A Long, Slow Goodbye to Twitter

I created my Twitter account almost eleven years ago. The site was still smaller back then, a kind of nerdy place for bloggers to hang out. It wasn't something I ever felt I needed in my life, but I was curious enough to check it out and see what the fuss was all about.

And I kept using it, even though I never loved it. In 2015 I wrote about what I saw as some of the pros and cons of Twitter. I will say that it grew on me over time though. As I became more active within the SWTOR community on Twitter, I had more positive interactions. Also, when I finally got a smartphone, I could verify that there was indeed more of an appeal to scrolling through Twitter on the train (for example) than to looking at it on my desktop PC.

And then all that Elon Musk drama happened last year. I kept hearing worse and worse things about him, but was still hopeful that even if he was a big jerk, that didn't necessarily mean that Twitter couldn't continue to do its thing (lots of tech billionaires are not among the nicest people, but that doesn't necessarily make their products unusable). Oh boy, did I have no idea.

Look, I'm not going to rehash all the nonsense he's inflicted on the site since then - there are hundreds of articles and videos out there laying it all out in detail. If you're a Twitter user and you feel that his buyout hasn't really impacted your experience, I'm not here to tell you that you should feel otherwise... but for many of us, the site has become increasingly less usable and just generally less enjoyable to hang out on.

I've seen a lot of people talk about leaving, just to then come back a week later because despite everything, they missed it too much, and I didn't want to be one of them. However, I also have very different motivations from many Twitter users. For me, Twitter was always meant to be an extension of the blog, and so my first reaction to Musk firing 80% of the site's staff was one of annoyance. At the time, I honestly wouldn't have been surprised if the site had just outright crashed within two weeks, and I was seething at the thought that I'd put ten years of myself into a website that might just disappear one day due to the whims of a random billionaire. I mean, we often joke about how Google might shut down Blogger any day now, but at least they are usually professional about these things, giving you notice and plenty of time to export your data.

So I came away from the whole Twitter debacle with two main resolutions: firstly, to slowly wean myself off using Twitter as much (though I was going to continue using it while there were still interesting things to read there), and secondly, to extract everything I had ever posted there, review it for things I wanted to keep and remember, and incorporate them into this blog.

Point one was relatively easy to action: I completely stopped using my secondary account, and cut down on posting on my main account, no longer offering up random thoughts or anything like that, but purely limiting myself to promoting the blog and posting the occasional reply to someone else. I also started to look for other places that would provide a similar sort of entertainment and/or could be used to promote my writings. (For example I've taken to making a post on the official SWTOR forums every month.)

Point two meant requesting a copy of my stored data while that service was still functional, and starting work on sorting and categorising it. The latter is still ongoing, because it turns out that manually reviewing almost 5000 Tweets and pasting them into blog posts takes some time, and to be honest it's a bit boring - the kind of task for which I have to be in the right mindset. I am however close to being done, and what will happen then is that I will start making a series of posts on here called "Tales from Twitter" which will reproduce old Tweets of mine that I'd like to remember and preserve. I don't know how many parts this series will have yet, and since it's not time-sensitive, my plan is to intersperse it with "normal" posts. I don't know how interesting these will be to you as readers... I think some of them, like the random pug/PvP stories, are pretty amusing and timeless, but others might not be. Still, it's something I'd like to do for myself above all else, to have all this content in one place.

As for what will happen to Twitter... to be honest, at this point I think it will slowly fade away for me. As of now, there are still a few people there for whose content I check in every day, but the number of posts on my timeline is constantly decreasing as people leave and the weird crap that's been done to the algorithms makes it harder to find interesting new people to follow. I'm trying out Bluesky as a "Twitter replacement" (it's not the same but to me personally it does seem to be the competitor most likely to be able to serve a similar purpose right now) but regardless of how things go there, I feel like I'm going to make more conscious decisions going forward about where to post anything on the web.

My Very Own Malgus

I'm not a toy collector, but I do enjoy buying frivolous things sometimes. So when I found out that Hasbro was releasing a new Darth Malgus figure, I hesitated only briefly before taking the leap and pre-ordering.

I always felt like I missed out a bit by not getting the collector's edition of the game (which included a Malgus statue) back in the day - but when I decided to give The Old Republic a try back in 2011, I had no idea I would still be playing it twelve years later! Anyway, the point is that this seemed like a good opportunity to get my own Malgus after all.

He arrived in a nice cardboard box that made him look like a mummy when opened up. Honestly, I'm pretty impressed by the creativity employed in the plastic-free packaging that many companies have come up with for a variety of products recently, though it's my understanding that some collectors are not fond of not being able to see the figure inside the box through a plastic window anymore.

Anyway, once unwrapped, he's a pretty handsome, detailed and posable fellow.

I find myself once again reminded that I really wish SWTOR offered more merchandise. I believe the common argument for why there isn't is that it's too expensive due to the Star Wars license, to which my counter is always that I've seen crappy pens, bags of apples, and freaking toilet roll with the Star Wars logo on it, so surely it can't be all that prohibitive... however, I guess this kind of situation, where a company that's regularly producing Star Wars merchandise makes something that doesn't feature the game's logo, but does include a character or other content from the game in their regular line-up, is better than nothing. I'd love it if they made a Satele as well at some point. I'd get that one too and then the two of them could do battle.

SWTOR Moves to the Cloud & GS5 Changes Direction

After I recently posted about how with SWTOR, you rarely know what comes next beyond the very immediate future, we got some updates yesterday about what to expect in the next couple of weeks at least.

First off, the move to Amazon Web Services that's been in testing since earlier in the year is finally becoming reality! The latest news post on the subject explains once again why this should be considered a good thing for the game and informed us that the process will start in earnest this Tuesday. It looks like they'll be moving one server at the time, starting with the Leviathan - this makes sense to me as Leviathan is the smallest of the current five servers, so if anything goes wrong, the player base hopefully shouldn't be affected all at once. We'll see how soon after that they'll aim to move the rest - depends on how smoothly the first move goes I guess.

The other piece of news released on the same day was that patch 7.3.1, which will include the start of Galactic Season 5 as well as some more map UI updates, is meant to come "soon" - that is to say in "late August/early September".

One piece of feedback I've had over the course of the last couple of seasons was that while seasons as a concept were in a good place overall, I thought they could really do with a bit of innovation, such as more changing objectives and perhaps a reward that isn't another gibberish-speaking alien companion. I'm delighted to say that it appears that the SWTOR team has listened!

According to the blog post, we won't be receiving a new companion this time but will instead be "interact[ing] with several new characters [...] while making dialogue choices that affect gameplay" - whatever that means exactly. The story tied to this will replace the little personal stories that we've been getting with the seasonal companions since Season 2 and progression will be tied to overall season progression. There'll also be new objectives tied to companions, space missions and operations.

I have no idea what any of this will look like in practice but I'm happy to find out!

Romance Review: Base Game Guys for Gals

A couple of months ago (wow, this has been sitting in my drafts for a while!), Intisar wrote a blog post in defence of the romances with Doc and Corso, after they'd been panned pretty hard in one of Swtorista's livestreams. I had thoughts on this that I wanted to share in reply, but I figured that I might as well do so in a blog post of my own. It just took longer than expected to get it out...

I'll open by saying that I'm far from the most knowledgeable person when it comes to the in-game romances. Unlike many players, I'm not tempted to hit absolutely every flirt option I see, and in general the concept of romancing an NPC in a video game has less appeal to me nowadays than it might have had maybe fifteen years ago. I've also just been really inept at virtual romance in the past. My first post about companion romances on this blog talked about this at some length, incluuding mention of my akward attempts at romance in Dragon Age. However, that doesn't mean that I don't have opinions on the stuff I have seen, and I thought I might as well compile them all in a single post.

This will only talk about romanceable companions by the way - flirting with random NPCs you encounter along the way can still be fun and memorable, but it just doesn't quite have the same weight in my opinion. I'll also limit myself to the base game companions, and more specifically to those available to female player characters, because almost all my characters are female. It's only more recently that I've dabbled a bit in also trying to level a couple of male characters, but none of them have made it far enough in the story to see their major romances. Something to explore over the next decade I guess. Anyway, here's what I've got to say now:

Republic

Trooper - Aric Jorgan

My main is a trooper and she's never kissed anyone. As I mentioned in the post linked two paragraphs ago, I wasn't instantly sold on Jorgan, and by the time he kind of started to grow on me and I might've considered a romance, I had missed my chance. So all she's done is flirt relentlessly with Jonas Balkar, and I could see something developing with Rass Ordo depending on how things go with him in the future... we'll see.

Anyway, on the subject of Aric: I obviously made alts later and have romanced him since then, though it's been a while since I played through those conversations, and I've got to admit they haven't been particularly memorable. In this post from 2016 I wrote that Jorgan kind of acts like a clichéd action hero in the sense that he likes to let the tough guy hang out most of the time, only confessing his feelings under certain amounts of pressure. It's hard to picture him in a proper committed relationship where he'd actually have to act like a normal person most of the time. And yeah, I don't really have much more to add to that. I kind of want to get my Vanguard through Fallen Empire at some point, to see whether the reunion with Aric in chapter eleven adds any more depth to the relationship.

Smuggler - Corso Riggs

Ah, the frequently maligned Corso. I'll come out right away and say that I like him. Honestly, even if you don't want to romance him, taking him along everywhere and watching him squirm by intentionally pushing all his buttons is hilarious. However, even as a romance he's got some things going for him. Like Intisar says, he's the kind of guy who'll always have your back no matter what's going on. He's kind of old-fashioned in his protectiveness and ideas about loyalty... and yes, this is where the problem with the sexism comes in.

I can't really blame anyone for being put off by this, but to me it ultimately wasn't that big a deal because unlike many sexist ideas in real life, Corso's sexism is utterly toothless. He'll always pipe up about how he thinks that a lady shouldn't do this or that... but ultimately he never tries to stop you, ignoring his objections doesn't diminish his affection for you, and if you push back on any of his silly complaints, he never has a good comeback. His ideas about ladies don't come from some deep conviction, but rather from a place of being a young bumpkin growing up on a backwater planet who just repeats what he's been told growing up, which ultimately just means that he's kind of naive, which I don't find that big of a deal personally. Plus he does show some growth over time.

Jedi Knight - Doc

Next we have Doc, the other guy Intisar went to bat for, and I agree with him, though for different reasons. I get why people might find him unappealing if they're looking for a character who'll be their one true love - but I always loved Doc for offering a more casual romance option. Doc flirts with every woman he meets from the moment you first encounter him, so you know exactly what kind of guy he is. And that can still be fun! There's something attractive about a man who finds something nice to say about absolutely every woman he meets, as long as you don't let yourself get dragged in too deep.

Ultimately, Doc's brave, easygoing and optimistic, and some days that's just the kind of pick-me-up you need after a hard day of saving the galaxy. I think he might also be the only companion who's actually happy if you turn down his marriage proposal. I just think he's a fantastic buddy with benefits.

Jedi Consular - Lieutenant Iresso

My first impressions of the consular romance were not very positive (again I refer you to the old blog post linked at the beginning), as I apparently flirted with both Tharan and Felix without meaning to and it all got very weird. I still don't really care for flirting with Tharan, but Lieutenant Iresso was really charming when I entered a relationship with him intentionally on an alt consular. He's probably got the most mature of all companion romances, with no major tension or drama, just two adults that really like each other and slide into being more than friends really easily.

Empire

Sith Warrior - Malavai Quinn

Quinn is another companion that is hated by many, though he didn't do badly on Swtorista's romance tier list. His betrayal in the main class story makes many people's dislike understandable I think, though if you can look past that, he's got another pretty unique experience to offer. I actually never forgave him on my own Sith warrior - she didn't hold a grudge on Iokath but also came to realise that she was kind of over him and that she preferred casually shacking up with Lieutenant Pierce.

Either way, in the earlier part of the class story, Quinn is pretty delightful to romance as he's basically the male equivalent of a blushing schoolgirl. He's super turned on by the Sith warrior's power and confidence but doesn't quite know how to deal with it at first, which makes for many a fun opportunity to make him squirm. It's an entertaining dynamic that you don't see this way round in media very often - more commonly it's the strong man whose appealing qualities make the woman blush.

Sith Inquisitor - Andronikos Revel

Andronikos is the classic "bad boy". He even gifts you a knife at one point! I remember the thing I enjoyed the most about romancing him was that he starts out very chill and views the relationship as pretty casual. I'll never forget how much I cracked up when I flirted with a guy on Alderaan and Andronikos' reaction was to approve and tell me that he was gonna go off to entertain himself with some girl from house staff in the meantime. He does get more possessive later on from what I remember, but it's still an interesting dynamic. He's easily the fiercest of the male love interests.

Imperial Agent - Vector Hyllus

Vector is the one romance that worked for me from the beginning and that I've never changed my mind about. I find it hard to make a female agent without romancing him. I just love how he's this calm, dedicated geek, and how the early flirtations with him are very low-key and playful. His love is deep but he doesn't want to make any drama about it. What's not to love?

Bounty Hunter - Torian Cadera

Torian is superficially attractive, but I've got to admit I never found his romance terribly compelling. I'll always remember the various conversations where he just says something to you in Mando'a with no subtitles and I was simply like: "Huh?" How am I supposed to judge whether that's romantic or not? His voice actor also uses a pretty flat affect most of the time, which to me comes across as Torian being "too cool to care", which I in turn don't care for myself.

On replaying his romace more recently I found it a bit more appealing, as I think it actually works better if your own bounty hunter isn't too weighed down by morals and approaches things with a colder "just in it for the thrill/money" kind of attitude. (My first hunter who romanced Torian was very light side and e.g. letting a potential target go for "moral" reasons didn't generally sit well with him.)

Overall Verdict

All in all, I've got to say I rank the base game romances for female characters pretty highly - even if they don't all appeal to me personally, I think it's really impressive what a wide range of love interests the writers managed to come up with for these: from shy to boisterous, from loyal to promiscuous, from goodie-two-shoes to bad boy, they offer quite a wide variety of experiences.

In fact, just writing this has made me want to do some romancing on alts just to see the ones again that I haven't played through in a while...

Never Knowing What Comes Next

When the news about the Broadsword move first broke and everyone was worried and confused, I did something I usually never do: I went and watched some SWTOR streamers. I just had this urge for some reassurance from the community, to be reminded that there were other people out there who cared and that we were all in this together. It worked surprisingly well!

Somehow I ended up on the channel of Kat, one of my competitors from the Galactic Championship, and we got onto the subject of SWTOR's content release cadence. I actually don't remember what exactly she said about the subject, but I do remember this one thought that stuck with me as a result of that chat: that in some ways, even with all the uncertainty of the Broadsword move, not much is changing for SWTOR players in the sense that we rarely know what's coming next anyway.

I mean, whatever you may think of World of Warcraft for example, it's undeniable that Blizzard has been churning out new content for it at an incredibly predictable rate for more than fifteen years now. You basically get a new expansion every two years, with each one being announced about a year in advance. This generates a nice hype cycle where an expansion only really has to keep people truly enthralled for about a year. Then you announce the next one, and as the old one winds down, people get engaged by the hype for the new one instead.

The content of each expansion is also very predictably structured, with each expansion consisting of three major patches that will contain a new raid and a new dungeon season each. There has been the occasional exception to this rule, such as with Warlords and Draenor and Shadowlands, but these then immediately generated complaints precisely because people have been conditioned to expect more by years of routine.

Then you look at a game like SWTOR, and while it's had a fair amount of content added over the years, it's always been all over the place in terms of direction and with limited communication. I think the most advance notice we ever got of new content was with Makeb, which was released in April 2013 after being announced at E3 in June the previous year. Ever since then, it's basically been lots of surprises with relatively little notice given beforehand. Even Knights of the Fallen Empire, which I think was the expansion with the most pre-launch hype around it, was only announced in June for an October launch. I guess the gap between the Legacy of the Sith announcement and its eventual launch was a bit longer than that, but only because it got delayed.

Basically, the SWTOR devs have generally kept their cards close to their chest and have refused to develop any kind of truly predictable content cadence. At one point it was all story and no group content, but then group content eventually came back. I also remember there was a time after KotET where they wanted to stick to just having ongoing content patches without calling anything an "expansion", but then they changed their minds about that again, presumably because people were actively clamouring for something they could call an expansion.

At the point of me writing this, patch 7.3 has been out for a bit less than two months, and we have no real idea what's coming next, other than Keith mentioning on the forums that 7.4 is being worked on and should arrive before the end of the year.

To be honest, I haven't always minded this. A static content cadence like WoW's often comes with a sense of FOMO and a feeling of planned obsolescence, which can be pretty off-putting. There is something liberating about not knowing that my gear will need upgrading again in exactly x months and about being genuinely surprised by every patch announcement.

On the other hand though, there's also something to be said for being reliable when you want people to pay you a subscription. With a game like WoW, you always know that if the current patch isn't to your taste, there's going to be a new one that'll introduce something different soon. If you're into an activity like raiding, you can count on being catered to at regular intervals, so even if you unsub due to feeling "done" with the current tier, chances are good you'll remember to check back in later.

For SWTOR, things have been a lot more muddled, and in a way I can't even fault people for not necessarily having faith that the next patch will interest them, or perhaps even having doubts whether it will ever come at all, considering how little we've been given to work with in the more recent past. I sometimes see people talk about "the next expansion" and all I keep thinking is: Why do you even think there'll be one? That's not meant to be me dooming about the Broadsword move either, I'm just thinking of the fact that the game's leadership wanted to discard the expansion concept once before, and since Legacy of the Sith hasn't exactly gone too rosy, I wouldn't be surprised if they decided to do so again.

I've been trying to figure out whether SWTOR is unique in the MMO space in terms of being this inconsistent and secretive about its content updates. Most of the larger western MMOs, such as Final Fantasy XIV and Elder Scrolls Online, seem to be on a pretty regular cadence with their patches and DLCs, with players having a good idea of what's coming next well in advance. But you don't even need to be one of the big hitters to be consistent: both the Everquests for example still churn out yearly expansions like clockwork. (I seem to remember reading that they did go through a phase where they wanted to give up on that concept but I don't think it lasted very long.)

The only major long-running MMO I'm aware of that I think can match SWTOR in terms of the sheer chaos of its vision over the years is probably Guild Wars 2, which has also changed direction in terms of how it wants to release content and just what that content should be multiple times over the years.

I don't really know where exactly I'm going with this post... I guess the bottom line is that my own personal hope in regards to the Broadsword move is that it will allow the game to develop a bit more consistency in terms of its releases and how they are communicated. Of course, that assumes that all the wild swings in the past had something to do with Bioware's leadership, which is something we don't really know.

If you're reading this and are someone who's spent significant amounts of time playing other MMOs (especially ones I haven't already mentioned here), I'd love to hear your own thoughts on how you feel those MMOs handle their expansion/DLC cadence and how that affects your relationship with those games.

Planets I'd like to revisit

With 7.3's return to Voss, it's natural to wonder what other existing planets might be interesting to revisit as part of the ongoing storyline. Calphy shared his thoughts on this back in May, and in this reddit discussion thread on the subject people were offering up a lot of differing opinions a few months ago. Doesn't mean that I don't still want to add my own thoughts on the matter though! So without further ado, my personal top picks for planets I hope we'll get to revisit in the story at some point:

1. Alderaan

This was Calphy's first choice and the second most upvoted option on reddit, and it's my first pick as well. Now, it obviously helps that Alderaan is already my second favourite planet in the entire game, but it's not just about that. The lore surrounding the different houses in the base game is pretty complex, and I was not best pleased with the way the Star Fortress dialogue for Alderaan seemed to want to mostly brush that under the rug. I want to know how all those different nobles that we worked with in the class stories fared over the years! What happened after Boris Ulgo was brought down in the planetary storyline?

I don't necessarily expect to get an update on every single story thread here, but I don't think it would be unreasonably complicated to have us visit a new house on a small new map (assuming a similar approach as was taken with the Interpreter's Retreat) and have some people there chat with us about at least some of the things that have been happening on Alderaan in the last few years.

2. Taris and Balmorra

I'm putting these two together because I want to return to both of them for the same reason, though I think the case for Taris is somewhat stronger than for Balmorra. Basically, what both of these planets have in common is that in the base game, they are in the unique position of existing in two different states at different points in time.

Republic players help with the reconstruction of Taris around level 20 and things seem to be going well, but then the Empire invades the planet and Imperial players get to beat the Republic back around level 40. For Balmorra it's the opposite, with Imperials seeing it firmly under Imperial control around level 20 (though they have to fight off rebels), until Republic players show up around level 40 and push the Imps back off the planet.

I always thought this was an interesting concept as it allows territory to change hands without making either side feel like a loser... though it is a bit weird that there's basically a whole story there that you wouldn't know anything about if you didn't play both factions. If you only ever played Empire for example, you might well think that your faction still owns Balmorra, because you're never told that it's been lost.

So the reason I think either of these planets would be interesting to revisit is that it would give us a chance to "canonically" get caught up with the current state of affairs, with Republic players having to deal with the loss of Taris and Imperials having to stomach being pushed off Balmorra. The reason I think Taris would be slightly more interesting is that we don't really know what happened there after the Imperial victory - how much did the Imps care about rebuilding there, and did they even have the resources after Fallen Empire? With Balmorra, we at least have a vague notion that it continued to support the Republic later.

3. Korriban and Tython

It's easy to see why there's a certain appeal to going back to the old starter worlds. I think most players have pretty fond memories of these (less so of Ord Mantell and Hutta, I suppose) and we know that they've been razed both during the prelude to Shadow of Revan and then again when the Fallen Empire invaded. We want to see them rebuilt and know how things have changed since our own Jedi and Sith were little! Have the Sith changed in any way in terms of the cruelty of their training? Whatever happened to those Twi'lek settlers on Tython?

I do think those are interesting questions, but the main reason I rank these two planets somewhat lower is that in practical terms, I can't see us going back to a fully rebuilt version of the exact same area of Tython and Korriban that we already know (as in, the Jedi Temple and the Sith Academy respectively). Assuming we'd follow the Interpreter's Retreat model of going to a different part of the planet that's set further in the future, it's just hard to image that being quite as interesting here. Still, I guess it would be nostalgic if nothing else.

How do you feel about revisiting older planets in new storylines?

Republic Saboteur, Part 2

My Republic saboteur's journey continues. 

Since I learned that Imperial saboteurs have a special alternate ending for one of the Onderon dailies, I was curious to see whether there was a similar Easter egg for Republic saboteurs. There was, though it's somewhat less cool than the Imperial version (in my opinion), since it's only a bonus.

The daily mission to destroy Imperial listening devices has a bonus to find and take out the Imperial surveillance commander. As a saboteur you tell this person to hold their fire instead and that you secretly work for the Empire. They point out that you're not being very helpful by destroying their stuff, and offer you the option to do something useful for them by planting some listening devices inside the city. If you take it, you get a follow-up task to do just that, which feels kind of ironic considering that the main mission's objective was to do the literal opposite.

On Mek-Sha, I was kind of surprised that there wasn't even a mention of committing sabotage by influencing the vote so that the fuel sale would be blocked. (After all, if you play Imperial side, that's what Veek and Indigo expect you to do.) I guess you could argue that directly sabotaging the sale would've been kind of obvious, but it's not like you couldn't have come up with some way to shift the blame.

Instead everything proceeds just the same way as it does for a loyalist, until you get to the Imperial attack on the docks at the very end, where you arrive just in time to see Narlock confronting Major Anri - and the saboteur option is to just shoot him, which I did. Anri is confused by the unexpected assist for a moment but knows better than to ask too many questions when you prompt her to get a move on. So once again, the Republic's plans fail because you were too late to stop the Imperials. Oops?

At the debrief afterwards, Narlock is replaced by a Nautolan with an eye patch and a Scottish accent called Captain Prenton, and Arn wonders how the Empire could do this to "us" twice in a row... gee, I wonder.

I have to admit I felt kind of bad about this particular act of sabotage, because it was so cold and personal. It's one thing to (not) press a button that triggers something bad, but quite another to directly shoot someone in the back who thought you were their ally. You also get to hear about how Narlock had a daughter and Junker Jott agonises about having to tell her about her father's death. She later writes you a letter asking whether you saw what happened. Junker also writes you a letter, saying he reviewed some security footage (gulp) that showed Major Anri so it was probably her who killed Narlock (phew).

You continue on to Objective Meridian, which is pretty unremarkable from a saboteur point of view as a Republic player. For all the devastating losses you inflict on the Republic fleet on Onderon and Mek-Sha, it doesn't look any smaller during the attack on Corellia and I didn't notice any differences to the loyalist outcome during the battle. The only thing I'll say is that like on Imp side, the ending with you leaving your buddies behind after the Malgus fight without a care in the world feels so much more natural as a saboteur than as a loyalist. I briefly considered not committing sabotage on this last step since I still felt bad about Narlock and handing the facility over to the Empire seemed like kind of a big deal, but it turned out to be just another opportunity to be just a second too late to press the button that was meant to prevent the shields from going down... it was simply too easy to do.

At the post-battle conversation on the fleet, things got a bit buggy as an angry Theron yelled at my smuggler for not using the fleet to protect the civilians the Empire was bombarding and then ran off... just to then proceed to contribute jokey comments to the rest of the conversation while invisible.

In the debrief on Nar Shaddaa, NR-02 introduced me to Darth Xarion. Unlike on my agent, I didn't even have my smuggler ask about being allowed to join the Empire properly; I think she quite enjoys being a chaotic force not strictly beholden to anyone. I just chose to have her complain about Malgus trying to kill her on Corellia, which of course just got her the response that he didn't know about her real loyalties since they're a closely kept secret.

All in all, the things that really stood out to me about the Onslaught arc for Republic saboteurs was that coming from a defensive perspective, with the Republic always caught on the back foot and scrambling to deal with Imperial attacks, it felt so much easier to justify the sabotage as failure and much less suspicious than the way the Imperial saboteur always makes it all the way to the objective of an offensive strike just to then mysteriously fail at the finish line.

Also, the Republic is incredibly chill about failure compared to the Empire. The Sith were always angry and seeking to place blame, but the Republic attitude can pretty much be summed up as "too bad, so sad". It's almost comical how they're only mildly disappointed by mission failures causing hundreds and thousands of deaths, and it's never anyone's fault, just a tragedy. All they do is talk about how they need to find ways to soldier on anyway.

If you asked me whether I preferred the Imperial or the Republic saboteur path up to this point, I'd honestly struggle to choose. The Republic version seems much more believable, but on the other hand the consequences of sabotage on Imperial side feel a lot spicier (what with angry Sith blaming and trying to murder each other), which is more entertaining in a way, even if the way you keep getting away with it is much less convincing.

The Interpreter's Retreat

I've written in great detail about 7.3's new story as well as the new flashpoint, but I also wanted to take a moment to talk about the new area on Voss more generally. As I said after the 7.3 livestream, I think that adding new areas to existing planets is a marvellous idea, even if Voss isn't a particular favourite of mine. From a production point of view it's presumably very efficient, since existing planetary assets can be re-used, while still giving players something new to play around with.

My initial expectation of the Interpreter's Retreat was that it was going to be roughly Black Hole-sized (since that was the first "secondary planetary area" that was ever added to the game) and it... kind of is? I do have the feeling that it's probably a bit smaller, but it's not like I counted myself doing laps around the two zones to compare.

Compared to the rest of Voss, it's a lot less open, with a lot of relatively narrow paths and much denser mob placement, but after spending the last few months on Ruhnuk, it still felt almost liberating to quest there. You can't really dodge most mob groups very well, but at least they are easy to kill (unlike many opponents on Ruhnuk) and the area is at least open enough that you can keep running and shake some of them off before running into a dead end.

One thing that wasn't quite clear to me after the initial livestream was whether the Interpreter's Retreat was going to be a daily area or not. They didn't call it that, and if it was they probably would've said so, but it still sounded like there were things to do there other than the main story. Based on the PTR, commenter Iris informed me that the structure of the repeatable quests was a bit like Mek-Sha, and after having seen how it works for myself, I think that's a fair comparison, though I think the Interpreter's Retreat does things somewhat better.

With Mek-Sha, my general feeling was that the repeatable/side content was just not very interesting or rewarding. Why do things like the heroics or the trade house missions more than once just to see what they're about? There's the one heroic with the gangs that has an achievement attached to it if you repeat it forty times, but all in all, the experience always felt very "meh" to me.

The Interpreter's Retreat is better at luring you in with a plethora of decoration and pet rewards, and I found all of it to be pretty "discoverable". For example I never looked up a guide for the picnic achievement, I just found the leftover food naturally while doing the daily in the Gormak kitchen, and then spotted the spare drink while walking around town on another character. Then the description of the combined item makes it clear what you need to do with it. Considering the area isn't huge, it didn't take too long for me to find the right spot to use it as well. My discoveries of the contemplation achievement and the pet played out similarly. There were some things I looked up eventually, but in general I was positively surprised by how many items of interest I managed to encounter organically and how they drew me into spending more time in the area without having to look anything up.

I also thought it was interesting how a couple of achievements unlocked decorations on the vendor in town when completed, which isn't something SWTOR's ever done before I think. A guildie commented that he's seen something similar in Elder Scrolls Online though. No matter its origins, I think it's a neat idea, as it provides a bit of extra incentive to work on those achievements even if you're perhaps not much of an achievement hunter normally, though it's not very clearly communicated. The achievement description does point out that there are decos involved, but surely I'm not the only one who doesn't usually read achievement descriptions... I just think it could've been made a bit clearer, perhaps with the vendor having a quick chat option where they tell you that they'll show you some special goods if you help out enough or something like that.

All in all, I think the Interpreter's Retreat is a nice little addition to the game. I don't think it will have a lot of staying power for people, as even going after the achievements is not something that's going to keep you grinding for months and months, but I think that's okay. The mobs are supposed to drop decos randomly (though it's been acknowledged that the drop rates are currently bugged), which could be something to keep people interested in grinding them once fixed. Now if only the devs also added a Conquest objective or two for the area and we'd be golden.

Republic Saboteur, Part 1

When Bioware first added the option to the game to sabotage your old faction after KotET, I was not ready for it. All my most progressed characters were simply way too loyal to their faction!

It took me until last year to finally get my Imperial double agent up to the point where I could start making saboteur choices on Ossus and beyond. I wrote about the experience in a series of posts here, here and here.

Of course, after that, the next step was going to be to be repeat the exercise on Republic side, which required me to get yet another character caught up to the relevant point in the story. The choice fell on my somewhat dark-sided smuggler Racelle, since I always pictured her as quite chaotic and enjoying personal power. I figured she would view it as liberating to break free from her old ties to the Republic, and to be fair, Acina and the Empire did help her during KotET...

Getting her up to Iokath was very slow though, and by the time I finally got there I was baffled when a piece of dialogue reminded me that she had romanced Theron. He must be my most-romanced companion at this point; I just can't resist flirting with him on the blaster-wielding ladies... on re-evaluation, I figured that the two of them probably weren't going to be a good match, but then, even a somewhat dark-sided, chaotic smuggler can have a soft spot, right?

Interestingly, when my bounty hunter who had also romanced Theron reached Iokath, that felt like a reason to side with the Republic there for the sake of his dad, but on my smuggler I had no such compulsion, even though she was also dark side and in a romance with Theron. Instead, she seemed to take the obvious cue that Theron didn't actually seem to like his dad very much, and saw it as just one more justification to turn her back on the Republic. Though that then led to her having to watch her beloved Theron get upset when his dad died, which was not a combo of events I had really anticipated seeing.

Up next was the traitor arc, which I'll admit was really tricky to decide on in this instance. My bounty hunter had turned her back on Theron on this occasion, but I felt that despite her chaotic nature, my smuggler wasn't quite that cold. When he asks you whether he can stay with the Alliance at the end, I actually selected "no" at first but then escaped out and changed my mind. Turns out this smuggler just had to forgive him... even I didn't see that coming.

In the Nathema Conspiracy, I was kind of disappointed by the way that this smuggler also got the dialogue with Master Sumalee at the end, just like my light-side smuggler did. Based on a quick Google search, there seems to be some disagreement on how exactly you trigger the alternate variant.

Anyway, Ossus was next and I got to start sabotaging in earnest. First you damage the water pumps in the Jedi base, then you plant an extra bomb in the cave with the Geonosians to make sure it collapses completely and no artefacts can be preserved (I think that's what the sabotage is about anyway, considering the loyalist version is to save some relics) and you steal the Jedi's farming data in a somewhat blatant way as it's handed to you directly and then when someone asks about it later you go "oh, but it was corrupted". Just a little suspicious I think...

Interestingly, unlike on Imperial side I didn't really get any vibes that the ending monologue sounded noticeably more pessimistic than for non-saboteurs. I went back to compare the loyalist and saboteur ending cinematics on YouTube just to make certain, and the overall sentiment really wasn't that different. There is some disappointment about the lost farming data and some of the escaping shuttles being snatched up by Imperials, but the overall vibe is still one of "yay, we got the Jedi back and we'll totally show the Empire".

During Hearts and Minds I confessed about the sabotage to Theron and he took it surprisingly well! I mean, he was taken aback and didn't like it, but also assured my smuggler that it didn't affect his love for her, plus he seemed to be more worried about how taxing the whole double agent business can be than anything else (based on everything that happened during Fractured Alliances).

The saboteur version of the interview with Alec Ranin was a hoot as expected - I especially loved the bit where the camera pans to your character and they just break into a big goofy grin, and how when Alec asks whether you have any last words, my smuggler said: "I really like your boots!" A true TV natural.

Onderon starts the same way for Republic characters as for Imperials, with a space battle where as a saboteur you let the enemy get away instead of shooting them down.

Interestingly, I found the first act of sabotage on Onderon much more convincing on Republic side than on Imperial, where you just mysteriously fail to press the right button at a crucial moment. After all, Republic side has you reacting to Darth Savik's attack on Iziz, and when you get to the point where you would usually stop the cannons from firing at the fleet, you just pretend that you were simply too late. Much more believable!

This means that all but a few of the Republic ships above Onderon are destroyed, and surprisingly little fanfare is made about it compared to what happens on Imperial side regardless of outcome. After that, there isn't really much sabotaging left to do, as you hunt down Darth Savik just like a loyalist would and there are no options to try to be nice to her (not that it would matter as she has a personal grudge against you).

All in all, my first impressions of the Republic saboteur path so far are that it feels surprisingly more subtle than the Imperial version, but also less impactful somehow. On Ossus, stealing the farming data for the Empire is a decent win I guess, but ultimately the Republic still wins the day no matter what you do. And on Onderon your sabotage is simultaneously much more believable, but also kind of downplayed in the story as you quickly shrug and move on to chasing down Darth Savik. I'm curious to see whether these vibes will stay the same or start to change as my sabotage continues. Read more in part 2.

Playing Story Catch-up

With Galactic Season 4 in the rear-view mirror for now, I've been able to set myself some more free-form goals again. As I've noted previously, it's not unusual for me to feel the urge to focus on some actual character/story progression at this point in the "season cycle".

This time around, I got quite philosophical while thinking about the subject though.

I remember during the game's first few years, it was relatively easy to get caught up because obviously, there wasn't as much story content back then as there is now, but also, in the days before level sync you kind of had to do the new content on every character you actually wanted to level up.

Then level-sync came around, and while I did love the way SWTOR implemented it in general, it did kind of mess with the flow of levelling. (Fun fact: I still maintain that spreadsheet to keep track of which character has done what and it's a godsend.) Plus KotFE was not very fun to replay so there was even less incentive to actually get characters up to that point in the story and beyond.

Then we got the Dark vs. Light event which encouraged you to level lots of alts without any need to do the story, meaning I ended up with all these (close to) max-level characters that hadn't really done anything other than run some flashpoints and participate in PvP and GSF. I really did not do well with progressing any of these alts in terms of story either.

My interest in making some progress on that front was revived for a bit when Bioware first made the change that made it possible to earn Conquest points by just doing story content, but that didn't last for long, and then Galactic Seasons were introduced and since then it's been mayhem as I constantly feel compelled to jump through the hoops provided by the seasons objectives instead of focusing on other things.

I had a closer look at my story progression spreadsheet and honestly, for as much as I claim to love SWTOR's story content, my progress over the past few years has been pretty pathetic. KotFE and KotET came out in 2015/16, yet it took me until 2020 to get one of every class/origin story through that bit of content. Since then I've tried to keep those eight roughly up to date with the current story, but I've not even been very consistent with that. I mean, I don't expect to get all of them through every new patch within a week - that would be pretty repetitive and boring - but I realised that a couple of them had barely even started on the 7.0 story yet.

And the alts stuck before the Knights expansions have it even worse! Many of them are barely any younger/newer than those "main eight", and yet an astounding number of them never even did the Shadow of Revan expansion. Content that came out almost a decade ago!

So my personal goal for the time being is to get all the characters that are meant to be caught up with current content actually up to the current content (aka patch 7.3), and to make a bit of a push to get a second of each origin story through KotFE and KotET. Now, that one's still going to be difficult and somewhat repetitive, so I'm not setting myself a deadline here, but I want to at least make a bit of an effort. I mean, how did I get three smugglers through KotFE but only one knight, consular and inquisitor? Those expansions aren't even that bad on those classes.

I tried to date my previous playthroughs by referring to old screenshots, and it was interesting to see that while I got seven characters through KotFE and KotET within three years of those expansions first coming out, I didn't play through either expansion even once in 2019 and 2021. I can do better than that!

(And yes, I get that if you're a more casual SWTOR player who rarely even does any of the story content on more than one character, all this might sound a bit insane, but for me this is my main game and I love my stable of alts. I can definitely do more with them than I have been doing.)