7.4 First Impressions

I was surprised how nice it felt to be able to upgrade my gear again. I had enough tech fragments saved up across alts that I could raise both of my implants to item level 340 right away, merely requiring a few relogs to claim more fragments on different characters. Getting back into full max-level Rakata gear is going to be my next goal, and any spare tech fragments can go towards upgrading the implants of alts. SWTOR demands so little of players in terms of grind that it's actually nice to have something like this to work on again every now and then.

I was excited when they announced the new shiny dyes, so I immediately bought some to try out. I also really liked the new Suppression Trooper armour, so I bought that too. It's funny to me how I'm earning more free Cartel Coins than ever from doing Galactic Seasons on multiple servers, but the devs are also getting better at luring me into buying things, so my huge stash of free CC is actually starting to diminish for the first time in ages. Of course, simply making all the new items expensive also helps.

I remember when Treek came out back in the day, a dev commented on Twitter that this made them huge amounts of money... Note that the Chrome White/Metallic Gold dye bundle costs as much as two and a half Treeks, and it's a one-time consumable. Well, I hope it makes them good money and that Broadsword will invest it back into the game.

Pictured below, from left to right: my trooper's Rakata gear dyed Chrome White and Metallic Gold, the Battlefield Commander set dyed the reverse way (Metallic Gold and Chrome White) and the new Suppression Trooper armour with a secondary light orange dye applied.

There were some bugs. It's kind of funny to me at this point that as a long-time player, I should really know that there are always going to be some bugs on patch day. The devs certainly do, which is why they're always on standby to implement hotfixes after pushing a major patch out. And yet... it's still always a little disappointing to run into an issue that stops you dead in your tracks. Then again, if they fix it quickly enough, hardly anyone even remembers a month later - though I do immortalise some bugs by posting about them I guess. It's a funny cycle.

It didn't help that one of the issues this time around has been game performance, which by its very nature affects a lot of people. It wasn't too bad for me, though I did suffer from abnormal lag and stuttering the first evening, which eventually resulted in a full game crash. The rest of the time I was fine though. Others have had it worse, struggling to even get the game running. The devs are still investigating.

A more harmless bug manifested itself in the new storyline on Republic side, where you're supposed to click on an object in the open world that's somewhat slow to respawn. I say "somewhat" because it must've been one, two minutes tops, which isn't that long in the grand scheme of things, but of course it's a nightmare when there are fifteen players stacked on top of each other, all wanting to click first. Musco was actually spurred on to make another one of his rare forum appearances to clarify that this happened because the tool they use to build these kinds of quests sets this long-ish default timer and they forgot to manually fix it in this instance. They'll look at adjusting the default as well to avoid the problem recurring in the future. Interesting to know!

At the time of writing this, I've played through the main storyline once on both factions; I haven't looked into the Lane Vizla story yet. Still, I've got lots of thoughts already, which I'll save for a long story review post as usual. The only thing I'll say for now is that I appreciated the faction flavour. 7.2 and 7.3 have been exactly the same regardless of what faction you play, so it's nice to be reminded that the Republic and Empire exist. While the overall storyline is the same in 7.4 too, it's similar to Secrets of the Enclave in the sense that you work with different people on both sides and that makes all the difference to the experience.