Around the SWTOR-sphere: January 2025

How are we already one month into 2025? Time gets weird as you get older. Anyway, here are some links to interesting, useful and/or fun SWTOR-related content that I came across over the past thirty days.

• Intisar decided to pass on making silly predictions this year (even though that has kind of become a tradition for him) and instead gave some more serious thought to what the new year might bring for SWTOR. I'm not going to say much more than that, just go and read for yourself!
• Roger from Contains Moderate Peril, whom I also gave a shout-out last month, continued documenting his journeys in SWTOR with Revisiting Star Wars: The Old Republic Part 4, in which he hits legendary status among other things. While he expressed some interest in endgame, I'm really curious whether there's going to be a part five or not, as I suspect that the transition into endgame is a point where many players fall off.
• Kal from Today in TOR decided to ring in the new year with a guide called "How to Make Credits in SWTOR 2025". I tend to find credit-making guides interesting in the sense that the very idea of playing the game specifically to make credits has always been quite foreign to me, as I find that just looting everything and playing in ways that I enjoy tends to provide for all my needs and then some, but I guess I also don't spend a lot of credits (besides the repair bills during operations) and there'll always be players looking for shortcuts to have more money available while playing less. I do like that Kal tried to label and sort everything very clearly, so everyone can find something whether they are subscribed or not, and whether they play with friends or by themselves. He's also intending to keep the guide updated on a regular basis (since a lot of it is based on selling items on the GTN, where prices might vary).
• Swtorista maintained her recent focus on fashion by fully mapping all the rewards you get for playing through the KotFE/KotET chapters, including the different weapons and outfits for every combat style. I was kind of in awe of that simply because chapters are among my least favourite content in the game and I can't imagine replaying them so many times just for a project, but she told me it made for good content to do on stream, where she can't necessarily focus much on the gameplay anyway while chatting with viewers. Anyway, some of those Outlander armours don't look half bad!
• My favourite post from the SWTOR subreddit this month was a short one called "Smuggler bad ending" by user Lomakys. It's not long so I don't want to spoil it, but in short they experienced something unexpected during the end of chapter one of their class story and the whole description of the event and their response to it made me smile.
• As I was putting this together, a comment I saw on reddit reminded me of a YouTuber I've been meaning to give a shout-out for a while: TakesCooosh. He's made some guides I think, but the primary content on his channel are videos of him doing group content in pugs, usually master mode flashpoints. You might have seen him in your recommendations before if you've ever come across a thumbnail with a short title and a cute pink cartoon twi'lek making a face. The thing is, I'm a little bit conflicted about him to be totally honest - he seems like a nice guy in all the vids I've seen and can be pretty funny, but his mannerisms are also very... "stereotypical streamer" with the YELLING and the EXAGGERATED REACTIONS to everything; it honestly makes me feel very, very old just to watch (and even hurts my ears sometimes). That said, I realise the latter is more of a me problem than anything else, so I still wanted to give that shout-out, because I do think he definitely deserves more viewers than he's got. Here's an example video from last month, hand-picked by me, called "WE GOT SOME NEW GAMERS", in which he tanks a Czerka Core Meltdown and things go kind of wrong, because we all know that's more interesting to watch than a super smooth run, right?
  
• Finally, in news not directly related to SWTOR (anymore), Bioware announced another round of massive lay-offs the other day. There's been a fair amount of talk about it online, but here's the IGN article for reference. While this is sad news for all the affected devs, it does kind of strike me as ironic that after literally over a decade of people predicting SWTOR's imminent doom, it currently looks likely to outlive the studio that originally created it. In 2023, most voices seemed to view the game's move to Broadsword as a bad sign for The Old Republic, but it really does look like it was bad news for Bioware more than anyone else. Ask a Game Developer has a bit of commentary on the lay-offs and also mentions that 2024 was Bioware's first year without SWTOR and that this likely hurt their financial situation significantly.