Cautiously Optimistic

Bioware likes making announcements about announcements, so while we still know virtually nothing about Knights of the Eternal Throne that hasn't come from data miners, we know that on Friday, everything will be revealed!

We even got a teaser for a shiny new Blur trailer about a week ago, which really surprised me. These are expensive and while I could understand EA splurging on one for KotFE's effective re-launch of the game, I expected them to return to business as usual for KotET. Apparently not.

A dangerous #StarWars family grows stronger.

New cinematic trailer for Knights of the Eternal Throne arrives Oct 7! pic.twitter.com/NAFZqormWe

— The Old Republic (@SWTOR) September 30, 2016

(I can't believe that some people are actually complaining about getting another trailer, arguing that they'd rather have a new operation instead. Have you heard of this thing called a marketing budget before? Good luck getting any company to completely forfeit marketing in order to spend all that money on their product instead. Considering that marketing is a thing that exists, I find them investing it into a shiny new trailer more appealing than a bunch of "play for free" ads on Google. But maybe that's just me.)

Anyway, based on how bitter certain parts of the community have become over the past couple of months, you'd think that Knights of the Fallen Empire was the worst expansion ever, which is really weird because on the whole it was really well done. My main two criticisms of it would be the lack of support for group play in the new content and that levelling content in general feels quite undertuned now. All in all though, I think that there has been more a lot more good than bad.

I really love level sync for one thing. Levelling alts since 4.0 has been incredibly satisfying, as it's fantastic that you don't have to worry about outlevelling content anymore and can receive XP and level-appropriate rewards no matter where you go.

In terms of new quests to play through, the KotFE chapters have undeniably delivered much more in terms of quality and quantity than any previous expansion. The other day I looked back at my gushing review of the first nine chapters and I can honestly say that I stand by everything I said. That it loses some of the shine once you repeat the whole thing half a dozen times or more over the course of only a few months is hardly a surprise and doesn't invalidate the original experience.

While no new group content was added, I've loved the updates to flashpoints and operations. I was originally a bit sceptical about all levelling flashpoints becoming tacticals, but in practice I quickly found that they still provide a similar amount of challenge to a levelling group as before and the role- and level-neutral groups make group finder pops nearly instant.

The revamped operations have also been really nice. I was initially a bit worried about how I (and my guildies) would feel about re-learning fights we had beaten before when we'd overlevelled them, but in practice that hasn't really been a problem. And having such a wide variety of content to choose from every week has been fantastic. For comparison, the 3.0 cycle - while containing new ops - was immensely frustrating for me and my guild due to the super awkward tuning of Ravagers and Temple of Sacrifice and those two being the only places to go to for gear upgrades. The past year has been so much better.

Oh, and how could I forget the addition of Odessen Proving Grounds, which immediately became my favourite new warzone and really helped invigorate my interest in PvP?

With that in mind, Knights of the Eternal Throne delivering more of the same actually sounds like a good thing to me, especially since Bioware has already stated repeatedly that they've heard our feedback in regards to group content, lack of challenge and overabundance of skytroopers. There've also been hints that we'll check back on the Republic and Empire and find out more about what's been going on with Valkorion, two things that have pretty much been my biggest "wants" since KotFE's launch.

As the title says, I'm cautiously optimistic. I'm not going to speculate about the identity of the kid in the teaser trailer for now (I'll leave that to others), but we'll all find out soon enough!