On the Comlink

One of patch 7.6's more minor features was the addition of the new comlink interface. To be honest, when the devs announced this on the stream in November, part of me wondered how something like that was considered important enough to be included on a stream... but in hindsight I think it's good that they showed it off in advance, as otherwise I'm pretty sure my reaction would've been a big WTF on first encountering it in game.

Musco also said on the stream that this new interface wasn't meant to replace cinematics and proper conversations, so naturally in the first place I encountered it... it felt like it was replacing a proper conversation, namely the short intro mission for the new ops boss.

The story wrapper missions for operations have been in KOTOR style for almost a decade, so suddenly seeing this purely text interface pop up, with not even an NPC talking to me in Huttese or anything, was certainly surprising. To be honest, the dialogue also felt a bit like it had originally been written for a traditional conversation, as the NPC - after indicating that they don't know who they're addressing on first contact - replies to your first comment with "Oh! It's YOU!". This is the kind of response that would make sense in an in-person interaction, as many a quest giver in the game starts by muttering something or other just to suddenly recognise our character the moment they look more closely. But in a texting interface, where it's already been established that the NPC doesn't know whose number this is... what are they recognising without seeing my face or hearing my voice? Does my character have a super obvious profile picture in her chat app? It just felt like a bit of a stretch is all I'm saying.

Anyway, I may poke fun, but ultimately I didn't mind this change to an ops intro mission of all things. As an operations player, I was just happy to have a new boss to fight, and one that's well-tuned and fun too. I would've gone and done the new ops even with zero story attached to it, and so would many others I'm sure, so the fact that they trimmed down the intro and post-ops debrief to a simple text exchange is no skin off my back.

I will say though that I liked the other two situations in which I encountered the new interface better. One is the little story that comes with the new Remote Outpost decoration bundle from the Cartel Market (about which I'm planning to write another post) and the other was one of the new dynamic encounters on Tatooine, where you're simply interacting with some terminals. In the latter, having this new interface instead of a KOTOR-style cut scene felt very organic, and the Remote Outpost missions felt like something that simply wouldn't have existed without this feature - the devs wouldn't have made a voiced storyline to go along with a bunch of decos at this stage of the game, but using the comlink interface they could add a little something extra that we wouldn't have gotten otherwise, so that was nice.

All in all, I think this is a positive addition to the game, assuming the devs do stick to using it in ways like these. Most people around me haven't minded it at all either, though I will say that there was one guildie who absolutely freaked out when he saw the new ops mission in writing, shouting something along the lines of: "What is this? They are going to make me read? I specifically play this game because I don't want to read things; if I wanted to read things I'd be playing WoW!"