Whatever else I or anyone else wants to say about it, Legacy of the Sith's launch felt like much more of an "event" than that of the previous expansion. The game's official Twitter account did a countdown during the last week leading up to it, and on the day before, they revealed that a new cinematic trailer was going to launch on the day as well - something that they had already teased to fans back in November.
I was very excited to see SWTOR's first CGI trailer since the one for KotET back in 2016 go live at the set time while the servers were still being patched:
I think it lives up to the previous standards set by these vids, showing a classic Jedi vs. Sith conflict that's understandable with no real context, while also tying into the expansion story and adding meaning for those of us who actually know who the characters are. Also, I haven't done a word count, but I think this might be the most dialogue that's ever been featured in one of these?
The only thing that kept throwing me off was that the green Twi'lek's name, Sa'har, sounded a lot like the nickname of someone I know, meaning that all those exclamations of her name triggered associations with that person, which was very weird. That's not anyone's fault though, just life.
The intended end of maintenance crept closer and closer... and then we got the almost inevitable tweet to say that it had to be extended. As a guildie memed very appropriately:
I used the extra time to shell out for the digital collector's edition that Bioware decided to release for Legacy of the Sith (the expansion itself is freely accessible as long as you're subscribed). To be honest I'm actually not that fussed about any of the items, but if you consider the value of the subscription time and Cartel Coins included, the cost of the actual items is only a few quid, which seemed like good value to me and I liked the idea of supporting the concept.
Otherwise I kept busy for the rest of the extended maintenance by talking to my guildies on Discord - the wait certainly made some people a bit crazy; at some point we were even talking about Selkath porn! And yes, I know, I've just made things worse by actually using that phrase on the blog, but it was just too funny.
Then the servers went up and... I got stuck on the loading screen. People were saying that sometimes restarting the game helped, but I didn't notice a difference after doing that myself. Eventually I just left the loading screen alone and did other things on my second monitor, and after about ten minutes I made it to the character selection screen after all - I guess the servers were just overloaded and slow.
This was also in evidence when I started playing through the story and everything was super laggy, with combat freezing for several seconds at a time and my latency indicator spending a lot of time in the red. To be fair, things got better as the evening went on though. Also, unlike others I didn't really run into any noteworthy bugs... but this is getting close to talking about first impressions of the expansion itself, which I will save for my next post.
I didn't have *too* bad a time yesterday either, but... Selkath porn seems to be inevitable! I caught a "Do you see any tits on real fish too?" while going through the Manaan session on it's gen chat, and that came AFTER they all agreed everyone wanted Khem Val's dick... I guess Drommund Kaas and Manaan are real similar, with all that rain.
ReplyDeleteMeanwhile, husband kept mocking that I was playing in Amsterdam as everything is rain. :P
Still trying to figure out what I'll do to level my characters that HAVEN'T reached story point... D:
Considering the percentage of the player base that wants to romance everything and everyone, I guess the subject was indeed inevitable. XD
DeleteApparently levelling outside the story is a bit of a drag. I haven't tried myself yet, but one of my guildies was trying to level through flashpoints and still wasn't level 80 after what felt like four hours...
Okay, so, now I've got through 3 characters to 80; I had to do 4 Vet FPs and then most of Section X weekly to ding 80.
DeleteBad thing: I got conquest before 80, screwing up my charges for the thing... HOWEVER, I did get the 10 charges for the weekly, so, I guess it could be worse? IDK.
Talking about romance... I did miss husband doing more than showing up quickly in a cutscene with Malgus - and I didn't even get a mail! - but, eh, I guess... x.x
I completed my personal conquest before hitting 80 on my main as well. Charging the thing took a while after that, but then I realised I didn't have all the required currency to buy a legendary yet anyway... still trying to wrap my head around how it all works.
DeleteI had a few buggy bits, mostly quests not completing and putting you back at the beginning of them. Very confusing at times.
ReplyDeleteSTILL confused by gearing stuff, but I suppose that'll become clearer. Drops during the levelling were higher iLvl but worse (much!) than the set I had on.. Until I hit 80 and the set bonus disappeared.
Yeah, common agreement seems to be that if you had 306 gear, the levelling drops aren't worth bothering with, and you can just wait until you're 80 and then buy the 320 greens from the Conquest gear vendor on the fleet. I think it'll take all of us some time to get used to how different this gearing system is compared to how things worked in Onslaught.
DeleteI just looked at all the craziness and said "Yeah, I'm gonna wait before getting my updated downloads done." You'd think I'd know that this is going to be pretty much normal in any new game/expac release, but I still get my hopes up. My oldest was going to get going until she saw reports like yours, and decided that she didn't need to get on just that badly today.
ReplyDeleteI spend half of my night on forum and reddit helping an endless horde of players with always the same questions.
ReplyDelete"Where does the story start?"
"Where are my abilities?"
"Where is my 2nd combat style?"
"My Sniper is missing his cover bar?"
....
I had a feeling this launch wouldn't be smooth and decided early on not to play until a day or two later.
Never ever have i seen so many people asking the same questions over and over again. Every minute, every refresh...
Most of it already answered and guides out there since PTS. I guess, nobody is using Google anymore.
I got a real bad feeling for the expansion after the first dude showed up with heavy story spoilers without using the spoiler tag of course... that was merely over an hour after server restart.
"Why story so short?"
One hell of a night. Can't play tonight. Will do tomorrow.
Yeah, coming to think of it, while we had UI and mechanics changes of various kinds before, I think this is probably the biggest "bundle" of these sorts of changes they've ever pushed live in a single patch, and many SWTOR players (myself included) are just too used to things not ever changing very much.
DeleteWhen I saw Swtorista retweet her "What are combat styles" FAQ mere hours before launch I thought to myself: "Surely, everyone who cares must know by now..." But of course most players don't look at anything out of game.
"who cares must know by now..."
DeleteCertainly not. I wrote over 100 responses in just a few hours... and after i went to sleep... the next day... it just kept on going... i just looked a few minutes ago... still going strong...
Nobody knows... all the work Swtorista or others put into this... their range is heavily limited. They reached nobody. Just people who are interested anyway.
I only took a look at the new character creation - I kinda like it.
ReplyDeleteI know the subreddits (except FFXIV) usually hate every change to everything, but r/swtor sounded really bad today, maybe I should stop looking on those days. I was positively surprised how quickly everything patched up last night.
I'm not completely in love with the new UI but I don't get the outrage. The new icons are horrible (at least in their current pixelated form) and as someone who very often has windows open while running/speedering along, I don't like that the char window got bigger, this might actively disturb how I use the game UI - but otherwise.. different, not worse. My first reaction was: oh, it's flat, is this windows 8/10 all over again?
Currently trying to decide if I want to give it a spin, but if I need to subscribe (as you made it sound) I will probably have to wait for a bit...
For no particular reason I was kinda hyped up the last 2 days after being away for a year, but it's starting to fade already... maybe the wrong time...
I do think a lot of the drama around the UI changes is definitely overblown - as usual it's the unhappy people who are the loudest. That said, I do think it's fair to say that reception among the player base has been mixed.
DeleteAnd you do indeed need to be subscribed to play the new story, and also need to have caught up with all the previous content. Some people seemed to be surprised that there wasn't an option to skip straight to the new stuff, but Jedi Under Siege is still the furthest you can skip ahead; everything after that needs to actually be played through.
Yeah, thanks for the confirmation. I think they are REALLY bad with conveying clear information about what you can and can't do as a subscriber/preferred - but sadly the (quite nice) Reddit wiki page isn't updated, and at least I was reading it as "you can play all expansions", well - except the latest it seems.
DeleteI think I'm gonna have a look on the weekend how far I have actually progressed when I last played...
I'm sitting this one out. I am going to wait until they add some more flashpoints on top of this, or at least add in the new dailies. Reports are that there are only about two or three hours of new content included in this "expansion."
ReplyDeleteNow if you want to start over from scratch, I am sure the new combat specs freshen the old game a good bit. However, that's not really front-and-center of what I am looking for in an expansion.
Yeah, I was honestly kind of shocked when I heard that the dailies weren't in yet either; I completely missed the memo about those being delayed as well. I think it's totally fair to want to wait a bit longer for Bioware to actually deliver the full package.
DeleteI thought the trailer was good. It felt more like Swtor than the KotFE / KotET ones. (An amusing thing was that I got through half of the trailer at work and then lost signal. I had to wait until I got home in a few hours to see the rest.)
ReplyDeleteThe story was patch-sized, but that's ok. It feels like they are continuing to setup multiple situations to use over the next year. I can handle "It's only the beginning" with an expansion launch. Of course, now they need to deliver on that with steady, frequent story drops.
I did have bugs with the initial in-game story cinematics, but I put that down to overloaded servers. For all the complaints, this expansion seems to have brought a lot of people back. My only big bug was one dialog sequence where you end up with a different companion didn't move me to the next zone. Not seeing where I needed to go to get to the exit I started moving around to look and accidentally trigger the same dialog sequence again. After spacebarring through that, I was put where I needed to be.
The problem I have with "it's only the beginning" at this point is that this storyline effectively began three years ago. I feel we're due some sort of clarification/discovery/partial conclusion by now, and to me 7.0 didn't really deliver that.
DeleteOh yeah, my initial cinematics were oddly glitchy as well, with constant "empty frames" between scene changes... but like you I figured this was due to the server lagging. The other bug you described is one I've heard a few people suffering from, but for me it worked fine.
Seeing all the different bugs is concerning. It's one thing when most have the same bug, but so many having so different bugs doesn't speak well for the quality of the release. I don't want to think how bad the game would have been if they had to stick to the original release date.
DeleteOn the story side, I agree more resolution would have been good. Give us a few answers and then show us more questions. That said, the upcoming story beats better delivery some answers or people are really going to be upset.
It's weird to me to see so many complaints about bugs, because personally I've only encountered a few very minor ones. Of all the potential issues I may have with this update "too many bugs" hasn't really been one of them.
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