Impressions from the 7.6 PTS

A combination of PTS incentives and curiosity about the new dynamic encounter system got me to spend some time on the public test server this past week.

My aging PC doesn't have enough disk space to support having two versions of SWTOR installed nowadays, so I had to put the PTS on my laptop, but that actually worked out quite well this time around as I was travelling last week and had the laptop with me for evening entertainment anyway.

Only two planets have dynamic encounters on the PTS right now: Hoth and Tatooine. It's currently not clear whether that's all 7.6 will launch with or whether these planets were picked for focused testing and we'll be surprised with some more content once the patch goes live. There were some indicators on the PTS galaxy map hinting at dynamic events on other planets like Alderaan and Belsavis, but with no actual content available there so far.

One thing I originally wondered after seeing the sneak peek trailer was whether dynamic encounters would be more like World of Warcraft's world quests (as in, personal to you) or dynamic events in other MMOs (shared and the same for everyone). Interestingly, the answer turned out to be "both". There are two types of events, designated as either "group shared" or "encounter shared". In the former, your progress is personal, and the encounter continues to exist for other players on the map even after you've completed it. In the latter, everyone doing stuff contributes to the event's progression, and once the encounter completes, everyone gets their reward at the same time and it disappears from the map. The shared encounters are generally rarer and can still be soloed if nobody else is around, but they tend to require killing more mobs and can therefore feel like a bit of a slog if you're the only person in the area. On the other hand it's a lot of fun (in my opinion) if there are other players around and you can see things progress really quickly as everybody does their part.

In general gameplay terms, the encounters are about what you'd expect: a lot of kill x mobs and some clicking on shiny things, though there are some standouts where the devs clearly tried to be creative and come up with more varied activities. 

I don't think dynamic events are intended to be a new "main" gameplay mode, though depending on how many planets will get them when 7.6 launches, I'd be curious to see how much levelling you could get done by just doing dynamic encounters - as an experiment if nothing else! Realistically though, I think they are meant to be similar to side missions, just without all the picking up and handing in required. At max level they currently award a tiny number of tech fragments and Conquest commendations, small enough that they wouldn't make for a great primary source of either currency.

One thing that made me wonder a little was how much focus there is on highlighting these new dynamic encounters on the map. The galaxy map highlights planets that have them active, and on the planetary map they show up as big glowy diamonds. There's nothing wrong with that in principle, but it does seem an odd choice when the devs took multiple steps in the past to hide away exploration missions and/or make them less prominent because they were apparently confusing/distracting people. Surely new levellers will get a lot more distracted by all these big glowy indicators on their maps? I dunno.

I'm still a bit torn on whether to try the new lair boss on the PTS as well or not. On the one hand I prefer not to spoil myself when it comes to content like that and would rather see things for the first time on live, but on the other hand every bit of feedback might help with making the Propagator Core a better raid.

The initial round of forum feedback certainly hasn't looked too good. Players were asked what they thought of the fight's different phases, and everyone basically replied "what phases?" because by all accounts, it was just an extremely long slog against an enemy with a lot of hitpoints while trying to manage some bad stuff dropping on the floor.

There has since been another dev post on the forums that basically admitted that almost nothing about the fight was working correctly and that it will see massive changes with the next PTS update. Which is good in the sense that it means the tedious version people experienced in the first week wasn't at all final, though it also makes you wonder why and how an operations boss ended up being put on the PTS in that state in the first place (since you'd expect the devs to be able to verify that at least the very basics are functioning before asking people to play test). I guess I'll have a few more weeks to see how things develop and whether I want to have a go myself.

A Mini GTN Rant

It's been about a year now since the big revamp of the Galactic Trade Network, and I wanted to use the occasion to post some thoughts on how things have been going. Overall, the deflation of the economy due to the taxation changes has been absolutely bananas (which, to be clear, is a good thing), and the GTN has probably played at least a part in this. 

Transaction fees aside, the sales data it provides makes it obvious to potential buyers what other players have been willing to pay for an item in the past, so it's much harder to artificially drive up the price of things, and you can't hope to just fool someone into overpaying by making sure that you're the only one selling and putting a unreasonably high price tag on the item.

The only annoying thing about this is that you can't see this sales data if there isn't already an active listing, and the prices that the GTN "recommends" based on this sales data don't always make sense, in either direction. I saw this recently when opening some of the Cartel packs you get from the Galactic Seasons track on the Shae Vizla server, where the GTN is a lot more quiet.

First I got what I thought was a new-ish and pretty rare weapon which had no listings on the GTN. The system suggested I list it at 30 million credits and I was like "sure, that sounds reasonable for a rare weapon". Then I opened the listing I'd created and...

The historic price was less than half a million? Why in the world would you recommend that I try selling at 30 million then?! Needless to say that listing expired and I re-listed it at a lot less afterwards.

However, it works the other way round as well. Another Cartel Pack gifted me a bronze armour set that wasn't currently being sold on the GTN either. I know that those usually aren't worth that much, so I wasn't surprised that the recommended listing price was only 10k credits. But again, I checked the listing afterwards...

... and the historic range was ten times as much. Why do you do this to me, GTN? I'd really love to know where those numbers come from.

Also, whatever happened to those buy orders we were supposed to get with the new GTN? I was really excited about those but haven't heard anything about that feature in forever. I thought being able to add new functionality like that was partially the point of revamping the whole thing in the first place.

Once More With Feasting

I've been having a blast with the Feast of Prosperity for the past few weeks. Looking back at my blog archives, I really enjoyed it when it was first introduced in 2020 (Has it really only been four years?!), had a good time again in 2021 (when I also used the event to get my pacifist character to the then-level cap of 75) and was pleased to finish off the last achievement associated with the Feast in 2022.

Last year I only gave it a brief mention in the context of getting my pacifist to 80 and how that hadn't actually been all that satisfying, and I think that if you'd asked me then how active I was going to be during the event in 2024, I wouldn't have given myself very high odds. After all, I'd achieved everything that there really was to achieve back in 2022, right?

However, then seasons greatly increased my interest in strongholds and the devs added a bunch of new rewards to the Feast vendor - many of which were decorations - so off I went. Housing enthusiasts have to be such great customers for Broadsword, not just because they buy deco packs from the Cartel Market, but also because decoration rewards are the motivation that keeps on giving. With things like pets, mounts or armour sets, it's mostly a one-and-done deal, but when it comes to things like chairs, potted plants and rugs, you can never have too many, right?

One item in particular that caught my eye was the Regal Wall Garden, which is a gorgeous small planter that fits onto a small wall hook. Perfect for those tricksy walls in the Copero stronghold, and it fits the aesthetic there quite well too! However, it's 1,125 tokens a pop, so I had a lot of work to do.

Actually, that's the wrong way to put it. I had fun doing the Feast dailies and weeklies, and being able to buy more and more decos after each round just made everything even better.

I did all the weeklies on three to four alts per week, and even dabbled in the event a bit on other servers. Even on the notoriously small Leviathan server I managed to get into a world boss group for Trapjaw - it wasn't big, but it was big enough to kill him. (My Operative was also only level 25 - I didn't even realise you could pick up the dailies at such a low level, and Trapjaw's AoE absolutely wrecked me... after dying once, I had to stay far away and just shoot at him ineffectively from max range.) It was a great way to earn Conquest points too, as well as to get credit for this week's "do x missions as a trooper or agent" seasons objective.

I just found it striking how incredibly well the single-player and group content flow together during this event. I'd arrive on Nar Shaddaa and immediately try to get into a world boss group, but if I just missed the last one, the amount of time it took me to do the solo missions would be just about long enough for the next group to start forming, so it was always quick and easy to get everything ticked off for the day. The world bosses themselves are extremely casual-friendly and simple, and now with shared tagging you can get in on the action even if you're absolutely allergic to actually joining a group even for five minutes.

It's just been a joy all around, and all the (new) decos should provide motivation for me to keep taking part for years to come.

Adventures on Oricon

I don't really have anything too deep or meaningful to say this week, but just wanted to ramble a bit about doing dailies on Oricon. The change the devs made to daily areas with the Bessi patch still kind of fascinates me. It was very much a footnote to the actual venture, but dailies used to be one of the few endgame activities that were still largely gated behind a character's story progression, so seeing them get opened up account-wide with so little fuss just surprised me.

And it does seem a bit like... things weren't exactly optimised for this change in some ways, as I found out while questing on Oricon this past week. One of the weekly seasons objectives was to do exploration or repeatable missions in Empire space, and Oricon was one of the eligible planets.

I hadn't unlocked it at all on Shae Vizla yet, so I took my Sith warrior there to start the story. As I arrived in the base, I saw the daily mission terminal all lit up with quests and a little light went on in my head as well.

For those who don't know, the Oricon story requires you to do four simple missions as part of a storyline that eventually cumulates in you being sent into the Dread Fortress operation, and the dailies didn't used to unlock until you'd done the first three of those story missions. These dailies would then also be similar to the original one-time story quests, for example requiring you to destroy three terraforming devices when the storyline originally asked you to destroy five.

So I thought to myself: Wait, if I can pick up the dailies from the start, do I get a two-for-one? I picked up the first story mission to rescue Republic soldiers from escape pods, grabbed the daily mission with the same objective and indeed: every pod I opened gave me credit towards both! I love it when I get to make use of synergies like that.

Unfortunately, the smooth experience didn't last. I first started to run into problems when I got to the quest that requires you to locate a dark energy source by collecting "bioenergy enhancers" from the local mobs (ten for the one-time mission, five for the daily). I collected a whole bunch and then clicked on them to do the locating. One of the quests updated, but the other one didn't. I tried to use the item again, but it wouldn't let me because it kept saying that I'd already done that bit.

Somewhat annoyed, I proceeded into the phase for the quest and completed the one that was on the correct step. When I looked into my bags afterwards to try and use the bioenergy enhancers again for the second quest, they had disappeared, clearly "cleaned up" automatically due to me completing one of the missions. So I had to farm up another set, locate the dark energy source again, and repeat the encounter in the phase. Alright.

Things got worse in the watchtower. I defeated the various droids inside the control room, clicked on the final panel that's supposed to spawn Commander Zaoron and... nothing happened. This was when I noticed that only one of the two missions had updated correctly while the other one wasn't even on the right step. So I exited the phase again, reset the one that had progressed ahead of the other one and went through the whole rigmarole a second time. This time both missions updated successfully.

I watched the cut scene for the one-time mission and then... couldn't click on the holocron to complete the quest. I sighed and went back out once again, but at least one of the missions completed as I did so. I just reset the phase this time (instead of the whole mission) and went back in yet again, hoping that the game would be less confused now with only one quest left, and indeed, the holocron finally became clickable.

All in all, it wasn't the worst thing in the world, and I did get a lot of quests done in one run, but there was also a lot of trial and error with various resets involved. This is unfortunately the kind of thing that makes the game feel somewhat unpolished at times but at the same time isn't likely to get fixed because it's not a hard blocker and you can eventually push through with enough persistence.

Have you had any interesting experiences with the new daily zone unlocks for characters that haven't actually done that planet's story yet?

SWTOR Comes to the Apple Mac

A few weeks ago, Executive Producer Keith Kanneg published his Q3 Producer Letter. It's the kind of thing I would've looked forward to in the past, but more recently these have mostly been summaries of what happened in the last quarter instead of a preview of what's coming up in the next one, so not that exciting to someone like me who's mostly looking for announcements about the future.

Except for one piece of genuine news that was somewhat hidden away towards the end: that SWTOR is going to get a native Mac launcher soon. (They've since hosted a closed technical test with volunteers.) To which my reaction was... huh.

The last time I used a Mac must've been in my high school's computer lab when I was around fifteen, and I don't really tend to hear much about them either. My only "exposure" to them is due to our graphic designers at work using them. And while I see comments from people asking for SWTOR to come to consoles on social media every now and then, I couldn't recall the last time I'd seen anyone bring up a Mac client.

Of course, I then saw Intisar doing the virtual equivalent of somersaults on Discord, as he's a Mac user (which I didn't know) and was over the moon about this bit of news. So someone's happy!

I was curious to find out what Apple's market share is nowadays, but Google is full of contradictory information on that subject. This Wikipedia page has it at around 10%, but several sites claim it to be higher. Then again, general usage may be different from gaming market share anyway. The Steam hardware survey for example shows less than two percent of users on some version of MacOS.

So I can't say that this seems like a huge untapped market to me... especially since it's my understanding that SWTOR was already playable on Macs, though it required a non-trivial degree of faffing around with partitions or emulators. Then again, I can't claim that making the game easier to access for Mac users is a bad thing, and it may not be too bad in terms of effort vs. reward as they're not developing a whole native client, just a launcher (which is then supposed to automatically adjust the right knobs to make the game playable on Mac as far as I understand the process).

It's basically a slightly weird bit of news as a PC user, because while it sounds like a good thing theoretically, it's not something for which we are able to see any real impact on our end. I really just wanted to give a shout-out to this piece of news because it does feel significant in the sense that this isn't the kind of thing we often see a developer do for an MMO that's been out for close to thirteen years, and it does once again show the SWTOR team's commitment to maintaining and expanding the game for years to come.

7.6 Sneak Peek!

I was planning to write about something else today, but then as I was browsing YouTube last night, a new video from SWTOR's official account suddenly popped up in my recommendations. Whaaa...?!

Here we've all been sitting around, waiting for them to announce the next livestream, and they surprise us with an actual teaser like that. I like it! While I've enjoyed the livestreams over the last few years, they do kind of seem targeted at fans who are already highly invested, while a four-minute video talking about upcoming patch features should be much more accessible to a more mainstream audience.

The three major points of interest from the video are: the new type of gameplay that's coming in 7.6, the new lair boss, and the upcoming PTS.

The new type of gameplay that will take us back to existing planets is called "dynamic encounters" and is basically... world quests? Dynamic events? Something like that. We don't know enough details (such as how often they'll occur, and how much credit will be shared vs. personal) to say which of the comparable features in other MMOs they will resemble the most, but we get the basic idea: They'll be a bit like quests, but instead of picking them up in town, you'll just find them popping up on your map.

This seems like a smart direction for the dev team to take, as it'll allow them to add more things for players to do at all levels without needing more voice acting or fancy cinematics, plus it's likely to make the open world feel a bit more alive as you should encounter more players running around on old planets.

I'm tentatively excited, though it remains to be seen how engaging this stuff turns out to be in the long term, and of course there's always the question of rewards. I thought it was kind of funny that the example in the video showed the player getting literally nothing for completion (obviously since it's still a work in progress) but it does make you wonder. XP and credits seem like a given, but the game already throws plenty of those at you everywhere else too. Is another source of Conquest commendations at max level going to excite anyone? But then, SWTOR has never been as highly reward-driven as other MMOs, so I really wouldn't expect these to suddenly start handing out higher-level currency or anything like that. We'll see.

In fact, we should find out more soon enough as this stuff will be going on the Public Test Server! And there'll even be a new reward for going on there and helping with the testing: a special mini pet. I just thought this was funny since I have a guildie who asks every time the PTS goes up whether there's a new reward, and usually there isn't... so I outright told him at one point that there doesn't seem to be much point in asking that question every time. I of course had to ping him immediately once I saw the video, hah!

The other thing we'll get to try on the PTS will be the new lair boss, a droid called Propagator Core XR-53, found on Ilum among the remnants of the Emperor's old space station. Unsurprisingly, like R-4 Anomaly, the fight won't have a 16-person mode, which I know most people don't care about but I'll keep moaning about it anyway because as a guild who has done and continues to do 16-mans, I miss that option. (When R-4 was a seasons objective the other week and we had 13 people on, that was quite challenging to sort out.)

Aside from that though, XR-53 will have both a story and a veteran mode, and I'm curious to find out what it'll be like. I crave more group content, but R-4 was such an awful experience for me at launch that I'm also still a bit wary of their current design philosophy in that area, so I'm hesitant to get too excited just yet.

What are you most interested in learning more about in regards to patch 7.6?

Looking for Good Views

The Best View in SWTOR contest has returned once again! I noted last year that we were at risk of running out of planets to feature, and that has indeed resulted in a rather strange selection this time around. Instead of the usual ten planets, there are only five eligible locations this year, namely:

• Ziost
• CZ-198
• Section X
• Minboosa District
• The Black Hole

Aside from the fact that none of these are among the most picturesque of places, some of the choices struck me as a bit odd. CZ-198 and Ziost make sense as these were indeed among the last few planets/moons yet to be featured, but for some reason Darvannis was still left out. I know it's not the most exciting place to look at, but neither are most of these!

The Minboosa District is technically part of Hutta, which was featured before, but it's a new area, so including it made a certain kind of sense. What's surprising is that the Interpreter's Retreat and Kessan's Landing weren't included using the same kind logic.

Instead we got the Black Hole and Section X, which are separate maps, sure, but since they are old they were technically already included as part of Corellia and Belsavis last year. I recall that at least one of the finalists for Corellia was in fact a shot taken in the Black Hole, and my own submission for Belsavis was a shot of Section X. I guess I can simply submit the exact same image again? Just seems a little odd.

Anyway, last year I used the occasion of the contest returning as an opportunity to showcase my own submissions from the year before, but this year I'd like to talk about my observations about three of this year's locations instead.

Ziost is of course a unique planet in the sense that it has a "before" state that only exists during the storyline and which is very different from the permanent "after" state in which we get to do dailies. I had several alts with the Ziost storyline active and thought I'd be clever by taking screenshots on these otherwise impossible to access maps, but I've got to admit I liked none of them enough to submit in the end. Looking out at the skyline in front of the People's Tower certainly made me rethink the impact of Vitiate's actions that day, but the buildings honestly looked a bit basic and like the designers intentionally didn't put that much work into them, knowing that they would live in a phase only used for a single storyline where nobody would spend a lot of time marvelling at the scenery (and who would blame them).

Somewhat basic-looking Ziost skyline

I can see why CZ-198 was saved until the end because while it's an extremely popular daily location, it basically just consists of a landing platform and some indoor spaces. I look forward to seeing whether someone actually manages to come up with a good shot of the place, because I certainly didn't.

The Minboosa District mostly consists of a lot of swamp and pipelines (and I learned that the annoying Xuvva spawns that can see through stealth are not limited to the storyline but just always there it seems), but while scouting the area for good shot locations I was surprised to realise that there's actually a whole sub-zone that we never go to during the storyline. I didn't think it was particularly pretty so I didn't take a picture of it, but it did make me wonder what was up with that. With Broadsword's more limited resources nowadays, it seems odd to have such a large chunk of an already relatively small map not serve any purpose.

Anyway, those are my thoughts on this year's contest. It's worth noting that the devs have acknowledged that they're basically out of planets now and that they're thinking about what other topics future screenshot contests could be about, such as strongholds or outfits. I'm not sure how that would work because surely then it'd more about building a good-looking outfit/stronghold rather than about being able to take good screenshots of the world we all share? Personally I think something like flashpoints might work better, but we'll see. If you want to enter the current competition while the going is still hot, you have until the 20th of October.

Around the SWTOR-sphere: September 2024

This post is a few days late because I briefly forgot that September only has thirty days and then figured since we were already in October anyway, there was no rush anymore to get it out as soon as possible. I once again didn't have any interesting links to share in August (in fact, when I opened my draft at the end of the month it was literally empty), but in September my link-collecting endeavours were more fruitful again.

• Earlier in the month I promoted my appearance on Ivano 1337's PvP podcast, and on the day of recording he told me that he was actually already about to talk to his next guest that same evening. That episode released a few days later and had him talking to - what shall we call him... controversial personality Snave. I have no love for Snave myself - I played Republic on The Red Eclipse before streaming became super popular, and being stomped by Snave's Imperial premades and then being publicly ridiculed for losing on his stream was generally enough to make me stop queueing for the evening. And that's without even going into any of the other reasons most major content creators won't go near him... but I will say that his chat with Ivano was interesting. They also recorded themselves playing a couple of warzones at the end. Funny thing is that for all the reasons to dislike Snave, I actually agree with him about objectives in warzones.
• In the blogosphere, commenter Yeebo (who also has his own blog) finally got around to publishing the two posts about SWTOR he'd been telling me about for a while. The first one is about the "Knights of" era and the months that followed immediately after, and how that content put him off the game for a while. The second one is about how he came back to SWTOR at the start of this year and was pleasantly surprised by the new content he found, and how he thinks the game is actually in a much better place now. Happy ending! (For the time being.)
• The second variety blogger I saw writing about SWTOR last month was Bhagpuss, in a post titled "Back to the future", which was at least partially inspired by reading Yeebo's posts mentioned above. However, he was a lot less enthused and immediately lost interest again as far as I can tell, as there was no follow-up. Still, I appreciated his perspective. I thought it was interesting how disconnected he felt from his characters upon returning for example, when usually people cite feeling more connected to their characters as one of SWTOR's strengths.
• Finally, the SWTOR subreddit actually yielded a couple of posts last month that I found particularly amusing/interesting. On the amusing front, we had this post by someone whose Alderaanian trees were going bonkers - I've got to admit I quite liked the idea of in-game wind moving the leaves (even if it probably shouldn't look quite like that).
• On the "just interesting" front, we had this post by a now deleted user who talked about how transferring from Satele Shan to Star Forge was a complete game changer for them. The topic of server populations has been on my mind a lot after my experiences with doing seasons on all the servers and seeing how dramatically different things can be from one server to the next. You don't have to agree with everything the poster says, but I thought there were some interesting conversations sparked in the comments.

Mid-Season Doldrums

It feels a bit funny to talk about mid-season when Galactic Season 7 has only been live for one and a half months and we know that it's supposed to last another four and a half months. However, I am level 69 out of 100 on Darth Malgus, so even with the bonus achievements in mind, it does feel like I'm reasonably close to the halfway point, which feels like a good time to talk about how things have been going so far.

In a nutshell, while I thought that everything about GS7 sounded solid on paper, I haven't been enjoying myself as much as I would've hoped. But let's start with the good and then go down from there.

What's going well

I do love that the weekly objective for the DvL bosses means that there's one guaranteed large group objective every week, because this helps to fill my guild's social nights. You could argue that it's not ideal if people only show up to tick their weekly boxes and don't want to hang around to actually be social afterwards, but from my perspective as a guild officer, I'd rather have people who are perhaps not that into the game right now show up at least briefly once a week to say hi than not show up at all. It's good for guild cohesion, basically.

What's going so-so

My plans to impose stricter limits on my investment in seasons on other servers have worked out well so far in the sense that I've been able to stick to them without suddenly having the urge to binge. However, it also hasn't increased the fun as much as I had hoped. When you're only aiming for four easy weekly objectives each week, this basically means that I do a bounty contract on every server (because that's the easiest/fastest one by far), get 200k Conquest points somehow, and the rest is usually some kind of combination of mission-related objectives. However, depending on the nature of said objectives it can still be oddly time-consuming and a bit samey to be doing them on all servers.

I'm still aiming to do the 25k Conquest points per day for the daily objective on each server at the moment as well, but I'm starting to wonder whether I shouldn't be cutting down on that too. With the final removal of any kind of seasons-related currency there just doesn't seem as much of a point to it (when previously the extra currency you'd get from the daily objectives certainly added up) as the one hundred levels themselves can be achieved extremely easily without that. It's still worth logging in at least four times a week for the free season points from the login rewards, but beyond that, I think I need to reconsider this one as well.

What's not going so well

When I gave the notion of Bounty Contract Week being live all season a thumbs-up, this came with the assumption that everything related to that event would be available too, including Conquest objectives. The latter has not been the case however, and I can only guess that these are still strictly tied to the Death Mark Conquest event, which has not come around so far this season and I'm not sure it will (since Bounty Contract Week is usually its main draw). As someone who's quite motivated by Conquest, this has been disappointing to me.

More importantly however, I'm just not that into seasons at the moment. I'm kind of reminded of how I had to cut back on my investment in seasons a bit during GS4 (after burning myself out a little during GS3) and there might be a bit of that at work again this time, but it's also the first time that I find myself really straining against the way seasons try to keep you engaged at all times.

What I mean by that is that things like login rewards and daily objectives are not a big deal while you're having fun anyway - they just provide a bit of extra reward and direction. However, when your interests shift and you kind of want to do other things for a while, these same incentives can start to feel like a bit of a ball and chain, as they demand more attention than you perhaps really want to give the game at that particular moment. Worst case, by the time the chain finally snaps, you'll actively resent the way it held you back until then and you'll actually feel negatively about going back to the game. I vaguely recall having feelings like that in regards to ESO's extremely valuable login rewards and all the various incentives that Neverwinter used to give me to keep me logging in multiple times a day. I actually talked about this a bit when login rewards were first introduced to SWTOR back in 2020.

Now, those login rewards were actually pretty mild, ultimately, but seasons are definitely doing that thing where they really push you to keep coming back and playing in order not to miss out on the rewards. They've become such an integral part of the game that it's wild to think that they were only added three and a half years ago.

The reason I'm really straining against this at the moment is that I'm having a lot of fun with the latest WoW expansion right now. And to be clear, by itself, that's not a dig against SWTOR in any way. While I've been continuously subscribed to the game since 2011, I've always played other games on the side and I've always gone through periods of being more and less invested in it. When WoW Classic came out back in 2019 for example, I was all over that and not very interested in SWTOR at all for several months, especially as the latter was also suffering from a period of pre-expansion doldrums at the time. The point is: that was okay. The game didn't have any FOMO mechanics back then that made me feel like I'd be punished for not logging in and not playing for a few days.

Nowadays however, things are different. I may feel like spending more time in WoW, but SWTOR "demands" that I log in daily to earn my Conquest points and do my seasons objectives every week or else I miss out. And yes, I know it's not that strict and it's not as if you can't take a break and still earn all the rewards. And I don't actually have to do anything. However, the point is that the game is a lot more demanding of your time than it used to be and I'm just finding myself nostalgic for the old days when that wasn't the case. Seasons are just the most obvious reminder of that.

When Will We Get 8.0? Will We Ever?

This was a topic that I discussed with Ivano on the podcast, but I still wanted to write a blog post about it as well, since it's something that's been on my mind for a while. With it having been more than two and a half years since the launch of Legacy of the Sith, it's also a question I'm seeing people ask more and more.

The short answer is: We don't really know. If it's happening, it's unlikely to be soon. As of me writing this in September 2024, we have no official information on the subject. No, that post on Today in TOR was an April Fools joke.

Now for the long answer.

The problem with talking about future expansions for SWTOR is that it has never had what I would call a regular expansion cycle akin to other long-running MMOs, where you can count on a new expansion pack being announced once a year or every other year.

If we look back at the game's early years, we did get expansions at something close to a yearly pace for a while: Rise of the Hutt Cartel came out in early 2013, Shadow of Revan at the end of 2014, Knights of the Fallen Empire in late 2015, and Knights of the Eternal Throne at the end of 2016. That may actually seem kind of regular at a glance, but it wasn't really. RotHC was originally meant to be free content for subscribers but was later repackaged as an expansion. Then we got Galactic Starfighter towards the end of 2013 and Galactic Strongholds in mid-2014, and while people tend to not think of those additions as expansions nowadays, they were marketed as such at the time, meaning that for a while we were getting a major content drop almost every six months. Shadow of Revan actually felt kind of cut short, seeing how it was only current content for less than a year.

Then Knights of the Fallen Empire came around, promising to completely change the game from the ground up, and it did indeed introduce many changes that impact our gameplay to this day, such as level scaling and companions being way more powerful than they were in the game's first three years. The flow from Fallen Empire chapters into Eternal Throne on the other hand was so gradual it made the two feel almost like a single expansion... and then it just stopped.

I think it was around this time that I remember a dev saying that they weren't even sure they were going to do expansions anymore because they might just keep adding regular content patches without all that hullabaloo instead. They did eventually change their minds about that, but Onslaught didn't come out until the end of 2019 almost three years later.

When Legacy of the Sith was announced for late 2021, it felt like the team was really getting back into the groove, but then 7.0 turned into a big flop. (To be clear, I think they've released a lot of good content since then, but 7.0 at launch was just underwhelming in a lot of ways.)

And that's really the crux of the matter as I see it. People (both players and developers) like MMO expansions because they generate hype, promise exciting new things and give lapsed players a reason to check back in. From a developer's point of view, they can also be used to charge extra for a big bundle of content all at once.

However, SWTOR hasn't benefitted from that last one since 2014, seeing how they've never wavered from their "all content unlocks with the subscription" model that was introduced with KotFE in 2015. And well... Legacy of the Sith was great for hype before it launched, but then not so much. Those Twitch numbers I looked at the other day showed engagement with the game dropping to a two-year-low shortly after the expansion's launch, kind of the opposite of what you want out of a big release like that!

A really terrible expansion can harm your game just as much as a good one can lift it up; it's not an automatic win. I never played Rift myself for example, but from everything I've heard, interest in that game absolutely tanked with the first expansion because the new content went into completely the wrong direction for the player base it had built. And of course there's always Star Wars Galaxies' infamous New Game Experience. Legacy of the Sith was fortunately not on that level and interest in SWTOR seemingly recovered around the time 7.1 came out, but I still think it was a close call and reminded everyone that a bad expansion can actually be worse than no expansion at all.

The point of all this waffling is that SWTOR has never had a regular expansion cycle due to the many changes in direction it's had over time, and with the current business model it doesn't actually benefit from an expansion nearly as much as many other MMOs. While the team at Broadsword seems happy with their new home and has been doing a solid job continuing to pump out content, they are still small and I'm honestly not sure whether it would be the best use of their resources to reduce work on the regular patches in favour of building up to a bigger release again.

It's not that I wouldn't love to see another good expansion, but after the dud that was LotS' launch, I really don't want to see them mess up like that again either. I had a decent enough time in 7.0, but seeing how unhappy it made many players and listening to the game get panned left and right was no fun at all. If they are going to give us another expansion, I feel it needs to at least match Onslaught in terms of scope, which launched with a new playable species, two planets, distinct storylines for Republic and Empire, a new flashpoint and a new operation. If they can't honestly commit to that, I'd rather they stuck to focusing on giving us the best possible new content from one patch to the next, even if that doesn't get them as much press as an expansion launch would. Just raising the level cap by five again and revamping the way gearing works for the umpteenth time in order to call it an expansion would do the game more harm than good in my eyes.