Monthly Archives: August 2021

August 24, 2021 · 8:01 am

Here’s Where the Story Ends

Despite SWTOR being in an end of expansion lull, there is a lot of stuff worth discussing happening in the lead up to the Legacy of the Sith expansion, and I’ve been struggling to snatch one notion out of the ether to discuss. Prompted by Shintar’s recent review and motivated by a desire to get my own hot take on the record before the weather turns cold, I’ll start with a long overdue look of the flashpoint, Secrets of the Enclave. Beware! There will be some light spoilers ahead.

Secrets of the Enclave is a lush and loving tribute to one of the Knights of the Old Republic era’s most famous locations, the Jedi Enclave on Dantooine. Abandoned for centuries, nature has begun to reclaim the complex, and it’s fun to explore the ruins like a Star Wars equivalent of Indiana Jones.

The flashpoint is not long, but players will move through a remarkably diverse series of environments, starting outside among Dantooine’s rolling hills, then down into caves leading into the ruin, and finally through the crumbling libraries and halls and council chambers of the enclave itself.

The previous flashpoint, The Spirit of Vengeance was criticized for its copious trash packs and over-tuned bosses, but Secrets dials those issues back, and players in all modes should have no problem making their way through. I especially appreciate that power-ups have made their way from Uprisings into the flashpoint, even if they are not necessary to overcome any of the challenges facing the players. An experienced group should not have any problem with the flashpoint even on the Master Mode difficulty, with the optional bonus boss presenting the flashpoint’s greatest challenge.

All of Onslaught’s flashpoints have experimented with new mechanics and graphics to telegraph special attacks, and it’s cool to see the trend continue. Secrets may be the first time SWTOR has used a fear mechanic in the game and seeing friends react to it was most amusing! I hope to see more of these types of innovations in future flashpoints and operations.

Like other recent flashpoints, Secrets has plenty of weird achievements and unique decorations to discover. However, this time around, the drop rates for the decorations is quite low on Story and Veteran modes. If you want to farm those cool decos, you’ll have to start running Master mode!

Regarding the story of the flashpoint, I think it’s interesting that while Darth Malgus is the MacGuffin driving the action, Secrets is more about what happened to people Malgus has left in his destructive wake. Aryn Leneer and Darth Krovos are quite literally haunted by Malgus, and it’s fascinating to see their differing reactions, from Aryn’s fear to Krovos’ denial. Likewise the supporting characters get moments to shine as well. For Republic players, it’s satisfying to see Arn Peralun coming into his own as a Jedi. And on the Sith side, I kind of adore Darth Rivix. He clearly has his own agenda and has no interest in being another Alliance flunky. Figuring out how my characters want to deal with him and watching other players’ reactions has been a treat. Secrets continues Onslaught‘s tradition of also taking time to revisit characters from SWTOR‘s rich history. I was happy to see the return of Leeha Narezz from the Jedi Knight story, but not surprisingly the years seem to have burdened her with a great deal of anger towards the Sith.

All that said, however, if Secrets of the Enclave is to be the conclusion of Onslaught’s story, it feels lacking. If you’ll forgive the metaphor, Onslaught seems to be ending on an ellipsis instead of an exclamation point or question mark.

Compare Onslaught to SWTOR’s previous cliffhangers. Shadows of Revan’s climax has us saying “Oh, shit! The Emperor’s back, and he’s pissed!” The final chapter of Knights of the Fallen Empire asks, “Did we just make things worse by allowing Vaylin to claim the Eternal Throne?”

Onslaught, by comparison, is ending with open-ended questions.

Darth Malgus is out there, and he’s up to something…

Heta Kol is out there, and she’s up to something…

Heta Kol remains a cypher, and Malgus’ motivations are opaque. I feel like we needed at least one more story beat to bring either or both of those plot threads into focus or together to build excitement for the next part of the story.

Don’t get me wrong, Secrets of the Enclave is a terrific addition to the game; it is arguably the strongest of Onslaught‘s new flashpoints, and whether or not you’re a KOTOR fan, it’s worth a visit.  But Legacy of the Sith is still a ways off, and storywise it feels like we’re just cruising towards it, and I wish Onslaught‘s finale accelerated the stakes a bit more in the lead up to our next big adventure.

 

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August 3, 2021 · 9:01 am

Didn’t We Just Leave This Party?

This week, let’s take another look at the two Mandalorian posters that were introduced in the Spirits of Vengeance flashpoint and can also be found by players as stronghold decorations. In the most recent Game Update, the posters were revised and now no longer translate into English but into Mando’a, Star Wars‘ Mandalorian spoken language.

It seems that I may be inadvertently to blame for this change because of the translations of the posters I made earlier this year, something I learned to my surprise when I tweeted about the update a month ago.

I confess I had some complex reactions to this discovery. First, it’s honestly a very cool feeling to know that I got to have even a small effect on the game, but I was also somewhat abashed when I realized that my little blog led to extra work for someone on the art team at Bioware. For what it’s worth, that also meant that I also had to revise my recreations as well, so what goes around comes around. It’s like poetry, I guess; it rhymes.

If you compare the updated posters to their original versions, you can see that there were some additional changes made, especially to the banner from the Ash’ad ship, the Seeker’s Vigil. The revised graphic now features deeper and richer hues of the traditional Mandalorian red and green colors. While I can’t say if it’s intentional or not, this particular color palette specifically recalls to me the fresh coat of paint Boba Fett applied to his armor late in season two of The Mandalorian.

Despite a large number of weird alien texts seen in SWTOR and across Star Wars lore, Star Wars does not have a full Constructed Language or “conlang” like J. R. R. Tolkien’s Elvish, Star Trek’s Klingon or Game of Thrones’ Dothraki to call its own. The origins of the Mando’a language stretch back to The Knights of the Old Republic, but it’s been used frequently in both SWTOR. as any Torian stan can attest, and in many recent animated and live action Star Wars adventures.

For now, Mando’a vocabulary is mostly limited to the kind of things we can imagine Mandos most care about: honor, glory, battle, that sort of thing. It’s not yet at the point where you can have a conversation about the weather, your favorite Grav-Ball team, or how much better Hamlet is in the original Mando’a. It’s not unreasonable to think the language might be further fleshed out in future seasons of The Mandalorian and The Bad Batch.

The use of Mando’a, however, does present something of a dilemma for this humble translator. My recreations thus far have all been direct, letter for letter copies of the originals, even when they are not meant to have any actual meaning in English. However, in the future I may be tasked with not only transliterating Mandalorian letters in to English letters, but also translating Manda’o into English.

I’m wondering how far I should go. My goal for this project has always been to present SWTOR’s alien writing in a way that makes it feel as familiar to players as to their characters, but Mando’a is likely as unfamiliar to most folks as Aurebesh, and since Mando’a grammar is different from English, any full translations I make may lean towards my interpretation of the text rather than direct translation. This is a dilemma faced by any translator, of course, but I must admit learning to speak Mandalorian is not a skill I thought I would need when I started this blog!

For now, however, in regards to these two posters, we know exactly how they are meant to be translated thanks to their original iterations, but in the weeks to come, we might just get to find out how clever an alien linguist I am! Wish me jate’kara!

 

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