I say this because I didn't notice a clear faction bias - in some cases I found the Imperial version more informative or atmospheric, in others the Republic version. It's almost as if Bioware's writers wrote different versions of each scene and at the very end they assigned them to the two factions in a mix and match pattern. The early bar scene on Rishi is a great example: the actual sequence of events that occurs there is exactly the same for both factions, but for some reason the dialogue is ever so slightly different: the barkeep chides people with different words, the Rodian insults you in a different manner, and your choice of responses is slightly different as well.
In fact I found it strangely fascinating during my first Imperial playthrough to observe how Bioware made each scene play out slightly differently, even as I already knew the eventual outcome. That is to say, while some lines of dialogue are identical across factions, most of them aren't, even when they easily could have been. Speaking of which, this is the second reason I'm willing to forgive Bioware for making the story the same for both factions - because, somewhat bizarrely to be honest, they didn't try to reduce production costs nearly as much as they could have. I'll be okay with this being what it is, as long as it doesn't become a trend to save money on production values. Shadow of Revan is the first time that multiple representatives of the Republic and Empire actually work together against a common enemy, and considering the scope of the threat that is revealed eventually, it makes sense. If anything, there was always an edge of competition to the feel of these storylines, of proving that your faction had a handle on the situation while the enemy clearly didn't. Republic and Empire have previously fought against common threats, such as on Oricon, but they were never actually united in this. First off, it makes sense from a story point of view, and we've never had a story quite like this before. There are two reasons I'm not more up in arms about it. However, in a game that prizes its storytelling as highly as Bioware does, this kind of thing is an even bigger faux-pas. I took Blizzard to task for this in Cataclysm (where there was in-game evidence of quest NPCs and their quest text literally having been copy and pasted to the other faction hub) - though to be fair, from what I've read about the game they seem to have gone back on this at least a little since then and injected WoW with some new faction-specific stories again. Having two factions and not making them feel different is a big issue. In a game where the levelling content for both factions is nearly 100% unique (exceptions are the shared flashpoints and the rare times when the story overlaps, such as with "the thing Czerka found" on Tatooine), this is a big deal, and not in a good way. After having played through the Republic version three times and the Imperial version once, I think I'm finally in a position to formulate a well-rounded opinion.įirst off, experiencing the story of Shadow of Revan on both sides of the faction fence immediately reveals its biggest flaw: that it's the same for both sides.
To avoid this happening again, I decided that I wasn't going to review Shadow of Revan's story until I had seen both sides of it.
Then I didn't play the Imperial side of the story until nearly three months later, and it ended up feeling completely different - this changed my first impression of the Republic storyline considerably. Back when Rise of the Hutt Cartel came out, I played through its story on Republic side and immediately wrote a post about it.