After I recently posted about how with SWTOR, you rarely know what comes next beyond the very immediate future, we got some updates yesterday about what to expect in the next couple of weeks at least.
First off, the move to Amazon Web Services that's been in testing since earlier in the year is finally becoming reality! The latest news post on the subject explains once again why this should be considered a good thing for the game and informed us that the process will start in earnest this Tuesday. It looks like they'll be moving one server at the time, starting with the Leviathan - this makes sense to me as Leviathan is the smallest of the current five servers, so if anything goes wrong, the player base hopefully shouldn't be affected all at once. We'll see how soon after that they'll aim to move the rest - depends on how smoothly the first move goes I guess.
The other piece of news released on the same day was that patch 7.3.1, which will include the start of Galactic Season 5 as well as some more map UI updates, is meant to come "soon" - that is to say in "late August/early September".
One piece of feedback I've had over the course of the last couple of seasons was that while seasons as a concept were in a good place overall, I thought they could really do with a bit of innovation, such as more changing objectives and perhaps a reward that isn't another gibberish-speaking alien companion. I'm delighted to say that it appears that the SWTOR team has listened!
According to the blog post, we won't be receiving a new companion this time but will instead be "interact[ing] with several new characters [...] while making dialogue choices that affect gameplay" - whatever that means exactly. The story tied to this will replace the little personal stories that we've been getting with the seasonal companions since Season 2 and progression will be tied to overall season progression. There'll also be new objectives tied to companions, space missions and operations.
I have no idea what any of this will look like in practice but I'm happy to find out!
I just hope there aren't any residual latency issues with the move to AWS. You'd not believe the number of customers I deal with who, upon moving servers to AWS or Azure, have the gall to be shocked that latency between some servers goes up. "You mean that there's a delay compared to when the servers were sitting right next to each other in the data center?"
ReplyDeleteI mean, I'm no expert on this but my impression was that it's supposed to be the opposite. As it's easier to rent AWS for multiple regions than to maintain your own server stack in different locations around the globe. The fact they previously had to make cut-backs in that area is why latency for people from the west coast hasn't been great for example (as they previously consolidated everything into a single datacentre on the east coast).
DeleteThey did do that PTS test using an AWS setup based in Australia. While I wouldn't want to play an FPS hosted that far away, there wasn't anything terrible about the lag in that situation. (Caveat: there wasn't the same amount of people on the PTS as a live server, obviously). I am a bit 'wait and see' about the possibility of more resources on the development side versus the live-support side. That said, it may be a case where we don't see that on the client side so much as improvements to the foundation of the game itself.
DeleteAs far as GS Season 5 goes, I may need to run a dark side character through the story, too, just to see the variations.
I'm curious to see the new storyline, and I'm intrigued to see how they handle a potential reputation faction if there is one this time. I hope there isn't, but if there is... eh, at least we won't have anyone new clogging up our ships for some time.
ReplyDeleteHeh, you made me go "what do you mean IF there is one"... for some reason I'd misread the article as saying story progression was tied to the reputation track instead of the rewards track.
DeleteThe main reason why they are moving the servers to the cloud it's because it's cheaper, that's it.
ReplyDelete