Around the SWTOR-sphere: October & November 2024

October was a fairly quiet month in terms of how much interesting SWTOR content I saw, but things picked up considerably in November.

• Astute readers may recall that I've already been on Bluesky for over a year, but it was a fairly quiet place for most of that time. The last month or so saw a massive surge in activity however, and suddenly the previously almost non-existent SWTOR community on the site has been popping off like crazy, much to my personal delight. Far be it from me to tell you which social media sites to use or how (if any at all), however if you're a SWTOR player and interested in giving Bluesky a try, Swtorista put together a nice guide for how to get started and how to easily find other people interested in chatting about SWTOR on the site. The game itself has also had an official account over there for almost a year already.
• The OotiniCast, SWTOR's longest-running fan podcast, also had an exciting month as they got to release their 500th episode! They managed to make it a special one too by securing an interview with Keith Kanneg and Eric Musco. They chatted about a number of different topics but the things I personally noted down as interesting were that the upcoming Mac launcher actually came about due to them wanting to update the regular launcher, that porting the game to consoles would be a "monumental" effort, and that whatever the next venture is going to be, it probably won't be a companion. The latter was intriguing to me because I can't quite picture how a non-companion reward would even work with that system, but I guess we'll find out!
  
  The podcast's 501st episode was released immediately afterwards by the way, and had the hosts Chill and Kittykisses do their usual thing while also discussing the interview from the previous episode.
• The State of the Old Republic Podcast, which updates a bit irregularly, also released two episodes in October and November, with the first one mostly talking about the Feast of Prosperity and Galactic Season 7, and the second one talking about the 7.6 dev livestream.
• In more random SWTOR content, big YouTube channel Gamology released a video called David Hayter Reacts to Star Wars The Old Republic. (If you don't know, David Hayter provides the English voice for the male Jedi knight.) The title is a bit misleading because it's not really a reaction video in the classic sense, more of an interview during which he answers some questions about Star Wars in general and his work on SWTOR in specific. It contains some interesting tidbits though, even if the video editors seemingly got Kari Wahlgren (voice of the female Jedi knight) and Xanthe Elbrick (voice of the female Sith inqusitior) mixed up.
• Speaking of Xanthe, an anonymous commenter linked me to a GoFundMe in her name that's supposedly meant to help her recover from colon cancer?! I hadn't heard about that at all and hope she's doing well. I feel a bit weird linking to a health-related GoFundMe because I never know whether these are legit (though this would be a weirdly specific thing to make up and looks real enough to me) plus the general concept of people in the US basically having to beg for money online to not die from routine health problems always makes me freeze in existential dread, but in this instance at least it sounds like she's already on the road to recovery and this is more of friend trying to help her out a bit.
• As we're approaching the end of the year, reddit puts out its annual recaps, and I always tend to find the ones for the subreddits I frequent most regularly quite interesting. I was going to link it here but apparently you can only view recaps on their phone app? Boo. Anyway, I did save one post from the SWTOR subreddit that I personally found interesting recently (not from the recap). If you come here regularly, you already know that the ones that catch my eye usually aren't the most upvoted ones but ones with interesting comments, and so it is with this one as well: "Why is the Kotfe dlc so disliked?", which is a question that I often see newer players ask, and understandably so I think - if you come to the game now and it's just another storyline you play through, it can't possibly seem that bad. Anyway, what I found interesting is that there were a lot of different answers, and even quite a few I didn't personally agree with, even though I was incredibly relieved to leave the "Knights of" era behind myself. Which just goes to show that back then the devs really managed to conjure up a perfect storm of things that ticked off a surprising variety of players in different ways.

Got any good SWTOR-related content of your own to share? Feel free to leave a link in the comments and tell us what you liked about it!