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.