7.6 Sneak Peek!

I was planning to write about something else today, but then as I was browsing YouTube last night, a new video from SWTOR's official account suddenly popped up in my recommendations. Whaaa...?!

Here we've all been sitting around, waiting for them to announce the next livestream, and they surprise us with an actual teaser like that. I like it! While I've enjoyed the livestreams over the last few years, they do kind of seem targeted at fans who are already highly invested, while a four-minute video talking about upcoming patch features should be much more accessible to a more mainstream audience.

The three major points of interest from the video are: the new type of gameplay that's coming in 7.6, the new lair boss, and the upcoming PTS.

The new type of gameplay that will take us back to existing planets is called "dynamic encounters" and is basically... world quests? Dynamic events? Something like that. We don't know enough details (such as how often they'll occur, and how much credit will be shared vs. personal) to say which of the comparable features in other MMOs they will resemble the most, but we get the basic idea: They'll be a bit like quests, but instead of picking them up in town, you'll just find them popping up on your map.

This seems like a smart direction for the dev team to take, as it'll allow them to add more things for players to do at all levels without needing more voice acting or fancy cinematics, plus it's likely to make the open world feel a bit more alive as you should encounter more players running around on old planets.

I'm tentatively excited, though it remains to be seen how engaging this stuff turns out to be in the long term, and of course there's always the question of rewards. I thought it was kind of funny that the example in the video showed the player getting literally nothing for completion (obviously since it's still a work in progress) but it does make you wonder. XP and credits seem like a given, but the game already throws plenty of those at you everywhere else too. Is another source of Conquest commendations at max level going to excite anyone? But then, SWTOR has never been as highly reward-driven as other MMOs, so I really wouldn't expect these to suddenly start handing out higher-level currency or anything like that. We'll see.

In fact, we should find out more soon enough as this stuff will be going on the Public Test Server! And there'll even be a new reward for going on there and helping with the testing: a special mini pet. I just thought this was funny since I have a guildie who asks every time the PTS goes up whether there's a new reward, and usually there isn't... so I outright told him at one point that there doesn't seem to be much point in asking that question every time. I of course had to ping him immediately once I saw the video, hah!

The other thing we'll get to try on the PTS will be the new lair boss, a droid called Propagator Core XR-53, found on Ilum among the remnants of the Emperor's old space station. Unsurprisingly, like R-4 Anomaly, the fight won't have a 16-person mode, which I know most people don't care about but I'll keep moaning about it anyway because as a guild who has done and continues to do 16-mans, I miss that option. (When R-4 was a seasons objective the other week and we had 13 people on, that was quite challenging to sort out.)

Aside from that though, XR-53 will have both a story and a veteran mode, and I'm curious to find out what it'll be like. I crave more group content, but R-4 was such an awful experience for me at launch that I'm also still a bit wary of their current design philosophy in that area, so I'm hesitant to get too excited just yet.

What are you most interested in learning more about in regards to patch 7.6?