Around the SWTOR-sphere: June & July 2024

Did you miss this column back in June? I didn't forget about it, but when I opened my draft at the end of the month I found that it only had two links in it, which didn't really seem like enough material to make a post out of, so I decided to combine my recommendations for June and July. That's not to say that people weren't doing enough interesting SWTOR-related things in those two months; as usual I'm just compiling things that I personally came across. I was also quite busy simply playing and writing myself, with less time spent on looking at other people's stuff.

The overarching theme for this installment of "Around the SWTOR-sphere" is going to be patch 7.5 and the content it brought us, which included the Spring Abundance Festival, Bessi the Basilisk droid, the Deseperate Defiance story update and graphical updates to Hutta.

• On the subject of the new story update, before I even wrote my own review of it, Chash Larol from The Old Republic Era wrote theirs, so go and read!
  
  While I was poking around on YouTube for more story reviews, I came across the channel CK Outpost and their video "SWTOR Chains in the Dark Review - What I liked. What I didn't" (that was the name of patch 7.4 if you don't remember). They were quite critical of some things, but I was super stoked to find someone providing in-depth reviews of story content based on multiple playthroughs, something I don't see very often, so I instantly subscribed. Naturally I was also excited when they shared their thoughts about 7.5 this month, in a video simply called "SWTOR Update 7.5 Desperate Defiance Story Review". Unfortunately - unlike me - they liked the latest patch's story even less than 7.4 and sounded quite disenchanted with the game in general to be honest, which is sad to see. Still, I wanted to give the channel a shout-out anyway since I thought their criticisms were well-articulated and they also have a bunch of other, older videos on their channel that people might enjoy, such as various SWTOR-related "top 5" lists and such.
• On the subject of Spring Abundance, I have to give a shoutout to Siow on Vulkk.com, who posted about Baking a Bestine Threeberry Pie with Recipe. Now, I'll have to confess up front that I didn't actually read the whole thing since it's extremely long and I'm not actually that into baking. However, I just think it's really neat that someone went ahead and attempted to recreate one of the new in-game pies in real life. World of Warcraft went so far as to release an official cookbook with recipes to recreate all kinds of in-game dishes, so there is precedent for this kind of thing! We're not quite ready for that in SWTOR I think, but it's a start.
  
  Another Spring Abundance-inspired piece of content I wanted to highlight was this little machinima made by /Jawaface about his character's adventures during the festival on Dantooine. He's only a very small YouTuber, but I've known him for a little while and he's always super friendly and fun to interact with. I also really admire his passion for video editing and creating SWTOR machinima... my only "problem" being that almost all his videos are about jawas and/or his OC Kara, who's supposed to be half-human, half-Jawa I believe? And I'm just... not that interested in Jawas, sorry! Still, I've been wanting to give his channel a shout-out for a while, and this seemed like a good opportunity.
• On the subject of the graphical changes to Hutta, my opinion when checking them out on the PTS was that they would take some getting used to but I also thought that they looked better in game than on screenshots. That said, I shared the sentiment of the post called "Same spot on Hutta one server maintenance apart... I'm kind of shocked" on the SWTOR subreddit, which showed that a lot of environmental assets in the distance had gone missing with the revamp, making the horizon look very bleak. Fortunately this appeared to be accidental however, as it was later followed up by: "They put the low-res distant mountain PNGs back on Hutta. This vista looks absolutely GORGEOUS once again!". Phew!
• I haven't come across any non-guide or news content about Bessi the Basilisk droid yet, but I do have one more "SWTOR in 2024" review this month, this time by MMOByte and called "Star Wars The Old Republic in 2024... is Absolutely NOT What You Expect". What surprised me about this one is that they didn't even actually play the game - they have done so in the past and figured that going through the same motions yet again would just be a waste of time - but instead just looked at the activity on SWTOR's various social channels to see how much posting was going on there. I just thought that was... an interesting approach to say the least, and I guess once again highlights the importance of those channels, not just to keep current players up to date, but also because of what kind of image of the game it projects to people who aren't (currently) playing but might be considering it.

Playing as a Male Character

Last week, after more than twelve years of playing Star Wars: The Old Republic almost daily, I completed a class story on a male character for the first time. The question of why it took me this long is kind of fascinating to me.

I've played video games with male protagonists in the past without giving it a second thought, but something about MMOs makes them different somehow. I've never shied away from creating male characters there either (one of the very first alts I created back when I started playing WoW in 2006 was a human male warlock) but for some reason I always struggled to get as invested in them as I was in my female characters.

I do know that I'm at least not entirely alone in this - Nick Yee from Quantic Foundry did an interesting survey about gender preferences in gaming a few years ago, which found that a large majority of women prefer to play female characters, but only less than half of the surveyed men preferred playing male characters. In fact, almost a third of men also preferred playing female characters.

Anecdotally, my own experience has been that people have basically two modes of engaging with their characters in an MMO: by viewing them as an extension of themselves, an avatar or personal representation, or by viewing them as toys to play with, dolls to dress up, action figures that they can make jump around. This isn't to say that people aren't capable of doing both, but I think that "by default" you tend to lean either one way or the other when you start a game.

My personal observation at least has been that people who prefer playing characters that match their real life gender tend to view them more as representations of themselves, while those who'll happily mix and match view them more as objects to be played around with and with whom they don't necessarily identify. Though why women would be so much more prone to the former than the latter is honestly a mystery to me.

Either way, my strong preference for female characters in MMOs wasn't something to which I gave a huge amount of thought in the past... but of course SWTOR has a lot of "gendered" content in the original class stories, such as flirt options and whole romances that are only accessible to you if your character is the right gender. After more than a decade of exploring the game with dozens of female alts, I was really starting to feel that I was missing out by denying myself access to those optional story bits designed for male characters.

I actually created my very first male character in TOR back in 2012: Zilek, my Jedi consular on what is now the Satele Shan server. I know this because I mentioned his creation in this post from October 2012. As I anticipated back then, I partially played through the starting zone and then didn't do anything with him again for ages.

As far as I can tell from screenshots, I decided to check in on him again for reasons I can no longer remember around May 2019. What I do remember is that I almost instantly realised that I suddenly hated the way he looked (I'd originally given him shoulder-length black hair and that complexion option with the lip liner), so I gave him a makeover to make him more visually appealing. That helped, but somehow the quest cut scenes still bothered me. For some irrational reason I cannot quite fathom, it felt strange to see him talk and have a male voice coming out of "my" character. It just felt wrong. So I bought him an outfit with a mask - something I usually never do - but in this instance it weirdly helped to make him more playable, as if it made it easier to pretend he was secretly a girl or something?! If that sounds kind of insane to you, I didn't think any better of myself for feeling that way.

I levelled him for a few weeks, but then forgot about him again for the next three years. It wasn't until I started doing Galactic Seasons on multiple servers that I began to give him attention more regularly and got him to max level, though I still haven't finished his class story.

As I got more into the idea of levelling a male character of each class, I made more of my new alts on the other servers male. They are all still relatively low level and not very advanced, but they exist and get play time, even if sporadically. At some point I realised that the only permutation I was still missing entirely was a male Sith warrior... so I went ahead and created one on my home server Darth Malgus. This was also around the time I was having a blast PvPing as a Juggernaut on Shae Vizla, so my newest warrior's purpose became to both do lowbie PvP while levelling and go through the warrior class story as a male character for the first time.

And... I actually succeeded! The questing really picked up once I outlevelled the lowbie bracket, as I wasn't keen to start midbie PvP at the very bottom of that pile and focused on progressing the story over queueing for arenas for the next ten levels or so.

I actually had a lot of fun with the story as well, and I didn't even have the urge to hide my character's face this time. I think what helped was that with this one, I had an idea for a "character" from the beginning and didn't even pretend that I was using him to represent my real self at any point. But it required a kind of actual "work" from me at first, as I had to think about what his personality was and how he would react to certain situations. There were some choices where I had to pause and think for a really long time to remind myself that I didn't want to go with whatever my gut feeling was, but what this character would do in that situation. For how challenging I found that at times, it was also a new kind of fun to be honest, and he quickly became one of my new favourites, as I connected to him in a different way to all my other alts.

I went in with a plan to romance one of the warrior's female love interests (seeing that kind of stuff was part of the whole point of making a male character, after all) and found myself surprisingly torn by which route to go down. I initially didn't think he was going to be interested in Vette, but she can be so charming... with Jaesa, I wasn't sure whether I was going to make her light or dark side, as he wasn't clearly one or the other himself, but I eventually ended up with her dark side version.

Now, dark side Jaesa has always been one of my least favourite companions, and I've been baffled by why she's so popular with some people. After playing through her romance, I can at least kind of see why - she may be psychotically violent, but she's also a stereotypically bad girl that falls head over heels for the player character and pursues him aggressively - I can see that being appealing. It's just that if you're playing a female character, like I always have, you're only left with the conversations where she's being absolutely psychotic and nothing else.

I thought that since I'd flirted with both Vette and Jaesa, there would be some sort of conversation that would force me to choose between them at some point, but I don't know if I just did things in the wrong order but I never saw anything like it. The most I got was Jaesa making a reference to my character having a thing with the Twi'lek but she never seemed to take all that much issue with it. Vette on the other hand never even mentioned Jaesa and asked to get married after a single kiss, which was just an obvious "whoa, no". Ultimately my warrior ended up agreeing to marry Jaesa in the most assholish way possible, which I thought was both disturbing and funny in equal amounts.

I kind of like the idea of continuing to play him to see some of the expansion content as a male character as well (even if I have no particular urge to flirt with Lord Cytharat, who knows what might happen) but realistically my enthusiasm for that kind of thing tends to fizzle out once I hit the level cap at the latest - we'll see how it goes.

Flying Robots, Account-Wide Surprises, Decoration Sale

One thing I keep thinking about in regards to my blogging is that I used to be much better at making shorter, more random posts. I do still love writing long and thoughtful treatises on all kinds of topics, but sometimes it's also nice to just... talk about a funny thing I saw for a few paragraphs? It's always really interesting to look back on those posts years later, plus I would guess that they make for an easier entry point for new readers as well.

So without further ado... some random thoughts on a Friday:

Flying Robots

You know how your class companions will sometimes want to chat with you on your ship or in a cantina? The conversations that can be held in a cantina can also take place in a stronghold. The other day I accidentally clicked on a talkative M1-4X while in my Copero Villa on an alt and the view went absolutely wild. I only took a few screenshots of my faithful droid companion floating in space (see below) but there were other crazy views, such as an extreme close-up of his shoulder, a giant rock wall stretching into infinity, and a view of my character from below with nothing but sky above her.

I was like "surely they didn't forget to test the companion conversation feature in this stronghold" and indeed, when I tried to have a conversation with another companion later, the cut scene took place at the entrance normally, with the kinds of views you'd expect. I wonder if M1-4X is buggy in a unique way or whether it was just a random glitch.

Account-Wide Surprises

The introduction of Bessi came with a change to the way daily areas work, as the patch notes stated that each one would now be accessible to all characters within your legacy as long as at least one of them had unlocked the area. The other day while using the activity finder on one of my secondary servers, I was shocked and surprised to see that apparently those patch notes had been slightly incorrect: the new unlock is not legacy-wide, but account-wide. Meaning that my alternative legacies on the other servers, where none of my characters have progressed through a lot of content, now have access to all the daily areas in the game.

I'm not quite sure how I feel about this yet. On the one hand, I've kind of liked having to re-earn certain things on the other servers, so this feels a bit like cheating. On the other hand though, it's going to make certain weekly objectives so much easier when the next Galactic Season comes around. (Doing the weekly on Ossus once is so much faster than doing the Oricon weekly twice for example.)

Decoration Sale

After the big summer mount sale ended, the sale section in the Cartel Market transitioned straight into another big sale, this time for decorations, though I haven't seen any official announcement or even much community conversation about it. I guess because decorating is a bit more of a niche hobby compared to mounts, which are something everyone uses?

I considered making another "tips" post about it but didn't really have that much to say that was different. Stuff like "check the price on the GTN before committing to spending real money" applies to decorations just as much as mounts. But since at least one person mentioned finding it helpful that I gave the mount sale a shout-out last time, I wanted to bring up the decorations sale at least briefly as well.

Since there's been no official word about this particular sale, I don't know for how much longer it'll be going on, but I would expect the "stock" to switch over again on Tuesday the 30th. Personally I went for the Copero utility bundle to match the new stronghold, since it's available for 50% off in the sale for the first time. Also, ever since I found out about the fact that many "light" decorations don't actually emit light, I've felt quite vexed by it and there are several bundles in the sale that contain either standing or hanging lights that actually do illuminate a room. Look up the Corporate Retreat, Distant Worlds, Restored Jedi Enclave and Security Bureau decoration bundles (though again, check the GTN for the items you want first!) or see Swtorista's full list of proper lighting decorations here.

7.5.1 Dev Livestream Notes

So there was a dev livestream today - you'll be excused if you're surprised to hear this, as for some reason the SWTOR team decided not to announce it anywhere... except on Twitter. I thought I was being bitterly hyperbolic in my last post with the whole "why do you think only Twitter users are worthy of knowing about what's happening with the game" line, figuring that they were still going to announce it somewhere else eventually, but they really didn't. What a bizarre marketing decision, especially seeing how they apparently want us to spend more time on Twitch...

Which is me segueing into the fact that the first item announced during the livestream was that they now have Twitch integration, and that once you've connected your account and patch 7.5.1 launches, you'll have 30 days to earn a purple speeder by watching four hours of SWTOR streams.

I hope this appeals... to the kids... or something? Sorry, I'm that old fogey that doesn't really "get" streaming and mostly finds it boring. To me, watching four hours of SWTOR livestreaming in a single month will be quite a big ask, but I guess I know Swtorista's schedule so I might be able to get there with some effort. I went ahead and linked my accounts, which seemed to be successful, but when I go into my SWTOR account now it still says that there's no linked Twitch account. There's already a post on the forum noting that there are issues. I guess that's why they announced the feature before it actually matters, so they have time to iron out any kinks before the actual eligibility period starts.

The stream's main focus was the next Galactic Season, which will be called "The Greatest Bounty" and whose theme will be bounty hunting. Interestingly, the Bounty Hunting event that is currently tied to the Death Mark conquest and only live about once a month will be active throughout the entire season. Even more interestingly, they'll bring back the Dark vs. Light bosses as targets to hunt for seasons objectives.

Amusingly, all the devs on the stream got the bosses' origins confused, as they talked about how these were supposedly part of the original DvL event from eight years ago. This is not true though - the DvL world bosses used to spawn based on the dark vs. light "world state" that was added in Knights of the Eternal Throne and removed with Legacy of the Sith. I hunted them all down back in 2020, and while it made for a fun guild activity for a while, it was also kind of a pain in some ways. It sounds like the issues with how easily they were to accidentally despawn will no longer be a thing, but we'll see what the difficulty tuning will be like - back then it was pretty brutal to be honest and not really pug friendly. (In the linked post I quoted a guildie as saying that he'd rather be kicked in the nuts for half an hour than ever fight any of these bosses again.) Still, I generally approve of these encounters being repurposed like this.

There was no mention of a central season reward like the past companions or the stronghold from the current season, so I'm not sure if it'll just be a more general reward track like in GS5? We will get a recoloured version of the Loth kitty apparently. We also weren't given a launch date, though Musco said that they're targeting "late August", so it sounds like we'll have about a month's break between seasons this time around. I just hope they don't repeat the whole blueprint gathering thing...

As promised previously, there'll also be two new date night missions, this time for Aric Jorgan and for Vette. As these are class companions, it was clarified that you won't be able to do these while just playing through the class story - you'll need to actually have reunited with your love interest in KotFE and locked in the romance before the date nights become available. I currently don't have access to either of these, so I can't get excited about them just yet, but I guess two more of these are another reason to work on getting those alts through the expansions.

There were some previews of new decoration rewards from the Feast of Prosperity and some new Cartel Market items. We'll finally get an Imperial trooper armour, which is something people have been wanting for a long time apparently, and there'll be two new weapon tunings which make either embers or flower petals float around you, which I've got to admit looked kind of amusing.

In terms of gear, there isn't going to be a new tier of gear or anything, but they are making some changes to make it even easier to get upgrades in the existing system. For example the various weekly missions will give you a choice between a gear box or just a flat amount of currency that will be much higher than just taking the gear and dissembling it (which is the only thing we can do right now if we don't need the actual item). All the ops weeklies will be back on the terminals every week instead of being on a four week rotation - I should be happy about that but I'll also kind of miss the way this made it easy to rotate different operations on social night without having to really think about it. You'll also be able to trade in gear boxes for higher-quality gear boxes, all the way up to Rakata... which does sound good in theory but also like it could be kind of clunky, depending on how many boxes you need to save up in your cargo hold before you can trade them for anything. We'll see.

Finally, there were some very brief teaser comments about 7.6, which we can expect closer towards the end of the year. Apparently this time the story will take us back to existing planets, where "an entirely new type of content" will await. *insert curiously raised eyebrow here* Even more importantly for those of us interested in group content though, there'll be a new lair boss a.k.a. a single boss operation. Again, I just want to be happy but unfortunately I don't have the best track record with lair bosses. I like the event-based ones like the Xenoanalyst and the Eyeless, but I've always hated the Colossal Monolith, and Golden Fury and the Hive Queen are at best kinda boring. I want it to be good though, honest!

Anyway... with that I've actually touched at least briefly on everything that was said in the stream I think! Still, as usual I recommend other places like Today in TOR for a more comprehensive and detailed round-up.

Brief PSA: Shintar No Longer on Twitter

Almost twelve years ago, I made a post on here to announce that I had made a Twitter account. It only seems fair to also make a note today that I no longer have a Twitter account. Or rather, it technically still exists, but I've been locked out of it.

Twitter had been pestering me for a while now to add my date of birth to my account. I'm usually not the kind of privacy nut to refuse giving any personal data to anyone, but Twitter under the leadership of Elon Musk? No, thanks. Plus I'd been using the site just fine for over a decade without giving them that, so I didn't see the need. I figured they just wanted it to have an excuse to shove porn down by throat, since that seems to be their latest thing.

At one point they decided to set me a deadline. If I wasn't going to add my birth date by July 8th, I was going to lose access to my account! That day came and went and nothing happened. Figures that it was just a bluff. But then yesterday...

So I guess that's it. I mean, the site had got a lot worse since Elon took over and I've been wanting to move away from it anyway, but I've got to admit I didn't expect it to quit on me first. And despite myself, I'm a little annoyed and upset.

I won't miss Twitter as a whole... the random browsing experience got so much worse once they made the change the verification, as the top replies to any post would just be blue checks saying horrible and/or stupid things. But for some reason most of the SWTOR community (including the official account!) seem to pretty much live on Twitter, and I feel that I'm going to miss out on a lot of things now.

Like that mount sale I posted about the other week? Was only announced on Twitter. Yesterday, a friend told me that the official account had announced a livestream for this Tuesday. If he hadn't told me, I wouldn't know because there certainly hasn't been any sign of that announcement on any of their other socials, including the official forums!

In the past it made sense to focus on announcing things on Twitter because unlike most social media sites it was open to be viewed by anyone, whether they had an account or not, but Elon Musk changed that! I wonder whether people even realise that all their "public" posts are no longer truly public. Like, if you go to the official SWTOR account's page without being logged into Twitter, the newest non-pinned post that you can see is from May 2022. Why do you think only Twitter users are worthy of knowing about what's happening with the game, huh? It's not even such a big platform anymore!

And of course many of my fellow content creators are the same. I wonder how long it'll take for anyone to even notice that I'm gone. Maybe in a month or so, someone will go "huh, I haven't seen Shintar post anything in a while; wonder whatever happened to her".

Anyway, that's that rant out of the way. I'll just have to live with less news about the game and community involvement going forward I guess.

The Acolyte (No Spoilers)

I've been really slack in terms of writing about new Star Wars media in recent months... I watched both the final season of Bad Batch and Tales of the Empire when they came out, but while I enjoyed both, I found myself surprisingly lacking in interesting things to say about either. Not so with The Acolyte!

In the months before this show's release, I saw some curious comments about it around my corner of the fandom along the lines of "if you liked Andor, you'll like this too". This both caught my attention and immediately made me extremely sceptical... because I adored Andor, and comparing anything new to that show was setting yourself a really high bar. Not to mention that I thought a big part of Andor's charm was that it didn't need the Force and lightsabers to be interesting, so I couldn't see how a classic Jedi story could compete with that anyway. As a result, I ultimately didn't take those comments too seriously, though I tried to think of them with consideration for what I assumed was the intended sentiment behind them: to imply that The Acolyte was going to try and be different from previous Star Wars shows, which I figured could end up being commendable in its own way.

Why do I start with this? Because after having seen the last episode today, I can say with 100% certainty that this show is definitely not like Andor, but also, it did live up to the promise of trying something different, and for that I really liked it. In fact, this may well end up being my second favourite Star Wars live action show to date (though I wouldn't fault anyone for feeling differently)!

Set in the High Republic era, it immediately puts us in a context where there are no Skywalkers or Emperors or any of that baggage. I haven't read any of the High Republic books, but as a SWTOR fan, the pictured shenanigans surrounding the Jedi order didn't seem that dissimilar from the Old Republic to be honest. At this point, I like the idea of Jedi and Sith as groups of people more than as singular heroes with superpowers. When you have lots of Jedi, they don't all have to be amazing at everything; you can have some that are a bit dorky, or more bookish or what have you. Different personalities instead of just "the good guy" and "the bad guy".

And in that regard, the show immediately worked for me. I was interested in the characters right away, and some amazing acting really helped. Lee Jung-jae, who portrays Master Sol, acted his damn heart out in every single episode. I read somewhere that he actually had to learn English for the role, which you know... you might think that would be a handicap and not necessarily make him ideal for the role to start with, but damn, he was absolutely perfect in it. If anything, I think the show suffered a little from narrowing down the cast in the later episodes because more could have been done with some of these characters in my opinion.

The plot was also interesting - in Disney+ the show is tagged as "Mystery" and there is definitely some of that. More than anything though, I appreciated that it gave us what's probably the most nuanced portrayal of Jedi and Sith that we've seen in live action yet. The Jedi have good intentions, but they're also just people doing people things: they feel worry, lie to hide things that they think will harm others, get bored, argue, act rashly and make a lot of what turn out to be bad decisions. And the main Sith we see is a hardened killer, but also not without reason or incapable of expressing sentiments other than hate or rage - definitely one of the better villains we've gotten in Star Wars.

Another thing I liked - and which it did have in common with Andor actually, even if wasn't on the same level - was that the show didn't hold the viewer by the hand at every step of the way. For me it was episode three where I first caught myself thinking "eh, that wasn't a very satisfying explanation for that event" and at first I found myself feeling a little disappointed... until I talked to other people who had seen the episode, who highlighted to me that there was at least one clue I had missed to show that this was supposed to be an unconvincing story, that we were only seeing one person's point of view and they were obviously missing something. After that I immediately started to be more attentive, and there were still things I missed that I needed others to explain to me, and that actually delighted me.

Oh, have I mentioned the fight scenes yet? I don't need massive action in my Star Wars, but if you're going to have lightsaber fights, you might as well make them good, and I think The Acolyte probably had some of the best live action choreography since The Phantom Menace. It's more Eastern martial arts inspired than usual, but it works really well, and there were quite a few fight scenes that actually made me go "whoa, cool" which is something I personally rarely feel when it comes to action sequences nowadays.

The show is not perfect, of course. The editing in some episodes struck me as slightly odd in terms of where scene changes were placed, and more than one episode ended with a cliffhanger that just felt annoying and unnecessary. While I've praised some of the actors, others were... struggling to live up to the ambition of their roles is how I'd put it I think. I might not even have noticed it in a worse show to be honest, but it was kind of noticeable when contrasted with the more outstanding performances in this one. And while I quite enjoyed the plot, the general writing and dialogue was mostly... kinda mid. I can think of a lot of moments that I thought were memorable, but very few lines that were. I can't fault anyone for being more bothered by these things than I was, but I just loved the characters, the setting and the overall story.

Without going into spoilers, the last episode ends with one character's arc coming to a neat conclusion, and another coming to what I'd call a temporary conclusion... but there are several obvious hooks for a second season. And I'd actually like to see one, which is quite a contrast to Ahsoka, where my reaction was pretty much that I would watch a second season, but that I also didn't really care whether there was going to be one or not. Unfortunately what publicly available numbers there are seem to indicate that The Acolyte hasn't been as much of a success as previous shows, so a continuation currently looks anything but guaranteed.

Adventuring With Bessi

There's one major feature of patch 7.5 that I still haven't written about here yet: Bessi the Basilisk Droid! To be honest, I did the introductory quest line during the first week and then decided to nope right out of the whole system for the first month - it was all dailies and I was already doing the new spring event on ALL the characters; there's only so much daily-running I can take. However, I always intended to get back to Bessi eventually, so for the past few weeks I've been taking her out on adventures every week.

When Bessi and her new "venture" were first announced, my reaction could basically be summed up in three bullet points:

• Good: a companion with a meaningful story and gameplay behind it!
• Bad: another incentive to do the same old daily areas yet again!
• Confusing: why do we need a new system for this?

I feel like seeing the system in action only really gave me a partial answer to the last question. It has its own snazzy UI of course, but at its core it's still just a bunch of quests and achievements? My best guess is that the whole thing is legacy-wide in a way that the current achievement system wouldn't quite have been able to support or something...

As a system, I'm honestly feeling a bit ambivalent about it, but it might be that the devs are still working out some kinks. For example I saw people complain a lot about mission RNG from level five onwards (before I'd gotten there myself) and this was addressed pretty quickly with a new option to unlock specific missions via currency on a vendor.

For me, where I'm at right now, there are mainly two things that still seem a little unrefined to me: one is that even though the system was advertised as legacy-wide, all the training module missions are character-bound, which makes it kind of unappealing to ever go on an alt, as you'll keep earning new missions on the same character, and switching to an alt would require you to pay extra to unlock training missions on a different character, when what you really want to do is save your precious currency for actual advancement.

The other thing is that it's just... a bit confusing, but in a way that I find hard to articulate. I was actually somewhat reminded of the way I felt about the 7.0 gearing system when Legacy of the Sith came out, which is to say, I kinda got what I needed to do, but if you asked me to explain how it all works, I'd just draw a blank. With Bessi in specific, I can always see the checklist of tasks in the venture window, but I find that I have to keep referring back to it all the time, because I just can't quite keep track and the flow never feels entirely organic to me. I pretty much always complete one task at a time and then have to go "OK, now what".

Bessi herself is incredibly cute though. She's basically a robot dog with a giant, multi-barrelled gun for a face, which sounds bizarre but works somehow. Everything about her design walks a fine line between threatening and adorable. I particularly like her idle sound, which made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up the first time I heard it because she growls a bit like the T-Rex from the original Jurassic Park, only slightly more robotic. But then you watch her wag her tail while she casts heals on you and you just can't help going "aw"; it's pretty amazing honestly.

Also, and it almost pains me a little to say this, but the daily gameplay loop turned out to be more fun than I expected. It's a bit different in that you have to "rent" Bessi for an hour at a time, so you have an incentive to really dedicate that time slot to nothing but her (logging out pauses the timer so you can take breaks if you want, but my point is you may not want to go off and run a flashpoint halfway through or something).

More interestingly though, we're not being asked to do the weekly mission in each daily area like on pretty much every other occasion, but instead Bessi's training modules require you to do just two daily or heroic missions in a specific daily zone at a time, which makes you think about things like which ones to pick for good synergy and can result in a lot of planet-hopping in a relatively short time. It's just... different.

The one thing that's surprised me is how extremely time-gated the system is. Obviously there was always going to be a limit in terms of how much progress you're allowed to make in a single week, but there are four different currencies involved and so far I've always reached the weekly cap for all of them within only two hours of gameplay, at which point it's back to the stable for Bessi as she can't make any more progress until the next week. Considering how the resource investment for each level is also increasing over time, the devs clearly weren't kidding when they said that unlocking Bessi's full potential was going to be something that takes a level of real time commitment that not everyone will be willing to make to this system.

How are you getting on with Bessi and what do you think of the new venture system so far?

My 7 Favourite Post-Launch Story Updates

Over the years, a lot has been said and written about the merits of each of the different class stories, but there's been comparatively little discourse about the expansion stories from what I've seen - which I think is a shame, because in my opinion there's some pretty good stuff in there. Obviously, no single storyline can live up to the eight original class stories in terms of sheer breadth of unique content, but that aside, I disagree with the general sentiment I often see expressed that those stories were the peak of the game's storytelling and that it's all just been downhill from there. The more cinematic cut scenes post Knights of the Fallen Empire have been so much more exciting to watch than anything in the original class stories, and many of the non-player characters that were introduced in later years are much more interesting than the vast majority of NPCs we interacted with in the base game.

With all that said, I wanted to write a bit of a love letter to some of my favourite expansion stories. Back in 2019 I wrote a post called "Good Quest, Bad Quest" in which I laid out what I think makes an MMO quest good or bad, and those are the main items that influenced my ranking of these stories as well: presentation, writing, plot, characters, gameplay and world building.

Honestly, the most difficult thing was to decide what actually counts as a separate story. In the past it was pretty clear-cut for the most part, but ever since Ossus the game's ongoing storyline has been a bit of a never-ending soap opera in which different plot beats get picked up and dropped again without necessarily coming to a proper conclusion. You could argue that it's basically all been "the Malgus saga" since then, but I don't entirely agree with that as everything around Onslaught (and somewhat randomly, the Manaan part of Legacy of the Sith) has felt more like a classic and mostly self-contained Republic vs. Empire story to me, while I tend to think of Echoes of Oblivion as a stand-alone adventure that referenced a lot of older content. Spirit of Vengeance involved the Mandalorians for the first time, but then the focus kept ping-ponging between them and Malgus again.

Anyway, I obviously decided to make some choices in regards to the above; this is just to add some context.

1. Jedi Under Siege (2018)

Also known as Ossus or the prelude to Onslaught, released with patch 5.10. There was never going to be any doubt in my mind that this was going to take the top spot on my list, because I loved this update so frikkin' much. Seriously, if you go back to the blog archives from December 2018, every other post is just me gushing about some aspect of this update or another that I loved.

I'd yearned for a return to Republic vs. Empire after Knights of the Eternal Throne, and while Iokath had paid lip-service to this, it had also been done in an extremely lacklustre way, just to then immediately steer away from the subject again to pivot into what would later become known as "the traitor arc". Comparatively, Jedi Under Siege felt like a return to form, the likes of which we hadn't seen since the base game. Ossus was a beautiful planet that made it a joy to explore again, something that hadn't really been the case with the very limited environments of the "Knights of" expansions and Iokath's confusing architecture.

We were introduced to several new and interesting characters in the form of Tau Idair, General Daeruun and Major Anri, and several companion returns that people had been anticipating for many years were skilfully worked into the story in an organic way (Doc, Nadia, Khem Val). On top of that other minor characters made surprise re-appearances, such as Jonas Balkar from the trooper story, NR-02 from the Black Talon, or Darth Malora from Korriban.

Not to mention that Malgus came back! You may be tired of him now after watching him sit around and mope for the last two years, but back then I thought this was a genius move and a fun surprise. And of course, the storylines for Republic and Empire side were different and well-written. I just had a blast all around with this content and am always happy to revisit it on alts. The fact that it takes place on an open world planet instead of constantly shunting you through instanced corridors feels very liberating, and I enjoy seeing the little variations in dialogue depending on what class you play and whether you had any pre-existing relationship with any of the returning NPCs.

2. Onslaught (2019)

In this context I'm talking about the story content that came with the immediate 6.0 expansion launch, meaning the story on Onderon and Mek-Sha plus the finale in the Objective Meridian flashpoint.

Onslaught honestly repeated a lot of what Jedi Under Siege did, only with some minor flaws. We quested our way through two new planets again, met some interesting new and returning characters (Arn, Darth Savik, Jakarro and D4, to name but a few) and once again saw things from different perspectives depending on our faction and to some degree our class (getting the option to reclaim your Dark Council seat as a Sith inquisitor was fire). It just wasn't... quite as good. For example the Republic story on Onderon suffers a bit from your senator liaison being a bit boring, and on Mek-Sha too much of the content for both factions overlaps, but it's still a storyline that I love to replay.

3. Makeb (2013)

This the storyline from which the Rise of the Hutt Cartel expansion got its name, except the Hutts don't really get to rise very much at all before you slap them down again. They came in 2.0 and went within the same patch. This is a piece of content on which my opinion has changed a lot over time. Initially I liked it well enough, but the mobs on Makeb were quite numerous and tough at launch, and replays quickly started to feel like a slog. Not to mention that it was being sold to us as chapter four of our class stories for a while when it very obviously wasn't that.

However, considering how much smaller expansions got in the years afterwards, I've really grown fond of our adventures on Makeb in retrospect. We get to explore a large, picturesque planet over the course of a pretty meaty storyline, and it's totally different for Republic and Empire side as well. The Imperial storyline is admittedly a lot stronger, since the Republic one feels a bit odd with the whole "the planet is about to blow up" threat never seeming entirely convincing, but it's not terrible either. It's where we first meet Doctor Oggurobb after all.

4. Shadow of Revan (2014)

I'm mainly thinking of the actual 3.0 expansion launch story here, though I wouldn't blame anyone for wanting to include the Forged Alliances story arc that formed the prelude to the expansion; I'd just personally treat that as its own thing. I'm also not really including the Rise of the Emperor patch here, since that had nothing to do with Revan anymore really. 

Many people cite this as their favourite expansion, but as I've stated many times before, I think it's somewhat overrated. That doesn't mean that I think it's bad however, not at all! Again, we got to quest our way through two beautiful new planets, Rishi and Yavin IV, and the tale of battling the Revanites and their new-old leader was compelling enough. There were some bits that fell a little flat for me, but I did enjoy the story overall.

It's also the expansion that had us start our adventures with Theron and Lana in earnest (including the option for some romance), which I guess is a big plus for some, though it's been more of a mixed blessing to me personally. I know many people love Lana, but if you think Malgus is worn out as a character, imagine how those of us feel who aren't crazy about Lana and yet have had to listen to her tell us what to do for over a decade now...

5. Echoes of Oblivion (2020)

I hesitated a bit to put this one here because I actually don't necessarily think that this is a great piece of content to replay on multiple characters, which is something that is quite important to me. The final boss fight is (in my opinion) one of the worst in the game and the whole thing is pretty linear without any meaningful variations based on your faction or class. However! In terms of world building, this storyline did so much to tie up several years worth of annoying loose ends that I can't not list it here as a piece of content that was very meaningful to me when it came out. It just felt like a love letter to the game's lore in a big way, trying hard to improve on all kinds of tidbits that had felt a bit unsatisfying in the past. Plus hanging out with Kira and Scourge was fun. I wrote a longer review about it back then, which you can find here.

6. Legacy of the Sith or Whatever It Is We're Doing Right Now (2020-?)

As mentioned in the intro, it's very hard to pin down a clear start and end point for this one, but personally I see what I'm talking about here as starting with the introduction of the Mando plot in Spirit of Vengeance in patch 6.2 and then pretty much everything that comes afterwards, except maybe the storyline on Manaan since that doesn't really tie into anything to do with the Mandalorians or Malgus. I'm also treating this placement as tentative since I'm not sure whether 7.5 will turn out to be a real cut-off - I suspect not, so future updates might change my opinion on this storyline. It's honestly been a bit of a ride, and I know many players have understandably been put off my the sheer amount of real time that has passed while all of this has been going on. But I still like the storyline because it has given us both new flashpoints and multiple new planetary areas in terms of gameplay, plus it's had a lot of what I think is great character writing. I'm really interested in seeing where things go with 7.6!

7. Oricon (2013)

Technically part of the Rise of the Hutt Cartel expansion and only a short side story, I liked patch 2.4's "The Dread War" for giving us a cool daily area and bringing the story of the Dread Masters to a satisfying conclusion. The plot and writing are pretty basic - here are some really scary bad guys, we need to beat them - but it showed us how something that isn't technically part of the main storyline about our character could still result in a really interesting and enjoyable story update.

I'm going to stop here because after this point, I think I'd start to be a bit more grouchy about the storylines that remain, and this is meant to be a positive post! You might be surprised by some of the things I haven't listed - I know the "Knights of" expansions have their fans for example, but I'm not one of them to be honest. You can read more about why here if you want.

If you've played through all the expansion content to date, how much do you agree/disagree with my rankings? Is there a post-launch storyline that I didn't mention here and that you feel is really underrated perhaps? Feel free to chime in in the comments.

Galactic Season 6 in Review

We've got less than a month left of Galactic Season 6, and usually I would've been done with and written about the whole thing weeks ago. The reason I'm still at it this time is the Fragments Found achievement, which is grindy and horrible and which, at my current rate, will keep me busy until the very last week of the season. Still, that last stretch seems pretty predictable at this point, so I thought I might as well share my thoughts on the season as a whole.

GS5 was a slam dunk for me last year, so it pains me to say that GS6 was a bit more of a mixed bag. Let's get into the whys and hows.

Theme & Rewards

I expressed at the end of Season 5 that all the free decorations handed out as part of the seasons reward track had rekindled my interest in housing in an unexpected way, so I loved that the main reward for Season 6 was a stronghold. The Copero Villa is beautiful, and with its smaller rooms it fills a niche that wasn't previously catered to, offering a housing option for those who aren't so fond of the giant vaulted ceilings that are present pretty much everywhere else in the game.

The matching decorations on the reward track were also absolutely beautiful, and I can say with confidence that I finally stopped fretting about what to do with my season tokens whenever I get close to the cap again - I can always use a few more of those beautiful decos from the vendor. There were some other solid pieces on the reward track as well.

Objectives

The objectives were... okay. I definitely appreciated that the devs took the feedback about the ops objective from last season on board and changed it so it only required completion of a single story or veteran mode operation instead of two to four within a single week. Otherwise it was mostly the same old, except that they seemed to want to mix things up a bit by doubling up on certain objectives, like in that one week when all three "kill 100 mobs with your companion" objectives were active at the same time, which was kind of strange in a way that I can't really rate as good or bad.

I did think the seasonal objective to visit another person's stronghold was genius in its simplicity and I had a lot of fun looking at other people's strongholds across all servers. The posts I wrote about this were also quite popular with at least a certain subset of my readers, somewhat to my surprise.

Story

The story is where the disappointment starts to set in, because after how much I enjoyed Galactic Season 5's story, I had high hopes for this one. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying Season 5 was a narrative masterpiece, but it was an actual piece of story content where I didn't expect it, with a fun little mystery and three missions that actually offered you choices that changed the experience a little. I really liked that.

Unfortunately Season 6's story was nothing like it. It still came with three missions that you unlocked as you progressed along the reward track, but they didn't feel like part of a coherent whole, offered no choices and didn't come to any kind of real conclusion.

There was a little Easter Egg for those who brought Amity along again though, solidifying his position as best boy in my mind.

I actually thought the first mission was quite interesting at first, and the idea of "run this flashpoint" being framed as an act of studying history struck me as very clever. Unfortunately the three flashpoints you were required to run are all on the long side if you don't have stealth, and it made the mission a bit of a drag to do more than once. Most annoyingly though, you kind of go into it with the expectation of learning more about your mysterious Chiss benefactors at the end, but you don't get to meet any of them, and Vagol Oss' information about House Inrokini's goals remains vague all the way to the end.

In the second mission you meet a Jedi researcher called Cay Teenu who has also come to help you out with your studies. She's interested in biology and has a strained relationship with a former padawan who was expelled from the Jedi order. I thought this was actually the most coherent of the three missions, because at least it comes to somewhat of a conclusion with the Jedi thanking you for your help at the end.

The final part introduces yet another character who wants you to run errands for her, a disgraced Sith named Juna Helos. However, once you complete her mission, nothing happens. I initially thought I'd missed something - both her and Vagol offer some more conversation options after their missions, but they didn't yield any more information. I even went all conspiracy theorist for a little while, wondering whether there was some deeper meaning to each NPC making recommendations about what kind of decorations you could put into the house, whether you needed to decorate the villa in a certain way to unlock the last part of the story. But no, doing additional research on this just yielded other people being confused by the sudden cut-off as well. Season 6's story consists of nothing but running some errands in the name of mysterious benefactors that you don't get to meet and that's... it. No pay-off. With Juna Helos also appearing in the Spring Abundance storyline, another option I considered was whether there could be a continuation next season, but I think that would be a bit odd and seems unlikely to me.

Blueprint Fragments

I wrote about how the removal of the seasonal reputation track caused some confusion at the start of the season, and the way the devs kept the seasonal currency in as nothing but vendor trash. This definitely seemed like a strange setup, but once I understood what was happening, I didn't mind it too much.

The problems started once I realised how stupidly grindy the final achievement was that replaced the old reputation track. With the seasonal reputations, I'd never had any issues with maxing them out well before the end of the season. Acquiring the reputation tokens took no special effort beyond doing my weekly objectives every week, I just had to remember to actually pop them in order to max out my weekly reputation allocation in a timely manner. In fact, last season I commented on how I didn't see the point of the "Brrazz's Gift" booster items since I never needed to boost the item drop rate for the reputation currency anyway.

In hindsight it feels like that comment of mine made the monkey paw curl... I was hoping for a nicer and more useful type of reward when I wrote that, but the devs apparently took it to mean that they needed to make the boosters more useful by turning the seasonal currency into a horrible grind that will make you yearn for anything to alleviate the pain.

Don't get me wrong, I get that this is the "top tier" achievement that requires extra effort, but the degree of extra effort required this season was ridiculous. I don't know anyone who aimed for that achievement and wasn't fretting about it pretty much throughout the whole season. The thing that got me was that I spend so much time in this game and yet still only just scraped by because of how incredibly grindy it is.

It doesn't sound so bad on paper; after all you earn fragments for completing pretty much any kind of PvE group content, plus while simply fighting things with your companion. In practice though, you can (and I have) spend hours playing the game without making any progress towards this achievement whatsoever. Doing PvP? Nada. GSF? Nope. Killing some ops bosses with your guild but you don't fully clear because you're still progressing? Nothing. Killing things with your companion in areas that don't count for some reason? This has to be the worst one because you just can't tell what kind of area will or won't count and why. I killed hundreds of mobs in the Minboosa District while playing through the 7.5 story repeatedly, and those didn't drop a single fragment. Other areas do seem to be eligible but still offer only a crap drop rate. I did Kessan's Landing dailies (as a non-stealther) with the Brrazz buff on, just to end up with two fragments in my inventory at the end. Out of 1500 needed. It just felt ridiculous.

When someone who plays as many hours as I do a week still struggles, something seems wrong to me. I've heard people say that you can earn a decent amount of fragments by applying the buff and then just slaughtering flesh raiders on Tython for an hour or two... which may be true but also sounds like absolutely awful gameplay. It shouldn't be like that!

And that's without even starting on the fact that the buff items, for what little good they did, were bind on pickup instead of bind to legacy, and the buff didn't stop running once you logged off, so if you couldn't play for the full hour of the buff duration in a single play session - tough luck, the rest was wasted.

I hope that whatever they end up doing for the next season doesn't include anything like this. If they don't want to do a reputation track anymore, that's fine, but collecting 1500 pieces of vendor trash that only drops under certain (unclear) circumstances, and with a low drop rate at that, was just a horrible replacement all around.

Mount Sale Shopping Tips

Yesterday SWTOR surprised us by launching a surprise "Cartel Market Summer Mount Sale", with more than 48 pages of mounts (back) on the Cartel Market and most of them at around half price, though some have even steeper discounts. See, this is exactly what I meant when I said that they were experimenting more with different kinds of sales!

This is definitely something I welcome, because I'm not a fan of enforced scarcity for virtual items, and it's actually kind of mind-boggling how many hundreds of items the SWTOR team has created for the Cartel Market over the last decade and how many of them are not even available for purchase a lot of the time. So bringing them back and with a discount on top is definitely something I approve of. The sale runs until July 16th according to Twitter.

I feel like spending money on cosmetic items you like is one of the better ways of supporting an MMO that you enjoy, so I can only recommend that everyone takes a look at the sale section themselves to see whether there's anything there that interests you. However, I also advocate spending your hard-earned cash responsibly, so here are some tips to make the most out of this sale!

1. Avoid impulse purchases

I know sales are exciting, but seriously, there are 48 pages of mounts here. Unless you're a completionist and there's no limit on the number of Cartel Coins you're willing to spend, take a good look at everything that's available first and have a think about what you really want. That Hoverchair might look kind of nifty on the preview picture, but do you really want to be seen around the fleet on that thing? You don't want to splurge on something on page two just to be out of money when you see something that you actually would've liked much more.

2. Check that you're buying the right thing

What do I mean by that? Well, someone on Twitter pointed out for example that for some reason the Dune Sea Bantha is currently listed twice, at different prices. Obviously you don't want to buy the more expensive one! I think this is just a bug, but still something to watch out for. Likewise, while browsing I noticed that a couple of mounts seemed to have wrong images representing them - for example the Frostcrest Devourer is displayed as brown on the store image, but when you actually preview the item, it's grey and blue. I don't think there are many items affected by stuff like this, but you want to be on the safe side, so look closely. If there are multiple colour variants of a type of mount, you'll want to make sure to grab the one you like the most! This is really just an extension of point one.

3. Compare prices on the GTN

Just because something is on sale on the Cartel Market, that doesn't mean it can't still be cheaper elsewhere! Before hitting that "buy now" button, take a look at the GTN to see whether your mount of choice has any listings there as well, and if so, how much they're going for. There's no universal answer to the question of whether it's better to spend credits or CC because it'll depend on your individual situation, but as an example, there were four mounts I checked out that are going for 750 CC in the sale, and when I looked on the GTN, three of them were only 5-20 million credits there, so I opted to go down that route instead. The fourth one however was going for a hundred million, which I thought was a bit pricey, so I opted to purchase that one with CC instead, especially since I wanted it on a secondary server, where I'm not as rich in-game.

4. Check your cargo holds

Because people are doing the above, now may also be a good time to sell off any spare mounts that you might have stashed away in your Cargo hold. This may not be true for every mount, and there may be a dip in price as some people buy them off the CM specifically to re-sell on the GTN, but it's something worth looking at at least. On Leviathan, I'd been trying to sell a medium-rare mount that I got out of a free Cartel pack for many weeks now, and the moment the CM sale started, it finally sold.

5. Consider buying to re-sell yourself

If you'd like to turn some CC into credits, grabbing a couple of rare mounts while they are on discount may not be a bad idea either. Kal points out that the TF-4 Rampage and Walkhar Trickster are very rare for example. They obviously won't be as rare after this sale, but it's still something to consider, especially if you're willing to play the long game.

Anyone remember when mounts were called "vehicles" in game by the way? It's still the name of the relevant post category on this blog, because at launch we only had speeders and no animal mounts. I think the first animal mount was the tauntaun added with patch 2.3? I don't remember when they changed the actual in-game ability list to say "mounts" instead of "vehicles" though...