An Agent’s Tale
The Imperial Agent story in Star Wars: The Old Republic takes the usual Star Wars backdrop of wars and empires and narrows it down to one person’s work in the shadows. Instead of being a front-line Force user or soldier, you handle cover identities, quiet killings and information flows, and the game leans into that angle more consistently here than in almost any other class.
Things start on Hutta, with a brief that sums up both job and tone. Keeper, head of Imperial Intelligence, sends you down to Jiguuna to secure crime lord Nem’ro the Hutt’s allegiance to the Empire, not by simple threats or payment but by infiltrating his organisation under a forged identity, playing his lieutenants against each other and making the Republic look bad enough that siding with the Empire becomes the obvious choice. By the time you leave, you have already lied to allies, sabotaged a rival Hutt and seen how easily a mission’s “success” can be separated from any neat idea of doing the right thing.
From there, the story moves through three acts that gradually widen and then flip their focus. Early on you track down The Eagle, a Republic-backed terrorist leader whose cells are hitting Imperial targets, working under the callsign Cipher Nine and building a reputation as one of Intelligence’s most effective field agents. That arc culminates in the discovery and neutralisation of the Eradicator weapons, sleeper devices hidden in major population centres and keyed to your own brainwashing, and it sets up the twist that the mysterious Star Cabal has been using both sides’ extremists as tools.
Later acts shift from hunting outside threats to dealing with the damage done to you and your service. The Cabal’s conditioning turns you into a potential weapon against the Empire, forcing you to work half-under suspicion, half-off the grid, and Intelligence itself is gutted and restructured by Sith who see it as a liability rather than an asset. By the time you reach the Star Cabal’s own stronghold in Act III and confront Hunter, their agent who has been taunting you all along, the question is less “can you stop this plot” than “who will you be afterwards”: loyal operative, independent asset or something closer to a double agent walking their own line.
Companions mirror the story’s interest in trust and its limits. Kaliyo Djannis arrives early as a violent anarchist and sometime mercenary who likes chaos more than causes, and your relationship with her tends to sit somewhere between wary partnership and mutual exploitation. Vector Hyllus, a Joiner bound to the Killik hive mind, brings a quieter, more alien perspective that many players end up trusting more than they expect, while Dr. Eckard Lokin adds a layer of professional ambiguity as an Intelligence scientist with his own long-running side projects. Raina Temple, an Imperial officer with a hidden Force heritage, and SCORPIO, the self-improving droid AI you recruit while infiltrating the Cabal, round out a crew where almost everyone has their own angle and potential to slip away or turn on you in later content.
All the way through, the Agent’s choices matter in ways that feel more structural than cosmetic. You can double down on service to the Empire and the reconstituted Intelligence, accept a position as a semi-autonomous fixer who works with them but on your own terms, or walk further away by sharing the Cabal’s Black Codex and its secrets with other powers, including the Republic. Those decisions affect who survives, who ends up in charge and how later flashpoints and expansions treat Cipher Nine’s legacy, reinforcing the sense that this is a story about someone who has seen too much of how the war really works to ever fit neatly into the propaganda on either side.
In tone and structure, the Imperial Agent arc comes closest to a slow-burn spy novel transplanted into the Old Republic era. It uses disguises, double crosses and quiet conversations as often as explosions, lets its protagonist be used and then decide what to do with that knowledge, and rarely pretends that any victory comes without a cost to someone. For players who enjoy that kind of story – one eye always on the next lie, and on who might be watching – it remains one of SWTOR’s most praised class narratives.
