Galactic Season 7 in Review

You might call it premature to review a season that's intended to be live for three more months, but I'm about 80% done with it myself (including my goals on the secondary servers) and I think that's good enough to pass judgement on it.

In a nutshell, that judgement is a resounding "meh", similar to last season, though for completely different reasons. I loved Season 6's stronghold focus (I still use the Copero stronghold a lot on all servers - even bought the matching utility bundle from the Cartel Market), but its story was disappointing and the grindy meta achievement infuriating, meaning the good and the bad kind of cancelled each other out, meaning that all things considered I felt kind of blah about it.

Season 7 had no such problems. There hasn't been anything particularly terrible about it... but unfortunately there hasn't been anything particularly great about it either. It's just been kinda boring in a way I honestly didn't expect.

When the season's theme was first announced, I thought the concept of tying it to an existing world event sounded interesting, and bringing back world bosses that had been removed from the game several years ago sounded like a good idea to me too. However, in practice the fact that there wasn't anything new going on kind of got me down after a while.

I had some fun unlocking bounty hunting achievements on the other servers, where I often hadn't touched Bounty Contract Week before, but on Darth Malgus I already got all those achievements about a decade ago, and there just wasn't anything left for me to chase after. Same thing with the DvL bosses - I know some guildies were happy to finally tick off the achievement to kill them all, but again, I already got that four years ago, and I had so many DvL tokens left over I didn't even really know what to do with them.

I can live with a season without any grand rewards (the white Loth kitten is cute but I don't feel a pet is on the same level as a companion or stronghold), I can live with a season without a story, but I need there to be something.

I even kind of missed the currency drops in a weird way, because at least finding a strange new currency among your loot drops gave you an indication that something was different, even if you weren't following the latest news about the game or paying attention to the seasons UI. This time there just wasn't anything going on in the open that made me feel like a season was actually happening, no gameplay that was different from usual, nor anything new and intriguing out to see in the world (I remember seeing one of the meditation shrines in Season 4 before I'd got to the point of knowing what they were for and they instantly grabbed my attention). It just felt like a whole lot of nothing special.

Even Season 1 felt like it had more of a "vibe" than this, and that had all those tedious daily objectives to kill insectoid mobs on different planets. I was not a fan of those at all, but at least "killing insectoids that you usually wouldn't care about" was a theme! This season's one-minute intro to provide a pretext for why killing two DvL bosses a week should count as "bounty hunting" just wasn't enough.

I did like that we had both a seasonal weekly objective that was easy to solo and one for groups every week, but that's kind of it in terms of things that stood out to me positively. More than anything, this season made me feel like the worst kind of jaded MMO veteran, simply because everything about it felt so much like "been there, done that".

If you had a really good time with this season, please do let me know in the comments! I'd love to hear how other people felt inspired to hunt bounties every week or found fighting the DvL bosses a really novel experience. However, for me it was all just a bit too old hat, and I really hope that the next season will actually have something new to offer for long-time players (even if seasons are inherently about replaying old content to some extent).

Impressions from the 7.6 PTS

A combination of PTS incentives and curiosity about the new dynamic encounter system got me to spend some time on the public test server this past week.

My aging PC doesn't have enough disk space to support having two versions of SWTOR installed nowadays, so I had to put the PTS on my laptop, but that actually worked out quite well this time around as I was travelling last week and had the laptop with me for evening entertainment anyway.

Only two planets have dynamic encounters on the PTS right now: Hoth and Tatooine. It's currently not clear whether that's all 7.6 will launch with or whether these planets were picked for focused testing and we'll be surprised with some more content once the patch goes live. There were some indicators on the PTS galaxy map hinting at dynamic events on other planets like Alderaan and Belsavis, but with no actual content available there so far.

One thing I originally wondered after seeing the sneak peek trailer was whether dynamic encounters would be more like World of Warcraft's world quests (as in, personal to you) or dynamic events in other MMOs (shared and the same for everyone). Interestingly, the answer turned out to be "both". There are two types of events, designated as either "group shared" or "encounter shared". In the former, your progress is personal, and the encounter continues to exist for other players on the map even after you've completed it. In the latter, everyone doing stuff contributes to the event's progression, and once the encounter completes, everyone gets their reward at the same time and it disappears from the map. The shared encounters are generally rarer and can still be soloed if nobody else is around, but they tend to require killing more mobs and can therefore feel like a bit of a slog if you're the only person in the area. On the other hand it's a lot of fun (in my opinion) if there are other players around and you can see things progress really quickly as everybody does their part.

In general gameplay terms, the encounters are about what you'd expect: a lot of kill x mobs and some clicking on shiny things, though there are some standouts where the devs clearly tried to be creative and come up with more varied activities. 

I don't think dynamic events are intended to be a new "main" gameplay mode, though depending on how many planets will get them when 7.6 launches, I'd be curious to see how much levelling you could get done by just doing dynamic encounters - as an experiment if nothing else! Realistically though, I think they are meant to be similar to side missions, just without all the picking up and handing in required. At max level they currently award a tiny number of tech fragments and Conquest commendations, small enough that they wouldn't make for a great primary source of either currency.

One thing that made me wonder a little was how much focus there is on highlighting these new dynamic encounters on the map. The galaxy map highlights planets that have them active, and on the planetary map they show up as big glowy diamonds. There's nothing wrong with that in principle, but it does seem an odd choice when the devs took multiple steps in the past to hide away exploration missions and/or make them less prominent because they were apparently confusing/distracting people. Surely new levellers will get a lot more distracted by all these big glowy indicators on their maps? I dunno.

I'm still a bit torn on whether to try the new lair boss on the PTS as well or not. On the one hand I prefer not to spoil myself when it comes to content like that and would rather see things for the first time on live, but on the other hand every bit of feedback might help with making the Propagator Core a better raid.

The initial round of forum feedback certainly hasn't looked too good. Players were asked what they thought of the fight's different phases, and everyone basically replied "what phases?" because by all accounts, it was just an extremely long slog against an enemy with a lot of hitpoints while trying to manage some bad stuff dropping on the floor.

There has since been another dev post on the forums that basically admitted that almost nothing about the fight was working correctly and that it will see massive changes with the next PTS update. Which is good in the sense that it means the tedious version people experienced in the first week wasn't at all final, though it also makes you wonder why and how an operations boss ended up being put on the PTS in that state in the first place (since you'd expect the devs to be able to verify that at least the very basics are functioning before asking people to play test). I guess I'll have a few more weeks to see how things develop and whether I want to have a go myself.