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).
This entire season felt incredibly lazy. The four "new" sets added to the DvL vendors are far too little to get someone that's already finished with the bosses to grind them again. I cannot imagine it's that difficult to add the bosses as personnel decorations, or to add new rewards to the BBA vendors. This content is years old as you said, there's gotta be some incentive for veteran players to participate as well.
ReplyDeleteThe fewer and fewer amounts of story with those events is also annoying. Seriously, how hard is it to make cutscenes where you're only re-using alien voice lines? I can genuinely write an entire mini-arc with unique responses for each class in like a week at most.
I've never really gotten into the season themes that much because they've never really added enough content for me to really get into the themes. They could remove the theme entirely and I'd still participate. My motivation to participate has always been getting all the rewards, especially the cartel coins. I use most of the item rewards on alts, and I use the cartel coins to work on my cartel market wishlist.
ReplyDeleteHowever, after two more seasons, I will have all the cartel market items I want. Then I will stop doing seasons on secondary servers. The seasons are not much of a time commitment on one server, just 2-3 hours a week to do all the weeklies, so I will probably keep up with them just for the item rewards.
I like the rewards too, but they don't motivate me that much - the devs could remove them and just add a bar that says "you did it" at the end and I'd probably still do seasons. 😄 But it's a lot more fun when there's something novel and interesting going on.
DeleteI do like the rewards XD They (both for GS and especially PVP seasons) really motivate me to get them all on my main server.
DeleteI agree new armors on DvL vendors were lazy/ugly. That said the DvL bosses do seem to have plenty groups forming on fleet, however it seems to have calmed down a bit now after many seem to have completed GS/DvL achievements for killing all the bosses once.
I will be so glad to be done with this season in a few weeks' time. It's been interesting having the bounty event active all the time, and part of me actually thinks logically it perhaps should be available all the time anyway, but not having those conquest objectives for contracts really hurts, as you mentioned in one of your previous posts about it.
ReplyDeleteThe DvL bosses being back has been decent, and while I'm also glad we've seen players get those achievements at long last, it's definitely a stark reminder of just how much stuff several of us have done which are just "seen it, next!", which is absolutely not healthy but in this scenario it also can't really be helped...
At this stage in proceedings, seasons are set in their way. I wonder if now that they've been the same way since GS2, maybe the core element of how seasonal progress is attained needs another look in general. That said, I'm not really sure what they can really do that's a radical change and doesn't potentially lend itself to abuse like those who went farming 40 DvL bosses in week one this time around...
I really like dvl, I used to group up for them before they were removed from game, but was still missing 5when they taken out of game.
ReplyDeleteThanks to gs I've not finished them
I often make groups on fleet for the dvl, and as shan is a small server compared to sf, it usually lot of same people weeks after week who you find in groups. Get to find lot of good people and made some new discord friends along the way.
Ita fun that can make group on rep do boss then all of us swap to imp no issue and regroup.
While it's not a story season, I've enjoyed dvl and bounty as objectives even though I now have finished both and bounty rep is useless to me. Would be cool if they made a rep trade in system where you could trade one rep token for another type of lesser value so can play what you like and still contribute at lower rate to other event reps