My 2020 Predictions Reviewed

Wilhelm reviewing his video game predictions for 2020 reminded me that I actually joined in the crystal ball fun last time and made a short post with SWTOR predictions for 2020 early in January this year. While the year isn't technically over yet, all my predictions centred around content additions for SWTOR and I don't expect Bioware to give us another surprise content patch in the next 12 days, so I think it's safe to rate my predictive capabilities somewhat ahead of time.

I made five predictions for the year ahead back then; let's see how they turned out:

1. The Emperor's Last Gruesome Weapon won't actually turn out to be that big of a deal, for all the time Scourge and Kira spent expositioning about it. I expect we'll get to see this story arc relatively late in the year, October at the earliest. It will be smaller than Ossus was, with no exciting new environments and largely the same storyline for both Republic and Empire players. Depending on some previous story choices, you'll get the option to kill Master Satele. Either way you stop the weird mind plague before it can actually bring the Emperor back or anything like that, and we can finally move on from this subject.

I'm not quite sure how to rate this prediction. A lot of it ended up being spot on, from the late release to the small environmental scope and it largely being the same for Republic and Empire. And while you don't actually get to kill Satele, you do get an option to try under certain circumstances. Still, me saying that it would all be not that big of a deal seems very wrong considering Echoes of Oblivion's story scope.

2. Darth Malgus will get in touch with Imperial players somehow and give you the option to ally with him like many of us always kind of wanted to on Ilum. The idea will be that you help him overthrow Acina/Vowrawn so that he can position himself as the new Emperor, not false this time! This might not actually happen yet in 2020 but there should at least be a smaller story snippet setting things up and having you meet with Malgus. I'm not sure what Republic players could get that's equally as interesting, mind you...

Nope, no Darth Malgus story progress at all this year except for that brief scene at the end of The Task at Hand. I still kind of hope that this prediction will end up coming true one day though (as nothing's happened to rule it out either).

3. GSF will get a nice amount of love mid-year, with more than just some balance changes and a new map. There might even be a new game mode and/or new ships in the cards!

Hahaha, no. Among all the updates and changes made this year, I don't think GSF got a single thing. Sorry starfighters; I was rooting for you!

4. PvP will also get a new warzone at some point, though it might "just" be a new map for an existing game mode. More importantly though, someone at Bioware will finally figure out what's up with the weird desync in Huttball and fix it, or at least make it better... Yeah okay, I don't really think that one's going to happen, but I really, really want it to!

Oh boy, where to even begin with this one? Not only did we not get a new warzone (map) this year, we now have two fewer than we started with! I was right that Bioware expressed a serious interest in fixing the performance and desync issues in warzones, but unfortunately part of this initiative included taking Quesh and Vandin out of the Huttball rotation for the "short term". This was back in July. Having had bad experiences with other MMO developers removing content from the game to "fix" it, I expressed concern back then that the whole thing might just end up being forgotten, and considering that it's December and we haven't heard a peep about those two maps making a comeback I fear that I may have been right about that.

5. We still won't get Zenith back in 2020. It's mind-blowing to me now that we thought his return was imminent back in 2016 and yet here we are nearly four years later and he's the very last of the original companions that's still unaccounted for. I really wish we could get him back already, not least because he's my favourite of the original consular companions... however, looking at how Bioware has handled companion returns in the last year and a half, I've really enjoyed the way they've worked them into the main story again, compared to the rather disappointing Alliance alerts from two years ago. So I'm happy to wait if that means he'll get a nicely integrated return later on, preferably something involving Balmorra, considering his strong attachment to his home world. I just can't see that fitting into what's coming up in the short term.

This one may have been an easy one to predict, but it still came true. Though now that the next story arc is dealing with Mandalorians (and considering that I can't really see Zenith having taken up the bounty hunting life) I still can't see a good place for his return in the near future. So not sure I'd hold my breath for his return in 2021 either...

But that's getting into 2021 territory, and I don't know yet whether I'll bother trying to make any predictions for next year. If I do, it'll probably be in about two weeks or so.

Did you have any predictions for 2020 that came true or turned out to be complete opposite?