Around the SWTOR-sphere: April 2024

April has been a busy month for me! I spent a lot of time both playing and writing about Galactic Seasons, to the point that I thought I wouldn't have a lot of other people's content to point to at the end of the month, but I was pleasantly surprised to find that I'd managed to accumulate a decent number of links anyway.

• April started with April Fools' Day of course. I remember simpler times, at the height of the MMO hype, when every MMO dev would post their own fake patch notes or whatever to join the fun every year. (This included SWTOR.) Sadly, in times when people are spreading blatant lies on the internet all year round, the whole thing just isn't as funny anymore... so I was surprised to see Kal from Today in TOR go ahead and post a fake announcement for an expansion called "The Rise of Malgus", but I did still appreciate the effort. I'd only deduct some points for the bottom half of the page being an obvious copy and paste of last year's "The Ring Forge of Morrod".
• ... that said, Kal immediately earns those points back for releasing a full list of all the fitted armours with images at the end of the month. Last month I said that I was optimistic that it was only a matter of time until someone released a more detailed guide about all the new ancient armaments and it turns out it only took a bit over a month. Nice to see!
• A different kind of guide that caught my eye earlier this month was "How to Hide Your Lightsaber as a Sith Sorcerer or Jedi Sage in SWTOR" on Vulkk.com, authored by Endonae. Mostly I saw the headline and thought "What? Why? And how?" - so I clicked. Endonae gives a lot of explanation for the why, and the how is basically a combination of a specific weapon and a specific tuning to make your saber look so opaque as to almost be invisible (though it's not truly hidden). I thought that was interesting, though I wouldn't go for that effect myself as I don't mind my Sages or Sorcerers holding a weapon, and as someone who enjoys lowbie PvP, Saber Strike is definitely not worthless in an environment where you can find yourself running out of Force quickly with no means to regenerate it yet. Better to keep fighting with a low damage ability than to die picking your nose! Though I guess whacking people with a near-invisible saber could still be entertaining for its sheer confusion value...
  
• I feel a bit silly giving Swtorista a shout-out every month - it's not like she needs me to give her publicity! - but I admire how she's got something major coming out pretty much once a month. The big thing in April was the unveiling of the new and improved decorations section on her website, now that TOR Decorating is supposed to be gone soon. I like that it doesn't just list all the decorations, but that there are also collections of similarly themed items, for example if you're looking for items to create an office space or need some decos that emit light. It was only the latter that made me realise that a lot of things that are officially classified as "lights" don't actually produce any, which is very weird and I can't believe I hadn't noticed that before.
  
• On the YouTube front, this month's entry in the "how's SWTOR doing this year" genre was "SWTOR In 2024 - Is It Worth Playing?" by Gaming For Immersion, whose channel is still small but whose voice I found very pleasant to listen to. What I liked about this impressions piece was that it didn't focus too much on the nitty-gritty of gameplay details, but talked about how the ease of combat kind of clashed with his overall enjoyment of the story, which I thought was an interesting point to highlight. I do agree that combat in the open world is still quite easy, but the rebalancing of level scaling a couple years ago has improved things a lot compared to where we were shortly after KotFE, and I actually see the occasional reddit post going "I keep dying and I don't know why" again nowadays, proving it's not impossible to struggle.
• Another type of "evergreen" SWTOR content I enjoy is class story rankings, and this month, "SWTOR All Classes Ranked From WORST to BEST" from tiny YouTuber (only 71 subscribers at the time of writing this!) basiccTV ended up on my feed. Not gonna lie, I found this one a bit hard to listen to since he's got a strong accent and doesn't seem to believe in doing another take whenever he ends up stumbling over his own script, but his thoughts were still interesting and I can respect his ranking. Not like when I saw Nixxiom ranking SWTOR's class stories last year and went "WTF" at some of the choices.
• On the SWTOR subreddit, there wasn't a single post that really grabbed me in April, but there were a couple that were kinda neat. Both "What character or group introduced in SWTOR would you have liked to see expanded on in other SW media (books, comics, etc) " and "What are some wasted story potential swtor just gave up on or never advanced?" touch on interesting side characters and plot points that were never fully explored but had the potential to be more.
  
  This meme made me smile even though I'd seen it on /r/SWTOR_memes before - I didn't even realise it was a movie reference at first, but it was still funny to me because it's wild how tiny the objectively normal-sized rooms in the Copero stronghold feel when compared to the absolutely bombastic layouts everywhere else in the game.
  
  Finally, someone linked to an old Games Radar article from two years ago that is pretty thin and whose contents are basically "a dev said some stuff on Twitter", but I liked it for the headline if nothing else: "Star Wars: The Old Republic's exploding barrels are filled with shrunken invisible people"