31/07/2025

Some Interesting News From SWTOR's 7.7.1 Dev Stream

I was somewhat disappointed by the last two dev streams, but the voice actors' strike ended a few weeks ago, so I was positive that we'd get some good news about the next story update this time, and I was also hopeful that whatever they were going to announce about Galactic Season 9 was going to be more appealing to me than Season 8's uprising focus had been. I did get both of those things, but as I always do, I have some nits to pick as well.

Story is coming... but later and perhaps less than we'd hoped

At least when talking with some of my friends, there had been a hope expressed that the next story patch would be one big "catch-up patch" giving us a bigger chunk of story than usual, kind of like how Echoes of Oblivion and Spirit of Vengeance (which were originally supposed to be separate pieces of content) were both released at the same time after delays caused by Covid.

This... is not going to be the case. 7.8, which will come out before Christmas, will have the "Galactic Threads" story that was originally meant to be included in patch 7.6 last Christmas, and then they'll speed up a little bit and add "Master's Engima", the story originally built for patch 7.7, with 7.8.1, which should then launch at some point early next year and would usually have included only the start of Galactic Season 10 and no story update.

While I'm glad to finally have something close to a date, having to wait another four months or so until the next story drop still hurts - by that point the game will have gone nearly 18 months without a story patch, which is unprecedented in this MMO's history.

The other thing that stuck out to me is that if we're getting the story that was meant to be in 7.6 in 7.8, what was meant to be in 7.8 before that? No story? Ultimately it feels like aside from the delays, we also lost one of the twice-a-year story installments due to the strike, which sucks.

Same thing with date nights by the way - they mentioned working on one back in the 7.6.1 stream, but now we won't even get one with 7.7.1, with the next expected release (Torian and Kira) coming with 7.8.1 next year. 

Galactic Season 9: Flashpoint Resurgence

As for GS9, its theme is flashpoints. Yippee! There will be Czerka buffs involved like there were for uprisings during GS8, which I don't really care about, but I'm good with running flashpoints with or without buffs. Unfortunately it sounded like the objectives will be veteran mode only, which is a bit disappointing to me personally and will not encourage my guildies to group up I reckon, but still, it's flashpoints.

The most interesting bit of the stream to me personally was the devs talking about how they were using the occasion of this seasonal focus on flashpoints to make some changes to the activity finder. A big quality of life improvement they will make is that you'll finally be able to queue as multiple roles again, change roles while queueing (so that you can e.g. do dailies in a dps spec while queueing for a flashpoint as healer) and it will take both of your combat styles into account, meaning you could queue as all three roles if you wanted and have the right combat styles for it. Now, to be clear, only the last bit of that is actually new - both the ability to queue for multiple roles and the ability to queue as a different role than you're currently playing were in the game before but got patched out at some point, I think because they were buggy or causing issues of some sort. Still, I'm very glad to see these features make a comeback at last.

They are also going to improve the loot you get in flashpoints while levelling, though it's not entirely clear what that will mean - I'm guessing more gear that is actually appropriate for your level and combat style, because getting drops that you can't even use or not use for another twenty levels was definitely a thing sometimes.

For the max levels, you'll no longer have to queue for all flashpoints to be eligible for additional daily/weekly rewards, but can exclude a few that you may want to avoid. You still won't be rewarded for just spamming Hammer Station and nothing else, but you can untick a couple you don't like, which I guess is nice. 

No more "spacebar plz"

The thing that kind of shocked me was that in connection to all these flashpoint changes, queued veteran and master mode flashpoints will no longer feature any cut scenes or group conversations; everything will just be auto-skipped and if there was some sort of decision to be made (such as whether to kill or spare the captain in the Black Talon) it will just do so automatically. If you want to see the conversations and cut scenes in the future, you'll need to do story mode (where available) or manually walk into the higher difficulty with some friends.

Now, I completely understand why they are doing this and I'm sure many people will consider this a major quality of life improvement. I made a whole compilation poking fun at people's urge to skip the cut scenes seven years ago. I've seen it all, from the guy who drops group the moment you zone into the Esseles or Black Talon, to endless arguments about who isn't hitting their space bar and why. It was a source of friction for sure.

AND YET. I myself have always loved the group conversations in flashpoints and was generally happy to watch cut scenes if other people wanted to do so too. I enjoy running flashpoints, but I never "spammed" them to the point where getting the Esseles again made me frustrated. (The only flashpoint that I've managed to get utterly sick of is Hammer Station, and that has nothing to do with cut scenes and everything to do with the community.)

I also felt that the group conversations often inspired fun little interactions, such as when a dark or light side choice got people chatting. My guildies have seen me express (not-entirely-serious) outrage at killing the engineers or leaving Asara behind in the Esseles more than a few times. And some of the cut scenes also just genuinely looked nice! I have a whole collection of screenshots of pugs in Czerka Corporate Labs, from that last cut scene that shows your group walking into the room looking heroic.

Four SWTOR characters about to face down the last boss in Czerka Corporate Labs. One is a bounty hunter in green armour, the other three look like Imperial agents.

And all of that is just going to be... gone? Telling me that you can technically build a group manually and walk in to still see the cut scenes is a bit of a cold comfort because let's be real, how often do people do that? How often have you run Kuat Drive Yards since it was removed from the group finder? I just feel like this is going to be one of those things that will end up having negative ripple effects that people won't fully feel until later down the line. Or maybe I'm just a relic of ancient times for having actually enjoyed interacting with my pug mates in small ways, even if there was friction sometimes.

Be free, F2P-ers!

A big change for free-to-play players that's coming with the next patch is that the devs will be dropping a lot of the old restrictions on that type of account. You will now also get sprint at level 1, have all action bars unlocked, be able to hide your head slot  and equip random purples that you get while levelling. Honestly, with some of the things they mentioned I didn't even know there were restrictions for that: What, F2P players couldn't display legacy titles before? Or equip companion customisations? WTF?

Even as someone who's always been subscribed, I think this is great news. SWTOR has had a reputation for having extremely draconian F2P restrictions for a long time - I remember how the limited action bars were a source of ridicule across the entire MMO community when the game first went free-to-play. I think the devs did the right thing by being cautious when they first changed payment model back in the day (mostly because other MMOs that followed suit later and kept crowing about how much more generous their F2P model was in comparison, such as Rift and Wildstar, did ultimately not end up doing well).

However, all of that was over a decade ago, times have changed, and there's just no reason to be quite so brutal with all those restrictions on what's effectively the game's free trial mode. Annoying players with arbitrary feature locks before they've even left the starter planet was just never great, and I hope that these changes will give more people a chance to actually fall in love with what the game has to offer and then spend some money on it happily instead of feeling nagged from the get-go.

What about subscribers though?

So as not to leave subscribers feeling unappreciated, the game will run a new "subscriber login event" from September to December where you'll earn a special currency if you log in at least four times a week, which you can then use to buy some goodies. I kinda raised my eyebrow a bit at one of those goodies supposedly being "endgame gear" but we'll see. I really don't need more free stuff myself, but I can't blame them for trying to offer subscribers a bit more carrot while easing up on the F2P stick.

Say farewell to endless free CC

Speaking of carrots and sticks, regardless of your subscription status, you've long gained 100 free Cartel Coins per month if you've got a security key attached to your account. I often saw delighted comments from people who came back to the game after some time away to find that they'd accumulated thousands of free Cartel Coins while not playing. While that was nice, considering for how long the game has been running at this point, I can't blame the bean counters for concluding that someone coming back after years and immediately finding $40 worth of Cartel Coins in their account was maybe not so good for their bottom line. No, that free CC is not going to go away, but it will only be awarded going forward if your account was actually active in the last 30 days. 

Decos, Graphics, DirectX

Under "other topics about which I don't have that much to say", we have the Feast of Prosperity returning this autumn with some awesome new decos that I'll definitely want to grind for. (I actually broke my habit of ignoring Twitch chat to type "LOVE LAMP" when they showed the new ceiling lights.) 

The character customisation updates continue, with Rattataki getting updated textures next, and dark-side corruption getting a much-needed revamp so that it no longer turns every character into a pasty white dude regardless of their previous skin colour. (I might actually give showing it on my dark-siders a try once this goes live - I previously always disabled it precisely because it changed your skin colour so much and I didn't want to look like an albino axolotl.) Also, after they added all those skin colours for aliens in the last patch, they are expanding on this by adding more hair and montral colours with 7.7.1.

Finally, in technical news that I have to file under "I don't know enough about this to have an opinion but I guess it sounds good", they are making good progress on updating the game to DirectX 12 but there's still some work left to do. 

As usual, if you want ALL THE DEETS, including things I didn't mention here and images of various rewards, here are some other places you can look:

28/07/2025

Fun with the New Outriders

I've mentioned previously that aside from being an officer in Twin Suns Squadron, the guild on Darth Malgus that I've been a part of for over a decade at this point, I also joined some guilds on the other servers on a more casual basis. The standout among these is probably New Outriders, a multi-gaming guild/community that has its SWTOR branch on Star Forge and in which Intisar is an officer.

I don't get to actually interact with the people there that often because of time zones, but when I do it's always cordial, and on the rare occasion when they have an event in the afternoon in their time zone, meaning that I can join in as well, I'm always excited.

Yesterday was one such occasion, and it started off in a way that was very flattering to me, as Intisar instructed me to come online a bit early, declaring that a few people would help me get the last three DvL boss kills I was still missing on Star Forge. So we did that, and it wasn't actually too painful, even on Hoth! The GS8 achievement for the boss kills by itself doesn't actually give anything worthwhile, but it turns out the original achievement to kill all the bosses from back in Knights of the Eternal Throne is also still active, so that triggered as well and I got lots of banner decos for it, which was nice.

This was also a good example of one of the things I do love about joining events on Star Forge - there I'm just another member and can rely on other people to carry me a bit. I don't mind being an officer in Twin Suns Squadron, but it is also work sometimes, and only the day before I'd been making lists and parking summon alts all over the place to help my guildies there tick off their last few achievements, so it was a nice change of pace to have someone do the same for me, you know?

Members of New Outriders dancing near the Quesh world boss, with fireworks going off

Anyway, once the event got started properly, a lot more people came online, including a couple of the officers from the wider community that clearly hadn't played SWTOR in a while. I got quite wide-eyed inspecting them, with one of their characters being level 55 and the other one 75. It was like looking at a time capsule! I think I must have gasped lines like "OMG, he's got an Oriconian ear piece" out loud at my screen at one point.

The event itself was a very casual-friendly affair open to all levels that involved travelling across various planets, killing world bosses, collecting datacrons and just generally having a bit of fun. I was pretty impressed by how even though there was never a dull moment, I couldn't quite tell how much of it had been planned and how much was spontaneous. The characters that had been parked next to difficult-to-reach datacrons had obviously been prepared with intent, but other times we'd arrive on the scene of a dynamic encounter and Intisar would just go "oh, this one is fun" and we'd all do it together and I figure that can't possibly have been planned that way? I don't know.

A bunch of walkers stand around in a circle during the Ord Mantell dynamic encounter "Power Walking"

The most whimsical detour was when we got to Tython and Intisar beckoned everyone to join him at the planet's 0,0 coordinate to marvel at the strange floating orb of light there. It's funny how something that's clearly just a random bug has developed into a kind of mysterious attraction and people like to make up their own lore about how the Uxibeast next to the flame must be Force-sensitive or something.

Since there were no level requirements for the event, I took part using my little Sage alt who had only just earned her own ship (that part was required to be able to accept summons) and she gained no fewer than five levels from gallivanting around the galaxy and trying to take part in killing world bosses. Plus she got a lot of random creature codexes from when people around her decided to kill all the wildlife in the vicinity.

It was just very wholesome and I'm always kind of impressed by the joyful energy everyone in the guild still displays while playing the game, even when they're off to kill the Coruscant world boss for what must be the 100th time. It probably helps that they have a seemingly endless supply of in-jokes that sometimes make my head spin, including every boss and their abilities having special made-up names. (I've got to admit, FR3-D0M being introduced as "the Hamburglar who does cheese and tomatoes" broke me a little.)

Members of New Outriders scattered around the Sandcrawler in the Dune Sea on Tatooine. A Sage is pulling someone to the datacron on top.

Either way, it's refreshing to me because even though I obviously love my guild on Darth Malgus, I think it's fair to say that we have... a considerable number of members who are a bit jaded about the game at this point and are much harder to excite. It may not be possible to go back to being a wide-eyed noob, but I for one am still capable of having a lot of fun with even the more basic aspects of the game and it's nice to hang out with others who feel the same sometimes.

12/07/2025

(This Year) I Love the Night Life

When Nar Shaddaa Nightlife was mentioned in May's dev stream, I was grousing that they didn't address the one thing I cared about in relation to that event - whether they were finally making the casino chips a legacy-wide currency. And to be honest... I still don't know why they weren't shouting this from the rooftops, but this past week, one day before the event began, they announced that the chips were becoming legacy-bound after all - halfway down the page in a pretty long article.

As it turns out, this change wasn't without hiccups: Immediately after launch, it turned out that acquisition of any new chips was apparently causing all your old chips to be deleted, which led to an emergency server shutdown and quick fix, but once that had been handled, I was excited to log in and cycle through all my characters to get a tally of how many chips I had. It took a while, mostly because once I got to logging through them all, I also felt the need to check their mail, claim the latest set of freebies they'd received etc. but in the end I was left with what I felt was a pretty decent amount.

My currency tab showing me as owning 1,172 Smuggler's Casino Chips, 2,772 Kingpin's Casino Chips and 207 Emperor's Casino Chips after the currency conversion

Fortunately the days when too many free chips would just make me feel anxious are long gone (the max bet machines are a thing now after all), and I've been happy to just do a few spins per day for the Conquest points. I'm pleased that now that the chips are legacy-bound, this is much easier than it used to be, when I'd have to log back and forth between different characters all the time just to find who still had several different kinds of chips left.

There aren't any particular prizes I'm chasing this time around, but that doesn't mean I'm not happy to collect some new mounts and pets on different characters. 

A female human Sith inquisitor riding a Pritarr mount on Nar Shaddaa while fireworks go off in the background