7.6 Dev Stream Reactions

After watching the big Warcraft Direct stream yesterday, it was quite a contrast to spend time on SWTOR's 7.6 dev stream tonight. Smaller studio, fewer viewers, but also a much more relaxed atmosphere and lots of laughs. I was immediately overcome with an urge to make a bunch of gifs of the interactions between Eric Musco and Papa Keith, intending to post them on Bluesky, but it couldn't cope with me uploading any images at the time (I later learned it wasn't just me), so I'll be inserting them into this blog post instead, even if that may seem a bit random!

As usual, if you want the full rundown of every little detail, I recommend watching the recording of the stream yourself or reading a detailed summary elsewhere - Kal already has one up here for example. Over here I'm more choosy with what I talk about and won't mention everything, but I'll add some commentary to make it more interesting. Let's get on with it!

Topical and time-sensitive things first: There's a new Twitch drop for the next 14 days, an Ilum poster deco with a purple border. Handily livestream viewers were able to earn it right away simply by watching the stream as it only requires one hour of watch time. There'll also be another Twitch drop, a purple Vulptilla mount, once 7.6 launches. We weren't given an exact date for that, but from what they did say on the stream it sounds like it will be early December.

Also, effective immediately, there's a big 50% off sale on dyes going on! The interesting thing related to this was that they mentioned that they're planning to make changes to how dyes work soon... I'm sure I'm not the only one whose mind immediately jumped to the notion of making them unlockable in Collections, something I've seen people request more than once. I don't think that will happen though - dye sales have got to be too much of a money-maker for that - but I'm still curious to hear what they've got in mind once the time comes.

We got some info about the 7.6 story, and I tend to not go into too much detail about story previews in these posts, but I did want to note that Imperials will finally get to see Major Anri again, almost three years after Manaan, and that the story is supposedly going to be structured a bit differently, consisting of four threads you can advance in any order, about Shae Vizla, Darth Malgus, the Hidden Chain and Darth Nul's holocron respectively. I'm curious to see how that'll pan out - it could mean more content, but I've got to admit that personally I'm a little worried that "you can do them in any order" means that each "thread" will contain a lot of exposition/cut-scene watching and fewer interesting choices - but we'll see.

Unfortunately after all that talk about how interesting the new story is going to be, we won't actually get to see it at 7.6's release, because while the patch itself will still land as planned, they had to delay the story update part of it because they "currently don't have all the elements [they] need to complete this story", which I've seen people interpret as having to do with the voice actors' strike, though I don't know whether that's just speculation or backed by anything that was said elsewhere.

There was some talk about dynamic encounters and the new lair boss, but I won't go into that here as I already covered those topics in my post about the PTS from last week. They just confirmed that dynamic encounters will only exist on Hoth and Tatooine at launch, with the possible exception of Hidden Chain invasions, which might also happen on other planets from the sounds of it.

The new lair boss is also going to drop crafting materials for new augments, something that people had already caught on to some time ago but that hadn't been officially announced. These new augments will be better than the current gold augments. I guess this will offer a sort of gear progression without further raising overall item rating, though it does make me wonder whether the next gear reset perhaps isn't as far away as I thought.

There was some talk about new Cartel Market items, which I usually don't go into here either, but there was one thing that piqued my interest: there'll be a new decoration bundle called the Remote Outpost Bundle, and it'll come with a small amount of story/gameplay attached from the sounds of it. I was immediately reminded of the encrypted datacubes from back in the day and how people were not happy with those, though I guess a big part of that was that they came from inside Cartel packs, while this will be a direct purchase. I'll make sure to get it when it comes out and will let you know whether it's worth the money or not.

In terms of gameplay, there'll be a new UI feature called comlink to interact with terminals and characters in a more organic way without having to always resort to KOTOR-style cut scenes. They emphasised that this isn't meant to replace cinematics and proper conversations but should simply serve as another option for interactions where appropriate. The example they showed was of someone using a terminal and being given a prompt to enter a password, where in the current system that would bring up the KOTOR-style black bars and mute dialogue options like "enter code" or "walk away". They explained that they could also see this working for characters "texting" you.

PvP Season 7 will still start with the launch of 7.6 and bring an end to 8-man premades, as they'll once again be limited to four people max, and the devs are also disabling the old level 75 set bonuses in PvP to reduce the power of twinks. Not what I personally consider PvP's biggest problems right now, but better than nothing. What did stand out to me was that one of the new season rewards is actually going to be a proper emote instead of the previous "text-only" one, which might actually be something to look forward to for me.

As the stream was getting close to wrapping up, Eric and Keith dropped a few more surprises on us at the end. First off, we'll get a new mount as a free subscriber reward that introduces something new: the ability to have your (humanoid) companion ride in a sidecar beside you and a non-combat pet in the luggage rack. The preview looked hilarious and made me laugh out loud. I'm not sure how much I'll use it but it'll be fun for a little while if nothing else. Plus I appreciate that they decided to make it a sub reward instead of a Cartel Market item. There'll also be two new mounts from dynamic encounter-related achievements that won't show your companion but will include your active mini pet.

Next they announced that they'll do a character name purge for the first time in a long time. If you're a subscriber, all your characters are safe, but if not, you'll want to log into any toons that haven't been logged into since January 1st of this year, else they will be flagged for a rename. I wonder if that'll give me a chance to claim Shintar without the funny i on Tulak Hord, the one server where I don't currently own the name... they also mentioned that they'll try to remember to do this a bit more often in the future to not have all these names taken up by inactive characters.

Finally, a big surprise at the very end: they're working on more art modernisation for planetary environments, but also for player characters. Musco immediately assured everyone that their number one priority was to not change the overall feel of the characters. The examples they showed looked really good, with just more detail on the facial textures and more gloss on the eyes. (When I tried to explain this to Mr Commando afterwards, he said that talking about shiny hair and eyes made me sound like I was trying to sell him a dog!)

All in all, a fun stream with lots of news and some interesting things to look forward to, though the story update being delayed with no clear ETA was a bit of a bummer. What was your favourite part of this stream?