Galactic Season 3 in Review

Galactic Season 3 is due to finish in a little over a week. I completed my last achievement on Darth Malgus a couple of weeks ago and am now just wrapping up a few more objectives on the other servers, so I thought this would be a good time to do a little review of Season 3.

There was actually a feedback thread on the forums where I already put a lot of my thoughts in the format of answers to the specific questions posed by the devs, but I thought it might be nice to have at least a brief summary here as well.

Overall I enjoyed this season, just like the previous one, even if I struggled a little at times to not push myself too hard. Seasons objectives tend to overlap very little with the sorts of in-game activities I usually spend my time on, which are running operations with my guildies and doing story content on alts, but I'm okay with that because I'm fine with the game encouraging me to play a little differently for a few months a year. I do appreciate the breaks between seasons as well though - eyes Season 4 nervously.

Considering that I thought Season 2 was pretty great, I was also happy that Bioware made minimal changes to how things worked for Season 3, though I was initially a little disappointed that so many of the weekly objectives were exactly the same as in Season 2 as I had hoped for a bit more variety in that regard. I've enjoyed the silly little season-themed objectives the most so far, meaning the catching of cheaters this season or the dress-up and sabotage in Season 2. Otherwise I've really come to appreciate the weekly objectives that can be completed in several different ways, especially with the whole "playing on multiple servers" project. So when the objective was to complete missions in Hutt Space for example, I could do some exploration missions on Nar Shaddaa on one server and heroics on Voss on another to keep things fresh. Certainly a lot more engaging than doing Black Hole ten times over.

As for the season-specific companion, as I mentioned in the post linked in the previous paragraph, Fay was my favourite seasonal companion so far because I thought she had the most interesting backstory. One does have to wonder a little for how long Bioware throwing a new companion at us every season is sustainable, what with them taking up space on our personal ships and all. I also really wish they didn't all speak alien gibberish though. I get that voice acting is a cost to consider, but this isn't like a new piece of story content which requires 48 high-profile voice actors to be paid just to voice every version of the player character in three different languages. It would just be the one character... sadly, seeing how the Season 4 companion seems to be shaping up to be an unidentifiable species behind a full face mask, I suspect that this will be another excuse for incomprehensible alien gibberish.

Besides the companion, I didn't actually care much about any of the rewards, which is kind of funny considering how much effort I put into completing the season multiple times over. I just enjoy the journey I guess. I really liked the fleet strongholds we could earn from Season 1 onwards, but after I got both of them (on all servers) I kind of ran out of interesting things to buy and I struggled with bumping up against the seasonal currency cap multiple times. I take heart from Season 4 supposedly adding an apartment on Mek-Sha as one of the new rewards. (It's kind of funny that strongholds are so appealing to me as rewards, considering I haven't bothered to decorate most of the ones I have, but I never claimed to be fully rational about these things.)

The rewards from the levelling track weren't bad (I actually gave one of the outfits to one of my alts) but just nothing to be excited about for me personally either. In fact, they were causing me increasing amounts of stress due to the inventory clutter they produced, and I'm glad to hear that apparently from Season 4 onwards the seasonal dye rewards at least will become stackable. As I already ran into a bit of a "cargo hold crisis" this season though, I made a point of unlocking all the rewards for my account with Cartel Coins, so I could then trash all the gear items taking up space without feeling bad. This was a real godsend for my main's bank space.

The only thing I was a little unhappy about this season was when I realised that unlike normal reputations, the seasonal ones are capped at 5k reputation points per week. This hadn't really caused me any issues previously, but this time around I thought it would be a fun stretch goal to also complete the reputation track on all five servers... however when I ran up against the weekly cap, it became evident that it was actually already too late to go for that achievement by the time I started to pay attention to it. While I technically had more than enough tokens to earn the reputation, I hadn't popped enough of them early in the season, and the low weekly reputation cap was throttling progress so hard that it was impossible to catch up in time. It wasn't exactly a huge deal, just a small disappointment that seemed kind of unnecessary.