Road Map Reveal

I had already drafted up a different post for today, since it looked like Keith was going to miss his self-imposed deadline to release the road map by the end of May, but as soon as my guild's ops run tonight ended, someone piped up with "road map's up" and well, there it was.

I think the only sort of negative thing you could say about it is that it doesn't contain anything mind-blowingly exciting and new, but most people's reactions - from what I've seen so far anyway - have nonetheless been very positive. Everyone seems to latch on to one or two relatively tiny things and goes: "Yes, I've wanted that forever!" (For me the item that stuck out to me in that regard was "the ability to search for stronghold decorations using new filters"- I have so many decos that I don't even use because they've disappeared in UI limbo long ago and I've forgotten that they are even there.)

And that really gives you an idea of what kind of road map this is (aside from the longest one I can actually remember getting for SWTOR before). Keith has gone on to reinforce the initial impression he made when he entered the scene: that after nearly two years of development doubling down on story at the expense of other parts of the game and attempting to bring in new and returning players at the potential cost of alienating existing veterans, it's time to change direction again, to remember SWTOR's MMO parts and give some TLC to the long-time players who've been waiting for their favourite part of the game to get some love again.

From new ops bosses to a new old-school flashpoint to a new warzone to some actual, honest-to-god updates for GSF, everyone is supposed to get something in the next couple of months. And I have to admit that I'm happy about that. While you can't please everyone all of the time, I do think that MMOs in general are at their best when they cater to a diverse playerbase with a number of different interests. If I just wanted to spend my gaming time doing one thing and one thing only, there's probably some other genre of game that does it better. Variety is the spice of MMO life.

What items from the new road map did get you excited?