Back in My Day: Datacrons

 "Back in My Day" is a (very) irregular series in which I muse about how certain aspects and features of Star Wars: The Old Republic have changed over time. After writing my post about Kessan's Landing last month, I really wanted to talk a bit more about datacrons.

Datacrons are a funny subject to consider for this series, because in some fundamental ways they haven't changed at all. That +2 presence datacron you might stumble upon on Coruscant or Dromund Kaas is still in exactly the same place it was in 2011, and you still interact with it in the same way: click on it and you'll get a stat boost. However, some things have changed:

Most notably, credit for datacrons wasn't legacy-wide until Knights of the Fallen Empire, so if you wanted certain stat boosts, you had to pick them up on every single one of your characters. However, the degree to which datacrons affected your character's power level was also somewhat different. Last but not least, as the devs added more datacrons to the game, their approach to what kind of experience players hunting for those new datacrons should have clearly changed.

The Power of the 'cron

I think it's safe to say that datacrons were always considered optional content, but what that meant at launch was a bit different compared to what it means now. +2 endurance grants you about 20-26 extra points of health from what I understand (my own quick testing in game showed about 10 HP per stat point but I saw claims on the forums that it was 13), which was never a huge number... but relatively speaking, it was worth more when your total health pool at max level was 20k as opposed to the 400k or so we're seeing nowadays. I never heard anyone say that it was mandatory to get all datacrons relevant to your class to get into raiding... but it was certainly recommended, especially if you were planning to push into higher difficulties.

There was also the matter of matrix shards. At launch, getting gear for your relic slots was not a trivial matter, and one way to get a really good one was to assemble a "matrix cube" out of three matrix shards, which would form a basic relic with some useful stats on it. The first time I took an active interest in datacrons back in the day was precisely for that reason. As far as I'm aware, this functionality is actually still in the game, it's just that nobody bothers with it anymore because the devs never made an update that would've allowed you to build better matrix cubes than those original level 50 ones.

Hope you like jumping

Because credit for datacrons was character-specific and you needed to physically collect matrix shards on each one, you had to revisit some of them a lot. It is worth noting though that you didn't need all datacrons on every character. Before KotFE introduced the mastery stat, each advanced class had a proprietary stat to themselves (aim for troopers/bounty hunters, cunning for smugglers and agents, strength for knights and warriors, and willpower for consulars and inquisitors), so anything that granted a stat that didn't really do anything for you could safely be ignored.

I actually didn't bother with datacrons for the most part while levelling up my first few characters, and I didn't find more than a couple organically, but the longer I played, the more often I found myself grouping with other people who felt the urge to share their knowledge about datacrons close to our position, so I started to learn more about them over time in a pretty organic way. Things kind of reached a peak when I started regular questing with my pet tank, as he knew all of their locations and wanted to pick all of them up as part of the levelling journey on every character.

When Bioware first announced that datacrons were going to become legacy-wide, I actually wasn't that thrilled, because they were a form of content to me that made playing alts more entertaining, and I didn't like the thought of that going away. I will say that nearly a decade and several dozen alts later, I feel that it was probably the right decision... though part of my enjoyment of playing on other servers has definitely been having a reason to revisit some of those datacrons for the first time in many years.

Datacron gameplay

Unless I miscounted, the game offered 90 datacrons to collect at launch. I would say the ways to acquire them fell into four basic categories (with some overlap between them): simply finding them in hidden locations somewhat out of the way, requiring completion of a jumping puzzle, requiring some sort of item interaction (e.g. picking up the MGGS from the vendor and taking it to the right place), or riding some sort of lift or floating device to a specific location. God knows how many hours in total I spent riding the Jawa balloon on Tatooine... but in hindsight, none of these were overly demanding. If you set out on a fresh character to pick up all of them, it would take several hours of your time, but considering how many of them there are, it wasn't unreasonable (unless you were really bad at jumping I guess).

However, once the devs started adding new datacrons with expansions and patches... they started to get more inventive. The Makeb presence datacron was still in line with what had come before, but the endurance one was an insanely long jumping puzzle that would send you all the way back to the start every time you failed. And then the Rishi one involved an item farm that required a silly amount of grinding - not something you would reasonably want to do on every character. Though at least both of those datacrons were shareable, so that one person who completed the whole journey was then able to summon others to get credit without them having to go through the whole ordeal themselves.

After KotFE we didn't get any datacrons for a while, but once we got to Ossus, I thought it became quite clear that the devs had decided to take a different approach now that datacrons were legacy-wide. If you weren't expected to get to a datacron more than once, they could make it pretty hard and time-consuming the first time around without that feeling entirely unreasonable. Two of the three Ossus datacrons were still pretty "old-school" in the amount of effort required, but the third required you to both jump and puzzle in a personal phase where you couldn't get any help.

We saw a similar pattern with Onslaught, where the Mek-Sha datacrons and one of the ones on Onderon were pretty standard jump or ride puzzles (though I thought the jumping ones were fiendishly hard, if not punishingly long like the Makeb Endurance one) and then the Onderon Mastery datacron was a brutal combo of jumping and puzzling on a timer, making it one of the hardest datacrons in the game so far. Ruhnuk and Kessan's Landing haven't been as harsh in terms of skill requirements, but once again involve a personal phase and completion of a long quest chain beforehand, which to me makes it pretty clear that the devs are trying to make each datacron more of an experience now, knowing that you probably won't be visiting it more than once.

I have no particularly strong feelings about this. I think it makes sense with the way the game has evolved, but it does also mean that datacrons have changed from being more of a collectible power-up that usually supported and sometimes even required grouping in the early days to having more of a solo skill challenge focus now.