Some Rambly First Impressions of 7.7

Patch 7.7 dropped this week! MassivelyOP's post about this fact started with the line "A big Star Wars: The Old Republic game update without a story is kind of like Christmas without the presents", which I found surprisingly poignant... but of course there were still interesting things to discover and look forward to.

First there were the new alien skin colours, which seemed to be thing that had people the most excited on social media from what I could tell, based on the number of screenshots and clips from the very first cut scene that I scrolled past and that were meant to show off the poster's newest character in a brand-new hue.

I myself ultimately didn't end up creating a new character, because I realised I still had a bunch of lowbies that I hadn't actually played that much yet. Also, am I the only one who doesn't necessarily create and start new characters at the same time? Sometimes I'll just feel like playing with the character creator and come up with a new concept that I then end up not actually playing until weeks or months later.

Anyway, this week did not feel right for creation, so I just changed the shade of yellow on my newest already existing Twi'lek. After using the character customisation station, he got teleported onto the roof of my Coruscant stronghold... the last time that happened I thought it was just a one-time glitch, but I might have to upgrade it to bug - then again, it might just get filed away under "weird stuff that happens inside player housing" anyway.

The new dynamic encounters were very fun. I took some lowbies to the starter planets to check them out as I would've felt a bit weird razing all those level 5 mobs on a max-level character in raid gear, though other people clearly had no such reservations. The new events brought a lot of existing players back to the starter worlds to check out the the new content and earn some new achievements, and the experience felt like absolute mayhem. Anyone who just so happens to start playing SWTOR for the first time this week must be wondering what the holy hell is going on once they leave their first story phase. Now, this particular level of craziness obviously won't last, but I do think that in the long run these new encounters will still serve to make things a lot more lively on the starter planets going forward, and I can't help but wonder how that will affect players' first impressions of the game in the future. 

Unlike when the first dynamic encounters were added to Tatooine and Hoth, I didn't check these newest ones out on the PTS this time, so it was all fresh and exciting to me. Even having only checked out the starter planets so far, I thought it was very charming how the new encounters were used to enhance the mood and setting of each area. For example the Jedi training grounds on Tython were always meant to be under attack by flesh raiders when you first arrive there, but it was all fairly tame, with the same couple of NPCs shooting at each other without anything really happening. Now there's an actual dynamic encounter about a flesh raider attack on top of that, during which you'll see way more mobs spawn, as well as a proper flurry of activity from players joining the fight or otherwise defending the area. It's quite cool. Jiguuna on Hutta was another good example, as there's always meant to be a gang war going on there when you arrive, but now that is dialled up to eleven when the associated dynamic encounter is going on.

I have yet to dip my toes into the encounters on the capital worlds and on Ilum, but I don't want to rush to "the end" and reach a point where I've seen it all too quickly. My ops team also wants to check out XR-53 on master mode, and while I'm personally not hopeful that we'll make much progress on it, it's at least another new thing to check out. 

Ranking the First 7 Galactic Seasons

We're getting to the point in Galactic Season 8 where I'm starting to - one by one - complete my various goals related to the season. Once I'm all done, I'll jot down some thoughts on the season as a whole as usual, but in the meantime, I've been finding myself mentally revisiting Galactic Seasons of the past.

Seasons have been with us for four years now, which isn't that long in the grand scheme of things, considering that Star Wars: The Old Republic has been live for more than thirteen years at this point, but it is long enough for things to have changed over time and for people (including me) to start getting nostalgic about the way things used to be.

So I decided it would be fun to try and rank past seasons based on how fun I think they were. I'll be able to give some objective arguments relating to things like objectives and rewards, but I think my main points are going to be subjective. Still, it could be interesting to see how much people agree or disagree (so feel free to chime in in the comments).

Galactic Season 5

Season 5, titled "Confidence in Power" lasted from September 2023 to January 2024 and was controversial among at least part of the player base for being the first season to no longer include a companion as a reward, but to me personally it was my favourite season so far. It's not that I was against companion rewards in principle, but I did feel that the way they were implemented was becoming a bit stale at this point, so focusing on something else for a change was fine by me.

I loved the little storyline that came with the season, even if it was entirely KOTOR style with no voice acting - I enjoyed its mix of intrigue and humour, and the choices were meaningful enough that it was fun to replay it on multiple characters to see different outcomes. I also appreciated that for the reputation tied to the season, they added a major quality of life feature by making it so that reputation tokens could be acquired by any of your alts on the fleet instead of needing to unlock the seasonal companion on each character first.

The reward track didn't have a major season-defining prize (as cute and iconic as the Loth-cat kitten turned out to be) but was otherwise very solid. I was pleased by the many stronghold decorations, and while I wouldn't want to wear any of the armour sets in full, they contained some very nice and versatile pieces that I've gone on to use on several characters since then. My main on Shae Vizla also still rides around on her Armasaur. Overall this season just fully delivered for me in terms of fun, and that's all I can really ask for.

Galactic Season 3

Seasons 2-4 were very similar in their format and I feel that they were very close in terms of quality as well. The reason I rate GS3 the highest of the three is that it felt slightly more refined than Season 2, but didn't suffer from too much staleness creeping in yet (which was something I felt started happening with Season 4).

I really liked PH4-LNX as a companion - I thought her dialogues were fun and she had an interesting backstory, which was significantly fleshed out compared to what had been done in Season 2. I also liked the seasonal activity of catching cheating gamblers in cantinas.

The bright yellow weapons and dyes that were part of the reward track during "Luck of the Draw" were a bit garish and didn't necessarily match with a lot of things, but yellow is my favourite colour so I still appreciated them. The Security Officer and Pit Boss outfits that you could earn were fantastic looks for non-Force-using characters, and my bounty hunter on the Leviathan server still sports a dyed version of the Pit Boss outfit to this day.

Galactic Season 2

"Shadows of the Underworld" ran from February to July 2022 and made a major splash. It released at the same time as 7.0/Legacy of the Sith, and for those of you who weren't around at the time, the expansion was not well received at all. Yet even the loudest complainers could find no flaw with the new Galactic Season, which was a particularly powerful compliment at the time.

At the end of Season 1 I'd written up a list of things that I felt would probably need adjusting going forward, but the devs went above and beyond anything I could've ever thought of and gave the system a major revamp with Season 2, in a rare case of Bioware iterating on something quickly and decisively in a way that was pretty much universally well-received. The changes felt refreshing and smooth and everybody loved them. I remember Swtorista discovering that Fenn Zeil had more than one conversation and being all "OMG, the drama, I'm so here for it", which made me laugh. Really, the only reason it's not closer to the top of the list is that I didn't particularly care for the underworld theme or Fenn Zeil as a companion, and I don't remember any of the other rewards knocking my socks off either.

Galactic Season 4

 "A Passage of Peace" lasted from March to August 2023 and continued to emulate everything that had been good about GS2 and 3. Amity is another companion that I quite liked, though the backstory to justify him being armoured from head to toe and yet another follower who just spouts alien gibberish was particularly convoluted. The armour sets from this season were also very good-looking.

The season's only problem in my opinion was that because it was so similar to the previous two seasons, there was a definitive air of the whole thing becoming very routine and a little stale, even if nothing was really wrong with it.

Galactic Season 6

GS6's theme was "Building a Foundation" and it was active from March to July 2024. I can see my ranking of this one being somewhat controversial, because I think depending on what you care about in the game, you might have had a very different experience with it.

The Copero stronghold is gorgeous and made for a fantastic reward, plus I thought the stronghold theme in general worked really well (I really enjoyed visiting multiple different public strongholds for the seasons objective every week). And if that's the primary thing you took away from the season, I can easily see this one ranking in someone's top three, if not in the top spot.

However for me, the completely linear storyline that ended abruptly and didn't seem to go anywhere felt like a major disappointment after the high bar set by Season 5, and the meta achievement to collect vendor trash was initially confusing, then grindy and frustrating. Maybe those things didn't really bother you, and that's totally fair. But for me it was ultimately a season both of great highs and disappointing lows, with the latter pushing it further down in my personal ranking.

Galactic Season 7

I was really hesitant about which season deserved last place and went back and forth on the decision a couple of times. I might honestly feel a bit differently about it depending on the day of the week. As it stands, "The Greatest Bounty" was decidedly meh in my opinion, but in an inoffensive way. The white Loth-cat kitten was cute, and I think it's good that the DvL bosses were brought back to the game, but ultimately the whole bounty hunting theme felt very weak to me and I thought the whole thing was a bit boring.

Galactic Season 1

The other week I saw someone on the forums get all nostalgic for Season 1, to which my immediate reaction was "no way". I can't really think too badly of "The Strange from Kubindi" since it was SWTOR's first season ever, the devs were still figuring out how things should work, and we as players didn't have any set expectations yet. However, I also can't deny that Season 2 was a massive improvement on it in pretty much every conceivable way.

Season 1's heavy focus on daily objectives was quite draining, and I spent way more time running dailies, heroics, or just grinding mobs than I'd ever consider fun. I appreciated that Altuur had a bit of an intro conversation on Odessen, but otherwise I didn't really care about him, and I didn't like the season's insect theme either.

Like I said, I never felt too bad about it all since it was all new and I didn't know what to expect - plus we got the fleet strongholds during this first season, something I'd almost forgotten about. Nonetheless, I think that every season that's come after has been an improvement on the concept.

Even though seasons have "only" been part of SWTOR for four years, it's hard to imagine the game without them now, especially considering how many other MMOs include similar systems nowadays. I can only hope that the devs can continue to come up with ways of mixing things up and keeping them interesting to do.

7.7 Dev Stream: More Alien Colours Are Nice, but Still No Story

Yesterday it was time for another dev stream, this time focused on the upcoming patch 7.7. There was some competition for my attention as the new pope had gone live mere moments earlier, but I loaded up Twitch on my laptop and dived right in.

There was a new Twitch drop to be earned (a purple-framed Dromund Kaas poster), for watching one hour of live SWTOR content, but apparently Twitch measures time a bit differently from the rest of the world as it took almost the full one and a half hours of the stream for it to show as earned. Yes, the stream lasted one and a half hours! I wish I could say this was a sign of it being chock-full of exciting updates, but to be honest I get the feeling that they've just got better at fluffing up what they have to make it look bigger. For example there was a whole section about fixing a bug with the sprinter guild perk, which... don't get me wrong, fixing bugs is a good thing, no arguments there! But is a single bug fix of that nature really important enough to warrant a segment with the game producer on your livestream to get players hyped up? Personally I don't think so.

The thing that we of course all wanted to know above all else was whether there was any update on the story content and sadly, the answer was not really. Basically, they've built 7.7, but the voice actors' strike is still going on, so we're still not getting anything. The only thing I noted down here was that they showed the little trailer from Star Wars Celebration again (the one that included [Spoiler?]) and the accompanying slide said it featured "a mysterious figure that has been pulling the strings behind the scenes", which does seem to confirm that this person's role is going to be more than a throwaway cameo.

Anyway, having the second major patch in a row release without story content will be a bummer, but I guess I can't really complain as we know the voice actors' strike is still a thing. I'd just gotten my hopes up a little as a "datamining-adjacent" friend had told me that something had happened and somehow the 7.6 story looked ready for release now. (You know who you are; consider yourself given the side eye!) But that's not the devs' fault, and just goes to illustrate once again why you shouldn't put too much stock in things that are datamined.

Anyway, they still managed to fill a one and a half hour stream, and it wasn't all bug fixes, so there obviously were some other things announced.

Among a number of UI updates to the mission log and map, the one that stood out the most was the addition of the so-called "eras window", a new tab on your mission log. All this does is basically show you the storyline split into "eras" (which mostly align with expansions, but not 100%), to show you where you are and what's coming up. This seems like it could be a major boon to returning players who don't remember where they left off in terms of story. It was also noted that it doesn't "currently" include notes on any decisions you've made, though I guess this is something they could expand on in the future. Either way, it's a good feature but won't do much for me as a "power user". I wrote about how I had to create a spreadsheet to keep track of all my alts' progress almost seven years ago, which is much more detailed and most importantly, let's me see where each character is at without having to log into them in game to check. I still rely on that to this day, but for less hardcore Swtorites this new window will be useful.

In terms of group content, we got the official announcement for master mode XR-53, which is cool for the relevant target audience but I suspect it will be too hard for me and my guildies so I can't muster too much enthusiasm for it right now. I was also a bit disappointed by the clarification that the new augment schematics it will drop will be brand-new gold augments that will outclass the purple ones that people spent the last few months researching and crafting. We don't even know whether you'll be able to reverse-engineer the gold ones by deconstructing the purple ones (it was asked in chat multiple times but not answered). So eh. As a side note to this, they said that PvP weeklies will start rewarding small amounts of corrupted bioprocessors, the (until now) unique crafting material dropped by XR-53, which is nice I guess, though for me personally the bottleneck has actually turned out to be other mats.

Speaking of PvP, PvP Season 8 will launch with 7.7 and in order to align it more with how Galactic Seasons work, it will now also include an option to just buy out levels with Cartel coins. I've got to admit there was a small part of me that bristled at this because isn't PvP about skill? You shouldn't be able to buy that, right? But then, these new PvP seasons have always been just about participation with no particular requirement to succeed, so I guess it's not that big a deal.

They talked about Nar Shaddaa Nightlife returning in July, which just felt weird to think about this early in May, but I guess summer isn't that far away. The main thing that irked me here was that there was no comment about making the various slot machine chips a legacy-wide currency. They talked about this last year and said it was complex and would take time - but then they managed to change the DvL tokens from character- to legacy-bound within a couple of weeks, so I was really hoping we'd be able to start this year's Nightlife with something similar. But nope, nothing. I guess I can still hope that it will be addressed later, but for now I'm just disappointed that the main thing I was curious about in regards to this event was not mentioned at all.

The biggest and most universally accessible bit of gameplay to be added with the patch will be new dynamic encounters on seven planets, which will include all the starter planets, the two faction capitals and Ilum. The starter planets won't have that many encounters due to how small they are, but still. I thought going for these early planets next was an interesting choice when I first heard chatter about it during the previous PTS. I thought Tatooine and Hoth made great sense as first locations for this new feature, and in my mind the best place to use it going forward were going to be other large planets with a lot of empty space, such as Quesh, Belsavis or Voss. Cramming them into the tiny starter planets is kind of the opposite of that, but I can understand the devs wanting to introduce the feature to new players early on in order to get people interested and familiar from the get-go. I'm still a little concerned that it might end up being a bit of a pain to have god knows how many players compete for the same six k'lor'slugs on Korriban (which would not improve the new player experience I reckon), but we'll see how it goes. In general I've really enjoyed dynamic encounters and am looking forward to getting more of them.

One interesting thing they announced closer to the end was "combat updates", which is to say they are going to make some changes to combat styles, such as which discipline is selected for new players by default and what order you get some abilities in. The example they gave was that Guardians/Juggernauts don't really have any AoE other than Force Sweep/Smash for a long time, so they want to pull Cyclone/Sweeping Slash forward and grant it automatically at level 7 instead of making it a level 27 optional choice like it is right now. This sounds like a good idea in principle, though I could have thought of better examples to choose. From what I recall there are currently some utilities that actually give you buffs to certain abilities several levels before you actually get that ability, which is just weird, and I'm hoping that this kind of thing will also be included in this overhaul. (I quickly logged in to find an example and e.g. Deception Shadows have a talent option at level 27 to add functionality to Force Cloak when they don't actually get Force Cloak until level 31.)

I do wonder a little though, as another example they gave about something they want to change was to make the default spec for Shadows Serenity (the dot spec) instead of Deception (the direct damage one). I just wrote down "why?" in my notes here as the latter is much easier to play, so why change to the more difficult one as default? So I have some reservations as well, not fully understanding what they are going for here.

The big surprise at the end of the stream (including one here seems to be a pattern they are settling into) was that they'll be adding lots more skin colours for aliens in the patch, and I do mean lots. Like, Nautolans will go from having 10 colours to 95 different shades. Now, only some of those will be completely new colours, like the (inexplicably, to me) popular purple Twi'leks, but just getting a lot more different shades of say, green, will be cool too. I think this was the most exciting announcement of the stream for many players, and I liked it too. It's just no replacement for actual story content, you know? I continue to wait.

Meanwhile, further info about the patch and stream, should you want it:

• VOD on Twitch
• VOD on YouTube
• Article on the official website
  
• Swtorista summary
• Today in TOR summary
• Vulkk summary

May the Fourth Be With You

Happy Star Wars Day! It's that day when even people who aren't superfans are suddenly reminded of Star Wars, resulting in a bit of an activity bump for SWTOR every year (at least if Twitch stats are anything to go by).

It's also commonly a time when the devs are particularly generous with giveaways and freebies, and this year is no exception. The free pet and 50% off collections sale are pretty much expected at this point, but no less welcome for it. There's also a double XP event running until May 16th, which has never really been my jam but I do know plenty of people love levelling during double XP.

The thing they really got me with this time was additional sales on various Cartel Market items. I'd been keeping an eye on the Gothic Master set for a while now since I wanted it for a specific character but didn't want to pay full price, and I didn't like the credit price it was commonly going for on the GTN either. At 40% off I finally picked it up, as well as copies of the Coruscant and Dromund Kaas utility decoration bundles on every server. (I'd bought both on Darth Malgus for full price, and decided that I was going to get them on the other servers eventually, once there was a sale. They are also 40% off right now, so I went for it.)

This resulted in me dropping below 1000 Cartel Coins for the first time in what must be more than a decade at this point. I have this post from 2014 as a record of me buying Cartel Coins, but after that I was more than sustained by the refer-a-friend program for a long time. (In this post from 2018 I mention casually that I was close to hitting 50k Coins from this passive income "again".) Once the RAF system was shut down, my virtual wealth slowly started to decrease, but my subscriber stipend and Galactic Seasons were still bringing in plenty since I didn't spend CC very often.

Now, however... I might actually have to think about giving Broadsword some extra money if there's anything I want soon! Though since I rarely do, odds are good that my balance will be topped up with more free coins soon enough before it becomes an issue.