So by 11:30pm last night, Knights of the Fallen Empire finally finished downloading and installing. I’d already prepped the first L60 I wanted to take through the new content, so I was expecting to be able to get a good hour or two into the new storyline before it was time to shut down for the night.

No dice.

 

Inventory-alanche (or maybe Inventory-nado?  Not sure which way the Strongbadia Dictionary breaks on this one)

My storage was a wreck and my inventory was full up with equipment bits that my companions had unequipped because they no longer have slots for them. They also all unequipped their pants, not sure what they’re trying to tell me there. And so many crafting materials changed, my storage boxes were overflowing and totally out of order. I will note that in the end, I actually gained about ten open storage slots, meaning that the consolidation of crafting materials worked in my favor, storage space-wise.

It took about an hour to put that all right, and I discovered a few things. First, the “N” key now opens a new, bigger Companions screen where you can see which companions you have unlocked, choose which combat role they’ll fill (Damage, Tanking, Healing), and choose which one’s summoned. The crafting stuff has been moved to its own window, summoned with the “B” key. This was a pain because that’s the the key I’ve been using for the “Toggle Walk” command, for those occasions when I need to stride dramatically away from a large explosion. Easily corrected, though.

 

Companions Will Be A Lot More Fun To Use Now

As promised, Companions no longer derive stats from their gear; their apparel and equipped weapon are for appearances only. They even changed their equipment screen to an Appearance Editor screen, just to make sure nobody misses that point. In fact they no longer have slots for Earpiece or Implants (which is why I found I had five full sets of them sitting in my inventory when I first logged in). Also all droid parts (including T7 and HK-51) are removed from the droids and converted into some sort of generic “Droid Parts” items that you can sell to a vendor. The whole stack of 7 went for about 60,000 credits.

Note that you can now equip those L192 equipment bits that you earned for your companions on Yavin IV, since they don’t use’m any longer. That’s handy.

The Affection rank for Companions has been renamed to “Influence,” and in the 20 minutes I had to work with it, it seems to be easier to raise your Companions’ Influence rank. That’s really good, because your influence with your active companion now affects their stats. More on that a little later.

The Companions screen is now tiered, so all your storyline Companions are in one category, temporary Companions are in another, and “Other” companions like HK-51 and Nico Ocar are in yet another. And again, you can set each companion to be a full-on healer, DPS’r, or Tanker, which I like very much.

 

Searching Collections at Last!

Yes!  There’s a search bar and a filter pulldown at the top of the Collections screen now!  Want to find that elusive purple crystal you unlocked?  Search “purple” and set the filter to only show unlocked items.

Being able to show only items I have unlocked is a joy.  It made putting together the new appearance outfits for my companions tons easier.  The categories on the left column also are now collapsed by default, which makes it a lot easier to get around in the Collections screen.

It’s about time.

 

Dude Where’s My Powers?

The toon I planned to run through KotFE first with was Drae’den, a Jedi Shadow. First thing I noticed about him now is that he’s missing one of the first abilities he earned way back on Tython: there’s no Double Strike attack anywhere in his Abilities menu. That’s… a stumper.

His skills had also been reset, of course, and I had to go back and re-acquire several of them. Can’t really say how the rebalance has effected Drae’den’s performance (he’s a monster DPS), since I didn’t actually get to play any content yet.

 

You’ve Got Mail

My mailbox was also rife with new emails, all bearing attachments. Along with a basic “Welcome to the Early Access Thingie, Valued Subscriber!” message which helpfully included an attached XP boost item, I received my subscriber rewards: Nico Ocar’s jackat (which is really just a standard longcoat in a very painful shade of cream-yellow), Nico Ocar’s blasters (which are not unlockable and so not found in Collections, so be sure to keep up with the pair you get!), Nico Ocar (I can summon him but he has no dialog, can’t even click on him or change his outfit/weapons), and the biggie: the new KOTOR-era swoop!

That sucker is sweet. Sadly, tooling around it in is disappointing because it feels like it’s moving too slow. In KOTOR, the racing minigame this swoop bike is used in moves so frantically fast, that seeing the same swoop move at a hum-drum TOR-mount clip is kind of unsatisfying. It’s also a lot bigger than I expected. It takes up the same space as one of the “taxi”-sized speeders, not one of the little bikes. Not really sure how the justify calling it a “bike.”  Very cool looking speeder, though. Here’s hoping maybe some repainted version eventually winds up on the Cartel Market or something so everyone can enjoy it.

 

Crew Conversations: Use’m or Lose’m

Accepting the KotFE quest also gives you a reminder that when you start Chapter 1, you also forfeit the ability to run any companion missions. Ever.

Well, I’d never been all that hot on sucking up to my Companions. Nadia’s a sweetie so of course I have her Influence maxed out, but taciturn Qyzen and borderline egomaniac Theran didn’t really motivate me to dump tons of Credits into companion gifts to make them talk to me. Don’t even get me started on that Zenith piker.  And I don’t even know for sure how to gain influence with HK-51.

And upon accepting the first KotFE mission and getting the warning about companion missions, I also discovered that all my companion conversations seemed to have miraculously come unlocked. Every Companion that didn’t have maxed-out Influence was suddenly sporting the gold triangle over their head and just dying to talk to me. At length.

I didn’t want to miss this content if it was just going to be handed to me on a silver platter, so I figured sure, why not? That question wound up costing me a night of sleep:

So Zenith talks about his political aspirations. Disturbingly, his first solution to any political problem or obstacle is to go kill the guy opposing him and I have to take negative Influence points talking him down. This happens like five times, no joke. Got to the point he was a walking parody of himself. And the game didn’t make this out to be a disturbing or worrisome trend, it played the whole thing straight like I shouldn’t even care that a major political figure I helped get into power apparently has no qualms about murdering anyone who doesn’t agree with his leanings. Very 1980’s, very Republican.

Theran (AKA “the other, slightly more tolerable Doc”) has an actually-pretty-amusing story about being invited to join the Star Wars version of Mensa and participate in a contest of inventions. He invents a new kind of engine that will prove a radical engineering theory but melt itself down in the process, confident that this will sweep the symposium. But then — oh, the drama! — he realizes that the same radical core could be used to overclock his “Archer”-style holographic girlfriend Holiday, and he’s torn. In the end he chooses his pretend-woman and as a result is laughed out of the Science club. A university study may be in order to determine just how emotionally unbalanced this guy secretly is.

HK-51 basically experiences a mid-life crisis and fears he’s losing his touch, which after several filler conversations you finally help him remedy by telling him to go murder people.  Wasn’t that the punchline to Hot Shots Part Duex?

Qyzen gets long-winded about his Scorekeeper religion and eventually takes me off to Tatooine to pay his respects to his father’s remains there. Kind of touching, actually. And then more Scorekeeper fluff. And then he wanted to go to Aldaraan. And then I had to go to sleep because it was like three in the morning.

Companion Influence seemed to raise a lot faster than the old Affection system.  Different name for the same stat, I guess, but I was able to raise my companions three or four ranks minimum just by talking through the conversations and telling them what they wanted to hear.  I also noted it no longer tells you how much Influence/Affection/whatever you gain from a conversation choice; we’re back to the bad old days of “Theran likes this response” being your only clue that something positive happened here.

 

Conclusions

Well, I’d really like to play the new content… too bad there was all this extra prep to do first. Maybe tonight after work. I will admit it was fun to finally get some backstory and/or character development from my fleet of meat shields, though.  And being able to custom-outfit my companions without having to rip and replace tons of expensive mods is a blast.

Will likely update tonight after work, add some screenshots.