Meeting "Fay"

So the launch of Galactic Season 3 ended up being delayed by a couple of days due to Bioware discovering an issue during patch deployment (what else is new) but on Thursday we finally got to dig into it.

I have to admit that my first impression involved a slight feeling of disappointment when I looked at the weekly season objectives and saw a lot of the exact same ones that had been used in Season 2: Capitals of Dichotomy, complete the Revan flashpoints... there's nothing wrong with these as objectives, but while I wanted them to keep the structure of Season 2 for Season 3, I'd been hoping for a bit more variety in the content of the objectives.

However, soon I was off to pick up my new companion, and here I was quite positively surprised. Again, I wasn't immediately keen on a Scorpio-lookalike (the initial announcement about the season being "Galactic Gaming"-themed made me think we might get a Huttball player or something as a companion... wrong type of gaming it turns out) - but her intro really won me over.

I thought PH4-LNX has a much more interesting backstory than the previous companions, what with being a former Gemini droid, being captured by Czerka and being indentured to a Hutt! The little introductory storyline where you hop from planet to planet has her allude to even more tales of crazy adventure, such as when she tells you that she once killed a Hutt on Tatooine and became an Alderaanian Duchess.

One weekly objective that is new to Season 3 also involves travelling around the galaxy with "Fay" in tow to catch cheaters in casinos and cantinas and it's... weeeird. On the one hand I kind of like how it encourages you to visit different planets to find an uncontested spot to watch over, but on the other hand the scarcity of the designated gambler NPCs makes the whole thing a bit dystopian.

What I mean is that you end up with these scenes of half a dozen people staring at a character playing at a slot machine and just waiting to pounce on them to get them arrested for wrongdoing. Every gambler cheats at some point or another as well, and there are no false positives or anything where it turns out that their "acting suspiciously" was actually something innocent. I don't know, maybe I'm overthinking this...

The only real hiccup I've run into with the intro mission on Republic side (I don't know if the same issue exists on Imp side) is when it tells you to slice a terminal on Coruscant, pointing you to the Senate Tower cantina, and when you get there you see a gambler playing at a machine, surrounded by half a dozen people staring at him, so your natural inclination is probably to be confused in some way... is that the "terminal" I need to slice? Everyone seems to be looking at it, but I can't click it; does that mean it's bugged? I had to look it up when I got to that step myself and have since seen other people be equally confused by it. Bioware seems to be aware of this though and is looking into how they can reduce the confusion.