Random Pre-Expansion Thoughts

I've been a bit more quiet on here than I would have liked in the past week due to having issues with my computer and being limited in what I can currently do online. Hopefully my new rig will arrive early next week and then I'll be back in action... maybe even with slightly less lag in Huttball!

For now I've been busy catching up with all the announcements about Rise of the Hutt Cartel that I apparently missed out on in the last couple of days. I did just about catch the bit about the release date, and was about as unsurprised as the rest of the internet. (The bit about the double XP weekends leading up to the expansion had really made it kind of obvious already.) As Sod's law would have it, I'll be out of the country and completely without internet access for ten days in mid-April, and as expected the launch date coincides with that almost exactly - I'll be leaving on the 15th. On the plus side though, thanks to the early access I should get a chance to play a little bit before then anyway. Still, I'll be a bit sad to miss out on the rat race to the new level cap a lot of the excitement of the game's first expansion launch.

I am kind of curious how it will all play out... I don't have particularly fond memories of the launch day of the last WoW expansion that I bought. However, this is going to be quite different in many ways. There are a lot fewer unknowns to worry about. Sure, there'll be a new planetary story to level through and a new operation (both of which I really look forward to), but the way most classes play shouldn't end up being massively different, the "new" flashpoints will just be harder versions of existing levelling ones, and Terror From Beyond will be retuned for the new level cap as well, so a lot of what we have to look forward to will already be quite familiar anyway. I suppose in some ways that makes the whole thing less exciting, but on the other hand I expect this to ease the pressure of "keeping up with the Joneses" a.k.a. getting things done quickly so you know what all this new stuff is that your guildies are talking about.

The things that currently have me the most intrigued are two new features that I only found out about recently: Macrobinoculars and Seeker Droids. I have to admit the description of Seeker Droid gameplay immediately made me think of Archaeology in WoW - and apparently I'm not the only one. Of all the things to copy from WoW... it had to be this?

(I kid, I got a fair amount of entertainment out of that profession while I was still playing WoW.)

Still, all in all I'm guessing that RotHC will feel more like a big patch than like the meaty expansions I'm used to from WoW. That doesn't have to be a bad thing though. I'm certainly looking forward to seeing how Bioware's efforts to not obsolete all the level fifty content will pan out.