Star Wars: The Old Republic's new expansion, entitled Rise of the Hutt Cartel has finally launched, and Bioware has delivered several new features to the MMO with this new release. 'Rise' adds a new planet and some new story content and, despite the game's somewhat turbulent transition to free-to-play, delivers a worthwhile expansion to the original game. The expansion is $10 for subscribers to the game, and $20 to non-subscribers.
The new planet, Makeb, is being taken over by the Hutts looking for the valuable isotope-5. Notably, the expansion does not add a new story for each individual character class. Instead, there's a story for the Republic centered around preventing the Hutts from destroying the planet's environment on their quest, and another for Empire players who must try to acquire isotope-5 for themselves. Makeb is the largest planet yet for The Old Republic, and offers a huge amount of areas to explore for players.
The game's NPC companions also lack the full voiceovers of the main game, but have some limited dialog throughout the expansion. Some new dialog options have been added, including filthy dialog and same-sex romance options for companion conversations.
The expansion also reworks several gameplay components of the game. Character classes have been tweaked, and skill trees have also been changed. New abilities have also been added to the existing skill trees, and seek to change up the gameplay somewhat. The level cap also gets pushed to level 55 with the expansion.
In addition to weekly and daily quests, new missions involving marcobinoculars and seeker droids are available on Makeb. Two new raid missions also come with Rise of the Hutt Cartel. However, those looking for new P vs P zones, flashpoints, or space battles will be disappointed to know that Rise of the Hutt Cartel does not add any of those.
Overall, Rise of the Hutt Cartel is a worthwhile expansion to those wishing for more content for The Old Republic, even if it is not as grandly built as the rest of the game.
Thanks to IGN
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