Galactic Season 4 in Review

I achieved my last Galactic Season 4 goal today (the 100 weekly objectives), so I thought I'd write down some final thoughts on the season. I mean, technically it still lasts another one and a half months, but I'm happy to be done. Regardless of how soon the SWTOR devs decide to launch Season 5, I should be able to have a proper break between seasons this time.

All in all, my experience of GS4 was very similar to that of GS3, just with me deciding to moderate my time investment a bit. There were no major changes to the concept or reward structure, so I liked and disliked pretty much the same things as before. The one new thing I liked was that the way the chapter completion objectives were structured helped me get my old smuggler through KotFE, though I'm still not sure whether that was intentional or not. It seemed too consistent to be mere coincidence, but then the objective preview for the last few remaining weeks of the season has KotET chapter eight coming up two weeks before chapter four, which wouldn't make sense in that context, so who knows.

At the end of the last season I really wished for a companion that didn't speak alien gibberish, and I didn't get that, but at the same time I just couldn't dislike Amity. I enjoyed his story, and the whole concept of a human raised by Selonians who also happens to have been disfigured to such an extent that he permanently needs to wear full body armour was just such a bizarre way to justify keeping costs down, I honestly kind of had to admire it. At this point I'm willing to accept that this is just the way it's going to be and I'm simply curious what weird combo the dev team is going to come up with next. A Wookiee that's secretly two Jawas in a costume? A Kel Dor whose consciousness has been transferred into an astromech droid? I'm sure they'll surprise me.

In terms of rewards, I was quite pleased to be able to spend my accumulated tokens on all servers on the new Mek-Sha stronghold at the start of the season, just to then do absolutely nothing with it. That's just the way I am with strongholds and that's fine. I am however back to being close to the token cap everywhere, meaning that I now dread the start of next season and once again having to wonder what the hell I should do with all that currency. (I'll be very surprised if they release another stronghold or other major reward soon enough to help me out with that problem.)

While I was glad to see that they made the reward dyes stackable, my inventory problems still hit a new high this season due to all the weapons the reward track gives out each time. I'd already unlocked the armours in collections last season, but this time I went nuclear and deleted everything on all servers once I was done (and after unlocking it in collections first of course). I remember when I was sceptical about the devs adding a mass-delete window. Thank you, devs - you clearly knew what was to come better than I did.

All in all, this season was a bit of a turning point for me in that it really hit me that Galactic Seasons are just another routine event now. That doesn't mean they're not fun anymore, just... that I at least can't approach them with quite the same zeal as before. I also still wonder about scaleability in the sense that I think that the team won't be able to keep these going in exactly the same way forever - our ship will eventually run out of room for new companions if nothing else! I have visions of companions being stuffed into every nook and cranny as if the Alliance Commander developed a serious hoarding problem.

On Discord, I saw someone suggest that the "main reward" of a future season could be something like a playable race instead - which I think would probably be a lot more effort than a companion actually, so it's unlikely to happen, but I thought it was a neat idea anyway. It would just be nice to see things get mixed up at least a little to avoid long-time players getting tired of the same old, same old.