Why KoTFE will suck to play with friends… and How to Mitigate the Damage

SW:TOR’s newest expansion will suck to play with friends.

You heard me. It will suck. It will be horrible. It will be frustrating and unenjoyable. If you are interested in enjoying the amazing new storyline and cinematics in the new expansion, you’d better do it alone. The Force is not your ally, and neither is this new expansion if you are playing with a friend.

Skip to: How to Play KotFE with a Friend →

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Pre-KotFE: It Kinda Worked

It has always been a somewhat frustrating to play the main SW:TOR storylines with a partner, but this problem has been compounded ten times over in Knight of the Fallen Empire.

Doing the Storyline Together On Two Different Class Pre-KotFE

In the past, if you and a friend decided to level up together, you would have no problems if you chose different classes. Maybe you were a Republic Trooper and your buddy was a Jedi. You could go and help each other, and see each other’s cutscenes. The only problems you might have would be if your partner gets into a cutscene outside an instanced area (the green doors), like a holocall, you won’t be able to watch and vice versa. Because cutscenes outside of instances are normally less important in terms of the story, this was never a huge setback.

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Doing the Storyline Together On the Same Class Pre-KotFE

If you both decided to be the same class (for instance to see the famed Agent storyline on the Imperial side), you could not progress your story at the same time. You could either go in together and do it twice to continue to the next quest (once for each of you), or go in separately, and do the storyline at the same time as your partner but in seperate instances.

If you go in together, it can be very frustrating to have to see the same cutscenes twice in a row for  every class quest. It removes some of the magic of feeling like your chosen options mattered – often the NPCs will give the exact same reply for different choices. It also very repetitive! The perk of this option is that some choices do alter the story dramatically and it can be fascinating to see both sides of a major choice back to back.

If you go in separately, you will only have to see the story once… but you will miss out on seeing what your partner gets to see and say. If you are on voice communications with them as well, it can be very difficult to know when to be quiet to allow them to watch their cutscenes, and when it’s safe to talk again. You may gasp or laugh at something they’ve not seen yet, even if you are being careful.

Both these options have some major flaws when it comes to enjoying the game with someone else. It’s a serious case of picking your poison and making do with what you’ve got.

Story Instances Done Well in Guild Wars 2

Another game that handles a similar situation well is Guild Wars 2. In GW2, the first person to enter the story instance is the “main character” and the one you watch in cutscenes. At the end of the quest, you get to decide if you want to accept their progress and choices as your own, or if you would rather “re-do” the quest as your own character. This is great for partners and couples, because they can either choose one person to be the hero, or take turns going into the instances. If a particular quest was really good and one you wants to see it again with your own character.. you can go and re-do it by not accepting the progress.

This system would have some hiccups in SW:TOR (for example if you had chosen lightside in an instance before, and your partner darkside… your partner may have the choice to kill an NPC in the next cutscene, whereas you’d already let them run free. How would the game accept your partner’s choices as your own then?) but it would be the most optimal for allowing players to enjoy the amazing storylines together as the same class.

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It gets way worse in Knights of the Fallen Empire. Way worse.

At level 60, you will be prompted on your ship to start the new expansion storyline. The new storyline starts as “Chapter 1: The Hunt” – a new style of questing that will often start with a cutscene and teleport you where you need to go, skipping the tedious travel time and long load screens.

Unfortunately, because the new storyline is singular (same story for every class) it treats groups working together the same as if you were playing the same class in the vanilla game. Only one person can progress at a time in each instance… you can choose to either play at the same time in paralel, or you can watch a friend play and help them out outside of cutscenes.

When we started KotFE, we weighed the options based on our time playing together in the past, and I decided to play alone first time while I had free time so I could focus on the story, then follow my partner later when he had time to do his. My solo play through had little to no bugs or problems, but when I went to join him… it was one of the most frustrating experiences I have had playing SW:TOR since launch. If we weren’t so familiar with the game and “how to google”, I would have declared it was impossible to actually play with another person in the chaptered KotFE storyline.

The story starts on your ship. We grouped up, he went to the terminal on his ship to start… and there I was, standing awkwardly on his smuggler ship wondering where he went. There was no option to “join” him in his cutscene for me. And he had no ability to summon me over… because he was in a cutscene.

These new cutscenes often start somewhere that isn’t an instanced area your partner can run into after you… your partner will miss out on many cutscenes. They’ll also miss out on a lot of ambient dialogue by the new companions, which happens far more often in the expansion than in the vanilla game.

You can summon friends into your instance while playing KotFE… but they will miss your initial cutscene as you arrive at that new instance. For example, without some weird finagling, your partner won’t get to see the very first cutscene of KotFE… the scene that sets the stage for the entire plot!

It shouldn’t be this hard. If I want to follow a friend on their adventure, it should be as easy as playing alone. During a recent Q&A a developer said something to this effect about the new level sync…

“Let’s create content that anyone can enjoy, they can play with their friends no matter what.”

Why they did not take this approach with the most impressive part of the new expansion I can not understand. I feel as if no one tested these storylines with a second person during the entire testing period.

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Mitigating the Damage

You can make things work. Not easily, and not well, but you can. Here’s how to play Knights of the Fallen Empire with a friend.

How to Play KotFE with a Friend

Note: The author of this article is really hoping all this information is incorrect. If you have found a way to easily join another player for all their cutscenes (or even a better sneaky trick than below!), please chime in @swtorisa on twitter or /u/swtorista on reddit.

Once again, this is how to mitigate the damage of trying to level with a friend, not fix it completely.

You will never be able to “share a story” with a friend in the KotFE storyline – it is a single-player story, and will likely never change. Here’s how to at least watch a friend’s story and help them between cutscenes.

  1. Settings: You will need to turn on the shared-instance setting. ESC > Preferences > Settings > General > Allow Access to Same Class/Personal Phases. You may already have this on if you leveled in the past. If you are making level 1 characters together this is all you need to do.
  2. Summon to Instance: Your partner can summon you to their instance if you want to join them while they are running around. This is great if you just want to help them with a boss fight. To summon you, they will right-click their portrait while you are in a group and choose “Summon Group for Story Quest”. This option was added with 4.0.
  3. Joining your friend to see the “First cutscene” of an area… for example the very first cutscene… is tricky, obnoxious and annoying. There are two options.
    1. Sometimes they can ESC out of the cutscene, and they will be in a location they can summon you to, then re-start the cutscene with you nearby. This does not work reliably, and does not usually work for the intro cutscene because there is nowhere to “exit” to yet.
    2. Have the player who is doing the KotFE storyline enter the cutscene. They will watch alone until the first time they are allowed to make a choice with the dialogue wheel. Before they choose, they will need to right-click on their portrait in the cutscene and “Summon Group for Story Quest”. They will then wait for the incoming player to catch up. The incoming player will then watch the first few scenes until the scene pauses, where it is waiting for the original player… then can then tell their partner to continue and they will be in sync together!

That’s horrible. Really horrible design. Not friendly, and nowhere near what the average person would want to do or know how to do. I hope that helps you, you poor deprived KotFE souls. I told you it would be easier to just give up!

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Possible Fixes for Bioware

  1. A quick fix would be to introduce a chat command to invite your group, for example “/summongroup” for a story-invite. Chat can be accessed during cutscenes – the incoming players will be a bit behind as they load in, but it will do. This is not an intuitive fix for new players though.
  2. When a group member enters a KOTFE cutscene/instance your character is not in, prompt the player to join them automatically, with the allow/deny panel just like normal summons.
  3. When the player exits out of a conversation always put them in a location where they can summon their group members. This works best for allowing groups to view and start the cutscenes simultaneously.