Delayed!

Welp, seems my taking stock ten days before the expansion launch was premature... because yesterday Bioware surprised us with the bombshell announcement that they've decided to delay the launch of Legacy of the Sith by two months until the 15th of February.

I was simultaneously extremely surprised by this and not surprised at all. I'm not surprised that they ultimately decided that the expansion needs a bit more time in the oven, as I'd already become increasingly dubious of the planned 2021 launch the longer they put off committing to an exact date. Onslaught was originally supposed to come out in September 2019 and was then pushed back until the end of October, so there was also already a precedent for the current SWTOR team not being afraid to announce a delay when they thought it was needed.

However, I was surprised that they decided to drop this piece of news on us literally only a week before the launch was supposed to happen, as that's extremely short notice and they'd only just announced the 14th as the release date less than three weeks ago. How could they change their minds on this so quickly?

I saw some cynical comments along the lines of Bioware wanting to "trick" people into subscribing without actually adding any new content (insert dismissive hand gesture here), but most of the reactions I've seen to the delay were surprisingly positive. Obviously there was disappointment, but after the many disastrous game launches we've seen in recent years, I guess people would rather wait for things to be ready than deal with a million bugs.

One thing I really appreciated was that the devs immediately created a forum thread where they prompted people to ask questions about the delay, and community manager Jackie set to answering the most pressing ones only a few hours later. I myself posed the question that I also raised two paragraphs earlier, about why this came on such short notice, and got the answer that they'd basically been hoping against hope until the very end that they'd be able to launch in time for the ten-year anniversary celebrations, but that ultimately it just didn't work out. Fair enough; I can believe that.

They also explained that they needed two whole months because a good chunk of that was going to be holiday time for them too, to which again, I can only say "fair enough". There's been a lot of talk in recent years about crunch time and game devs having to deal with bad working conditions, so I'm all in favour of them getting to enjoy their well-deserved holidays too.

Still, the question remains what this means for me and my guild in specific. As I said in my last post, while I hadn't completed all of my pre-expansion goals, I'd reached a point where I kind of felt that things were "good enough" and that I was ready to jump into the new content anyway. I suppose I can use the extra time gained to work on some more of those unfulfilled goals, but... I've got to admit I'm not hugely enthused at this particular point in time as I'm just not in the right mindset for it.

Activity in my guild had been quite frantic for the last two weeks, as several guildies had been playing at all hours of the day to still get their Limitless achievement before it was supposed to go away. I guess the guy who was still a fair bit off will enjoy the extra time gained to complete his goal, but I imagine that the ones who pushed particularly hard to get it done in time might feel a bit let down at the moment. One of my guildies had also booked some holiday time to coincide with the expansion launch and was understandably ticked off at this last-minute change of plans.

On top of that, my ops team went on break some time ago to recharge in advance of the expansion, but with another two months to go this now also feels a bit odd, because now this break will either end up being much longer than intended, or we'd have to spin activities back up again for a few weeks just to then rejig things yet again when LotS actually launches. The joys of dealing with guild logistics...

Bioware is at least making a token effort to give us other things to do, by having a double XP event over the Christmas holidays, promising to re-run the Feast of Prosperity for three weeks in January and planning to have no less than three Total Galactic Wars throughout that period as well... but I gotta say that all that still feels like a very weak substitute for the actual new content we'd all been looking forward to. Which is my way of saying that I'm OK with waiting I guess, but I may well find other things to do in the meantime instead of spending even more time feeding Hutts and the like.