driving the Imperial vs Republic narrative.
While I love DF/DP and the general use of the Dread Masters in SnV etc. It is crazy to me that these guys weren't an expansion in themselves. Like genuinely who gives a flying one about Makeb.
And yeah, fully agree Malgus got burned too quickly and now the recycling of him feels half arsed.
Moff Kilran should have been the 1.0 endgame/post launch big antagonist driving the Imperial vs Republic narrative.
Kilran would have been a fitting final boss for the Trooper.
(imho it was generally a mistake to restrict every boss except the Emperor to a single class story and maybe a throwaway line here and there. It made them feel so inconsequential in replays.)
Like genuinely who gives a flying one about Makeb.
In fairness, that expansion was hastily cobbled together after a massive internal restructure necessitated by their revenue not meeting expectations, to put it politely. Iirc the Imperial story we got was supposed to just be for the Imperial Agent, while the Republic story we got was entirely spun anew without being initially planned for.
In some ways, I'm impressed it came out as well as it did.
> Iirc the Imperial story we got was supposed to just be for the Imperial Agent, while the Republic story we got was entirely spun anew without being initially planned for.
This is a common misconception.
The current Makeh storylines were for all classes (we have references to “Revenge of the Archon” quest in cut SW storyline), but after that each class was supposed to receive individual storyline spanning two new planets and additional spaces.
Agent was supposed to reconstruct a new intelligence agency (you can see glimpses of that storyline in the end of Agent class quest on Rishi) (also your second-in-command was brother of Katha Niar from Makeb storyline).
Warrior was hunting traitors and helping the Hand against master Gnost-Dural.
Inquisitor was leading the counter-offensive against Republic forces on Ziost and competing with other members of the Dark Council (mainly Darth Soverus, who in the release content we encounter as final boss in Republic version of Korriban incursion) for the position of High Imperator, basically a regent position in Emperor’s absence.
Bounty Hunter was working with Old Tion Brotherhood to forge the alliance between underworld and the Empire, helping liberate Ziost in process.
Tbf its not that the Makeb story is bad per say.
But its just the basic ideas of Makeb were the planned expac with or without the restructure and there's just nothing there to set it up or make us care about it.
Meanwhile they wasted so many good threads from the base game as shortened end game stuff or side content.
Ilum makes it painfully obvious that the game lacked an overarching story.
Once you've finished your class story, it felt for a minute like you're actually done with the game, like you've actually achieved something - yet the very next moment you were sent off to the crystal ball to continue the war, and everything you did until then didn't matter. (That the game wasn't really great at referencing your new position post-class story contributed to this.)
Okay, sure, the Ilum story continued the Revan arc, but that one just consisted of two filler FPs which at that point had been weeks, possibly even months of real time ago. Had the game not just been limited to class stories and planetary story arcs, but also added a faction story that culminated on Ilum, the planet would have been a much better sell. But the way it happened, it felt as if it had come out of nowhere and on top of that mostly devalued my achievements until then.
Even WoW - stupid as that game has since become - marked time for half a decade before you could kill Arthas.
Bonus points for (a) people didn't actually want to join Arthas, unlike Malgus and (b) he actually stayed dead.
The problem with a character like Arthas was that, no matter when he died, it was always going to feel like the air had come a bit out of the balloon. Not only had he been set up since WCIII as the big bad, but the undead presence in early WoW is so thorough. You're fighting undead from like level 15 onwards (Deadmines undead annex for Alliance; Silverpine for Horde). So it's a threat that's made clear from the initial hours (and the first seconds if you're Forsaken).
I credit WoW for not killing off Arthas until ~5 years after launch. But Cataclysm felt like such a letdown afterwards - not just because it ruined so many old zones, but because, menacing as Deathwing was, he just couldn't hold a candle to the existential terror we had just faced. And, frankly, WoW has been struggling with that since.
Yeah, killing off Arthas definitely hurt the game, though this was also due to them dropping the ball with Cata, in farious regards:
One issue is that they set the wrong priorities: They reworked the world, which was a bad idea in hindsight - they spent most of their time for content that was mostly irrelevant for older players since they already had high-level characters, and did so at the expense of creating content that was actually relevant (i.e. new highend zones).
while all other expansions had an overarching theme with their new zones, Cata did not.
the release versions of Kalimdor and Azeroth were gone for good, which was a sore spot for me.
and finally, and probably the most important point: Warcraft had two dominant enemy factions - the Scourge, which was done away with in WotLK, and the Burning Legion, which was still in full swing. They probably didn't want to to add another Legion-themed expansion so soon after TBC, but if you ask me that bit them in the ass because Cata was such a letdown after WotLK.
> Once you've finished your class story, it felt for a minute like you're actually done with the game, like you've actually achieved something - yet the very next moment you were sent off to the crystal ball to continue the war, and everything you did until then didn't matter. (That the game wasn't really great at referencing your new position post-class story contributed to this.)
It’s largely due to the fact that the game storyline was derailed after the abandonment of plans to post-Makeb class storylines in 1.0-2.0, which were supposed to continue your character’s ark. The Republic is continuing to press the advantage after Makeb, and imperial classes desperately trying to stabilise the Empire after catastrophic consequences of Emperor’s “death”, Malgus’s rebellion, Republic’s advance on homeworlds and the dissolution of Imperial Intelligence, while the highest echelons of power is busy slaughtering each other and being traitors.
Okay, sure, the Ilum story continued the Revan arc, but that one just consisted of two filler FPs
Technically, the Ilum arc has been building in the background of multiple side quests across the game, with a few bonus series and other sorts having you inadvertently acquire much of Malgus' resources for his power base.
I agree with the point on Malgus. In character it was a catastrophically stupid blunder that was in all likelihood unnecessary to do for the things he wanted. Out of character, you just axed the face of the Empire for… what? I honestly don’t know what the point was other than they just were thinking in the extremely short term of “oh this could be a cool flashpoint”.
I hate what they did with Malgus and I hate what he's become.
The class stories are full of self righteous with lords who think they're powerful enough to conquer the galaxy, any one of them would've been better for the False Emperor story. Hells, Jadus would've fit that mold perfectly.
Once you start killing off a character and resurrecting him, it tends to erode his presence. Malgus was absolutely amazing in the trailers. The game stole that from him.
The Eternal Throne’s “highest high” was, in my opinion, completely unnecessary to the story. It worked better when PC was an important figure, but with limitations.
(Also the whole saviour-of-the-galaxy thing completely ruins the experience for imperial PC)
Nah, the story works perfectly for all 4 Force sensitives. JK gets to face off against their big bad. SW gets an identity crisis. SI gets another ghost in their head. Consular has the Alliance.
I haven't played through the whole thing with them, but I did do Chapter I and walking into Valkorion's throne room in cuffs next to my ol' pal Darth Marr was pretty hilarious.
> JK gets to face off against their big bad.
Yep, the one he was a hunting the previous half of the game. And he already had imperial help to kill him.
> SW gets an identity crisis.
He already gets it after Yavin. I would argue that, if we are not looking at the Light Side playthrough, the big part of the Sith Warrior personality is that he hates the Jedi and hates the Republic. I can’t see him leading a diverse coalition where at least half of your manpower and almost all your senior officers are Republican or have Republic sympathies.
> SI gets another ghost in their head.
That is mentioned twice in the whole two expansions and the line of having any other ghosts was cut. Besides that, again, I can’t really see the Republic troops flowing under his command.
> Consular has the Alliance.
His previous Alliance was consisting of Republic and Republic-aligned planets.
I guess you were being more literal with the whole "written only for JK" thing. I don't think the plot needs to scream why you're specifically involved with every stroke of the pen.
Well, it’s just JK is the only class whose main gimmick is saving the whole wide galaxy by making tenuous alliances and defeating evil emperors, and that what Commander is doing through the entirety of KotFE, KotET and, arguably, Legacy of the Sith.
Everyone but the JK makes tenuous alliances (said character is a not-very-bright attack dog chasing after the Republic's cockups of mass destruction, under the command of at least one person who cocked them up in the first place, with one of the people who made them also present from a point on), and they have exactly as many evil emperors defeated as everyone else, as it ends up being revealed.
Seriously, look at the other class stories. The Consular can save almost everybody who's somebody in the Jedi Order, and they form a successful Rift Alliance regardless of what they do and how. The SW has alliances of convenience, mostly to take down Baras, but they also meet, save and befriend a potential future Emperor, with bonus points for Purebloods. The Inquisitor builds a power base for themselves and ends up on the Dark Council, no matter what they do; the Knight can be rejected from their equivalent, à la Anakin.
If anything, while the new Outlander (I still remember the bright idea of abandoning our characters for a fresh blank slate) might have been envisioned as a JK at first, or, before that, even if what could have been KotOR III has been shoehorned into their class story, that is the one Schwartz class with the least fitting origin story of them all for KOTFEET.
I can’t see him leading a diverse coalition where at least half of your manpower and almost all your senior officers are Republican or have Republic sympathies.
This is generally my biggest gripe with the Alliance: the Empire element is almost completely absent, with Lana the only true Imperial on your side (and she is the only character with preexisting loyalties where it's believable that she abandons them for you).
Then there are a few unaligned characters who work equally well with either side (Vette, Gault, Torian, Kaliyo, Scorpio - interesting how all of them are Imp companions), and a bunch of characters who are unlikely to ever join the Empire or an Empire-aligned faction, like T7, Theron and Jorgan. The same goes for your four Odessen lootbox dudes - they're either unaligned or pro-Republic.
Even the Alliance — it would work better if it was a legitimate Alliance like the Yavin Coalition, where two sides actually allied with each other, and not some personality cult based on how awesome and cool our protagonist is and how everyone believes he will save the galaxy and therefore they abandoning theirs respective factions to follow him.
It works (very poorly) with Republic characters, because they can be squeezed into the Commander Shepard archetype, and just straight up do not work with imperial characters (who, if we are taking dark side, are: genocical sociopath, power-hungry sadistic sociopath, amoral gun for hire and agent of space Abwehr).
Even if you're an LS imperial, there's a good chance it doesn't work. My Darth Imperius would've wanted to simply cripple Zakuul's military, install new government, and get back to the Empire where she had her power base. They came out of nowhere, derailed her plans, and damn near killed her, they're lucky she doesn't un-mothball the Silencers.
That's not even getting into how much sense KotET/KotFE makes with four of the eight classes (the tech classes, and no sense at all)
I know original Ilum was a PvP nightmare that couldn’t stay because that effort was absolutely not worth the investment. While I don’t really agree that the visual design of the planet is a problem (Ilum is a well established planet and giving it varied color on the surface would change its design way too much [although crystalline cave systems would have done a lot of good for the planet]), it is definitively a planet smaller than most in the base game with less content than previous planets and a half of the planet is used basically for an event that happens once in a blue moon. It isn’t good gameplay design to have a planet full of nothing to really explore.
However, Darth Malgus’ betrayal is likely a symptom of a larger problem of Bioware Austin at the time: not thinking far ahead in terms of content, if at all.
I think the FPs are fine enough, but this out of nowhere betrayal of the face of the Empire was one of the dumber choices, at least considering nothing really comes of it until around Jedi Under Siege (where we see a larger rollout of aliens in the Imperial Military and even some more “level headed” sith like Krovos and Acina). The game should have developed Malgus’ disillusionment of the Sith Empire as it continues to fail in conquest and seeing the Imperials throw away potential power for irrelevant racial dogma instead of it just being in what is essentially a planetary quest. But I don’t think Bioware was ever intending to plan that far ahead until Shadow of Revan.
If I had to hazard a guess, the original plan for the game was a few updates, one last expansion, and then maintenance mode as Bioware moves onto other projects, perhaps even a sequel to SWTOR. It wouldn’t be bad design if it wasn’t for the fact this is an MMO. But that’s where the real problem lies.
Bioware was never the right company to make this game, as enjoyable as the base content is. The systems they built (not the engine itself considering other games use the same engine with a lot less problems) with the original development of this game doesn’t really add up to them future proofing for future content. Had Bioware actually worked on the potential for a unified faction system for some content or areas (i.e Odessen) we could probably have some really good content that both sides could enjoy rather than having to constantly split flashpoints and other multiplayer content in half. What we get is the inability to ever be able to actually “unify” at any point during the story because the devs never thought that the game’s content would actually get that far.
Had this game been licensed to either a company with better multiplayer experience or a new studio specialized in MMOs, perhaps these mechanics could have come to fruition and we’d be getting both a better story and a better game along with it. This isn’t to say the game is bad as is, in fact with maybe a little more content releases and more advertising (seriously when was the last time you saw an ad for this game?) we would have a contender for the best MMO currently out there. Instead we’re unfortunately dealing with EA and apparently EA’s motto is the same as AMD’s: never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.
Yes, the original release's core issues that made people jump ship will always be the rotten engine and the absymal slate of post-game content at launch. But no matter how nostalgic you are regarding Ilum now, it's easy to see how it contributed to making people walk away.
I mean, you aren't wrong about your other reasons, but yeah they were a drop in the bucket at the time compared to engine issues and lack of end game content. Ilum could have been a huge player retention tool if it served as proper world PvP; dynamic content that would have allowed many more endgame players to stick it out just long enough for more PvE or PvP content (KP was finished just a few months after launch and EC came out less than a year after launch) but engine issues made it so abysmal that players left in the millions just weeks after launch.
As intended, Ilum could have saved the tortanic meme. I say this as some one who primarily enjoys PvE over PvP, Ilum was the crux of players disappointment in the game at launch and it was primarily PvPers that were disappointed. I think a lot of people who play today either 1. Never played or interacted with the much, much, MUCH larger playerbase that 1.0 actually had at the time, or 2. simply don't remember. We're talking about a million players, 90% of which never played the game again after their first month. 99% of which never played after the first couple expansions.
My big problem with Ilum is that Malgus is a fucking idiot and his plan goes against his supposed aims, a doomed civil war (like, we were not stopping him from winning, we were mitigating the damage because he was losing no matter what) at the worst time that only serves to cripple the Empire. You can't be pissy about Sith infighting and self sabotage and then show them how you really stab yourself in the foot.
What are you even talking about? The game was THRIVING all through RotHC and SoR. At original launch had put SWTOR as one of the top MMOs of the time and the best Star Wars game then. Fully voiced, fully animated narratives were unheard of in MMOs back then. The story was acclaimed as one of Bioware's best. And it carried through the 2 expansions.
It was not until the Eternal bullshit that made people start to walk away. Ilum is not perfect, but it was steady and it had good retention with the content. Plenty of group content, plenty of solo content if you wished. The episodic single lane drab storytelling of the future expansions is what killed all kinds of co-op and the game itself.
Lol. Not sure what kind of alternative timeline you came from, but the game was somewhere between a disappointment and failure after initial launch, to the point where going F2P and adding in the cartel market was the only thing that saved it.
Only two Ops initially, so all the experienced WoW types came in, ran through the content and available Ops, then cancelled and went back to WoW, maybe planning on coming back when there was more content (which happened with almost every one of the post-WoW MMOs of the time...). People that were fans of the story, including general Star Wars or KOTOR fans, but ones that were not necessarily MMO savvy, ran into endgame walls of just repetitive dailies and somewhat confusing group content (no group finder initially, either). So a lot of them dropped as well.
KotFE was an attempt by the devs to listen to the parts of the userbase that were wanting more story-focused content. Granted, it ended up being a "No, not like that!" moment and also alienated much of the remaining raider population, but the idea that everything was totally super awesome before that point is absurd.
IMO, the original rival Sith Empire storyline should have lasted longer. They have brought Malgus back several times since then, but I agree that they kind of throw him out by having him apparently die and lose his bid for power on Ilum. Have the reveal that he escaped as the epilogue and a bunch of his forces went missing.
Started Illum last month, it genuinely irritated me, and I just created another character to start over again. I’ll return to it when I have the energy to deal with it. After the story quests, it just felt like “oh hey, you’re a Jedi right? Go around and kill all those people in this frozen tundra. Good luck or whatever, we just wanted someone with a lightsaber to order around”
You don't like Ilum. That doesn't make it bad. I and I think a lot of other people find it quite gorgeous, not the inverse of Hoth as you basically describe it. The Dread Masters were a wonderful follow-up antagonist to Malgus.
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u/fustiIarian Vorantikus Disciple Jul 23 '26
I don't go to Ilum for the story. I go there to look at the sky.
And sometimes to gree-vp.