Like many of you, my main has been around for a long time. I want to refine his character and experience SWTOR with him again. A World Between Worlds can make that possible and the entire franchise is ready for it.
I’ve been playing SWTOR for nearly 13 years now. A Sith Sorcerer by the name of Endonae has been my main the entire time, and he is a true main. It goes without saying that we do all of the new story content together, as well as the vast majority of side content.
I also make sure he gets all the collectibles I’ve earned, so he has almost everything obtainable in the game at this point, whether it be all 12 of the worthless Datacron Matrix Shards, a pair of Macrobinoculars that aren’t on loan, or the Crest of the Dread Master.
Endonae has been around for so long that he’s nearly as old as I was when I first started playing SWTOR!
But therein also lies the problem. Those choices are set in stone because you are only allowed to play through the main story once per toon. Since I’ve been playing the story as it’s been released, I’ve made the vast majority of crucial story choices for him many years ago.
In the meantime, I’ve played through the Sith Inquisitor storyline something like 5 times, and all of the other Origin Stories at least twice. I haven’t replayed the post-launch stories as much, but there are only ever 1-2 distinct storylines compared to 8.
The most nuance can recall about Endonae is that he’s curious about the Force and vehemently supports the Empire, though his compulsion to exact vengeance makes him prone to murder and mayhem, and that gets in the way of his pro-Empire agenda.
Yeah, it sounds like a pretty generic Dark Side Sith Inquisitor to me too, albeit one who’s a teensy bit more cooperative than average.
Sure, I recall some of my choices, especially the ones I regret, and can make an educated guess about what I decided for him in the past, but for the most part, his identity is a leaky hollow compared to my newer characters.
“She probably won’t be up for…a few hours”
I’d also like to say definitively that I’ve done all of the side quests on at least one character, and I thought I had done the vast majority with Endonae, but as I’ve returned to the planets I first visited in 1.0, I often come across still incomplete side quests.
Take Lord Pharshol here; he’s in the Dark Temple , a place I visited on numerous occasions as a Sith Inquisitor. Somehow, despite completing the mission where you must speak to hologram of the Sith imprisoned for preaching about the light side right next door, I never helped the poor guy find his lost apprentice, Anyarah.
It’s possible I wasn’t as diligent as I thought I was back then, but the leveling process in 1.0 was demanding, I rarely did Heroics or Flashpoints, and I’ve had 100% achievements on Dromund Kaas for years. Color me skeptical.
It feels more plausible that they got reset at some point, perhaps after they reworked Heroics, distinguished Exploration Missions, or a server merge. Regardless, I want to do these quests again, but I don’t expect I’ll do this more than once.
I can’t deny such a major accomplishment to my middle school-aged main, but I also can’t make interesting and coherent choices for him anymore. And yes, that has also been frustrating with Legacy of the Sith. Luckily, there is a canonical solution to this problem!
A World Between Worlds
David Filoni, Savior of Star Wars, introduced us to A World Between Worlds in Star Wars: Rebels (S4E13). It’s a totally new concept for the franchise, and one that’s fraught with potential for abuse, both from writers and characters.
We’ve only seen it twice; first in the aforementioned episode of Star Wars: Rebels, and then, in Ahsoka Season 1, Episode 5, and also as excruciating cliffhangers in each of their preceding episode.
Little is known about the World Between Worlds. Also called the Vergence Scatter, it is a web interconnected portals weaved through the Force and leading to countless different exits in time and space. A Force-wielder’s connection to it may be the source of their clairvoyance.
It’s incredibly difficult to get inside this tapestry of the cosmos. We’ve only seen a single entrance located at a Jedi Temple on Lothal, though Ahsoka Tano also made it inside while on Seatos, and there’s almost certainly one on Peridea as well.
You can probably see where I’m going with this. A World Between Worlds could act as an in-universe way to consequentially replay the story on an existing toon. You’d go into the portal at a specific location in time and space and come out at an earlier point, likely relevant to a point in the story by supplanting your former self.
There are a few bumps in the road, paradoxes to be avoided, but nothing crazy. Entering the World Between Worlds removes you from wherever you once were, and you come back out wherever and whenever your chosen exit portal leads.
You’d pick where you want to pop out at a few major breaks in the story, corresponding to different portals, and then make a LS/DS choice to either to forcefully take the place of your former self or give your knowledge and possessions over to your younger self willingly.
There isn’t a need to adjust the story. You (the player) possess the future knowledge for your toon. Dialogue doesn’t have to change at all because of secrecy. Access to the World Between Worlds is dangerous in the wrong hands, so you can’t safely make any adjustments beyond the scope of options available to you before.
There’s no need to bother with interpreting which game progression systems would or wouldn’t transfer either. Most progression systems can be treated as some sort of possession. The only tricky one is Companions because fully taking them away again is a non-starter.
Realistically, they’ll just need to come with you and be treated like companions brought back through the holoterminal on Oddessen until you meet them, but it would be nice to have the option for a Legacy-based Companions AND post-launch story progression.
It would let you establish your Main as the Alliance Commander, share Companions, and pick which character you want to play for each mission. Your choices become more consequential; the Influence requirements are more reasonable while progress happens faster; and you can have a more authentic experience in post-launch content.
Dealing with the Force? Bring a Jedi or Sith. Dealing with elements from the criminal underworld? Bring a Bounty Hunter or Smuggler. Dealing with the war effort? Bring a Trooper or Imperial Agent.
I imagine those of you who have done the post-launch story a bunch probably just threw up in your mouths at the mere thought of such a restriction. I recognize it needs to be optional, but that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be an option.
An Alliance-oriented Legacy makes the game better for everyone who doesn’t replay the post-launch story on every single toon. It deserves to be an option and can be facilitated by the World Between Worlds.
Where in the World is the World Between Worlds?
There are several potential locations for a portal to the World Between Worlds. Of the existing planets in SWTOR, I think the most promising are Elom and Ilum.
While Lothal could probably be created entirely from existing Voss and Alderaan assets, adding Lothal is impractical for story reasons. The temple would be occupied (read: heavily guarded) or under construction by the Jedi, which could lend itself to a cool story, but accessing it as an Imperial would likely require a full-scale assault.
It can’t be anywhere that’s too accessible or convenient either. Otherwise, it would have already been discovered or abused. That rules out the Rakatan worlds like Belsavis and Rakata Prime, but also Korriban, Tython, Oddessen, and Voss.
Elom is the most grounded candidate because it’s so clearly meant to be Seatos, the planet where Ahsoka traveled to the World Between Worlds and Morgan Elsbeth plotted the intergalactic course to Peridea.
It’s mostly uninhabited, save for Darth Nul, and would explain her presence there. As a fairly neutral and particularly exceptional Force-wielder, it’s also plausible that she might have found it herself and either decided not to use it or was actively concealing it from the Sith Emperor.
That being said, I think it makes far more sense if Vitiate actually did secretly find and abuse a portal to the World Between Worlds.
Yes, it was a letdown to learn that the Sith Emperor used Zildrog to devour Nathema and Ziost at the time but giving him another insanely overpowered tool like time travel would cut him down to size. He’d still be one of the strongest Force-wielders to ever exist, but he would be more on par with canon depictions of Palpatine and Yoda.
We would find the portal in painstakingly excavated temple ruins in a piece of the wreckage of his space station on Ilum, exactly how we encounter the Propagator Core XR-53, but also just like Palpatine did with the Jedi Temple on Lothal.
At first glance, the parallels are so plentiful that it might feel derivative, but that won’t be the case. Emperor Vitiate would become the more successful foil to Emperor Palpatine’s relative failure and create the most delicious irony if this portal survives the next 3,000 years.
By ordering Ilum to be strip mined for its Kyber crystals as an essential component of the Death Star’s superlaser, Emperor Palpatine would inadvertently destroy said portal, sabotaging his own bid for unending galactic supremacy.
But it gets even better, remember what Darth Vader said to Admiral Motti in Episode IV right before finding his lack of faith disturbing?
If Broadsword and I are on the same wavelength, the World Between Worlds may very well be right around the corner. If it isn’t rolling out with the last of the visual enhancements, it could be the purpose of Malgus’ visit to Ilum in the next bit of story coming with Game Update 7.6, aptly named “Galactic Threads”.
