An Expansion Tease & A Peculiar Controversy

On Wednesday it was time for the dev stream preparing us for the launch of 7.8! And it was... okay? To be honest, there were less "news" than I'd hoped for, though to some degree that was to be expected considering we already knew a fair bit about the patch's major features. Still, I was a bit surprised that they spent a full fifteen minutes recapping the Legacy of the Sith story so far - I have no doubt that's useful to some, but probably not to that many among your hardcore audience that come to watch you live on Twitch. Whenever I glanced at chat people were complaining that they were bored and wanted to move on, and I had to remind myself to not pay too much attention to chat because it always contains a lot of negativity, sadly.

Also, what they told us about Galactic Threads was pretty much the exact same stuff they told us about it a year ago when it was originally meant to launch. Really, the most exciting bit of genuinely new news to me was a note that they'd be updating the large ceiling hooks in strongholds to work like large floor hooks, meaning they'll also contain a three by three grid of small hooks. This is great because the devs gave us a bunch of new small ceiling decorations this season which look really nice but were hard to place in an effective way due to the lack of small ceiling hooks available in almost every single stronghold. Either way, 7.8 still looks exciting to me and I'm very much looking forward to it.

One slightly sad piece of news for German and French players was that the voice work for 7.8 still isn't ready in their languages, so they'll only be able to play the new story in English for now. I wonder why Broadsword couldn't get that done while the English voice actors were on strike - the German and French ones weren't, as far as I'm aware! Either way, I guess it's up to these players to choose whether they want to play through the new story in English or wait even longer. 

(Side note: Sometimes I wonder whether a future project for me, once I hit legacy level 50 on all servers, could be something like playing through the class stories in German. I bet hearing all those player characters and familiar NPCs talk in completely different voices would be wild. But I'm getting sidetracked...)

Anyway, I'm not going to go into much more detail about things like new Cartel Market additions and so on. As usual you can find full, detailed breakdowns elsewhere:

• Official SWTOR website
• Swtorista
• Today in TOR
• Vulkk

I just want to talk about two more things that came out of this livestream. First off, Papa Keith appeared at the end of the stream, and as he so often does, casually dropped a hint about something yet to come that would hype players up. Specifically he said that in his producer's letter for the game's anniversary, he'll be giving us a roadmap for what's coming in the new year, and that they'll be "wrapping up Legacy of the Sith". That's kind of like... telling us that they are working on an 8.0 expansion without telling us that they're working on an 8.0 expansion.

EEEEEEEEEE!

I'm trying not to get too excited just yet because it hasn't been stated explicitly at this point, but it's hard not to be hopeful. I still stand by everything I wrote about the prospect of a new expansion a little over a year ago, but man, would I ever love for a good expac launch to make the game feel exciting and invigorated again. I'm looking forward to learning more.

Now, for something completely different - at the end of the stream, they showed off the new loading screen/key art for patch 7.8:

My reaction to that was something along the lines of "Nice. Lana and Shae's faces look a bit weird though. Oh well." And then I moved on, because a character looking slightly off on the art of a SWTOR loading screen is a pretty common thing. I remember when Legacy of the Sith's key art was first revealed, one of my guildies commented that Lana looked like Adam Driver in a wig, which made me go "oof" but I could also see what he meant!

When I checked social media for chatter about Wednesday's dev stream, I was surprised to see a few comments that accused the new key art of being AI generated. Warning: I'm going to go into way more detail than this probably deserves, but it's a subject that interests me and I kind of fell down a rabbit hole, so you've been warned.

As a certified AI hater my reaction was of course to be shocked and want to find out more. From what I've seen of the SWTOR devs they've always struck me as very pro human creativity and anti AI art, but who knows what's going on behind closed doors when there's money to be saved? I tried to look for more information on where this whole idea came from, but couldn't find more than the same three people or so repeating that it was "obviously" AI, no explanation needed, which was of course not helpful.

Finally Tacogoats, a SWTOR player I follow on Bluesky, shared a link to a tumbler post of his in which he attempted to break down the evidence he saw for the art piece being artificially generated. And for all the details he circled... I did not find it convincing at all. The comments seemed to either be flat out wrong (no, Anri is not missing her index finger; it's right there), issues that I couldn't make out at all, or even if I could kind of see what it was that was bothering him, I still didn't see how these things were in any way evidence of AI involvement. So what if the one knuckle on Malgus' hand has a slightly odd edge? Cause human artists never create the slightest imperfections when drawing hands? I was expecting some kind of "gotcha" like a line from something in the foreground merging into a different line in the background, like you can often get with AI art since it doesn't actually have any concept of three dimensionality. However, there was nothing of the sort.

In fact, the more I looked, the more I became convinced that this couldn't be AI. AI image generators are very good at conjuring up things for which they have lots of references. They can easily create a photorealistic image of a non-existing human because their training data contains millions of photos of humans! What they are not good at is creating very specific details for which they don't have (enough) references. And let's be real, random SWTOR NPCs are not something for which any AI is going to have lots to work with.

I remember when I encountered the very first image generator I'd ever seen - a few years ago now - I tried to get it to generate images of Darth Malgus and Satele Shan and it failed utterly. I think Malgus was a black blur with angry eyes so it clearly had some vague reference for him, but Satele pretty much just resulted in random noise. Obviously things have progressed somewhat since then, but it's not like the internet suddenly got flooded with millions of screenshots or art of all these SWTOR characters that wasn't there before.

I actually got curious enough to dust off my OpenAI login and ask ChatGPT to generate me a "painterly" image of Lana Beniko (since she's one of the characters on the key art). I'll be honest, the result was actually better than I expected. It clearly had enough material to deduce that Lana's a white, slightly angry-looking woman with mid-length blonde hair and a side parting. I also asked it to generate an action shot in which she'd have he lightsaber out and again - it wasn't totally terrible in my opinion.

But two things stood out to me: that it was actually very good at giving her an attractive face (even if it doesn't look exactly like Lana does in game) - which is something to think about when the first thing anyone mentioned being slightly "off" about the key art were the faces - and the fact that the AI had absolutely no clue what sort of armour she wears, dressing her in a generic black combat suit with matching pauldrons and a cloak.

Now, I'll be the first to admit that ChatGPT might not be the best image generator and that my prompting was extremely low effort - I'm sure someone could prod an AI into producing something better, but anywhere close to the sort of detail we actually see in the key art? That seems incredibly unlikely to me, not with where we're at right now. And all that's just talking about a single character, never mind five of them in a balanced composition. In a way, going down this rabbit hole has actually increased my appreciation for this new loading screen.

I can't blame people for being paranoid and suspicious. Corporations trying to cut costs by replacing real artists' jobs with an inferior AI-generated product is a real thing. But so is people being overly paranoid and thinking that everything is AI when it actually isn't. As a creative person myself (even if my hobby is writing, not drawing or painting), someone accusing my stuff of sounding/looking like AI would actually be more hurtful to me than just saying that they think it's terrible. We're not doing the art community a favour by immediately accusing things of being "AI slop" as soon as we don't like something.

Bonus AI laugh: I also asked ChatGPT to generate me an image of Shae Vizla and that one was a lot less charming. It clearly had enough of a clue to give me a red-headed Mandalorian, but what the fuck is that armour? Why is the "blaster" I asked for in the prompt just a plain old 20th century gun? And why is there another random Mandalorian's helmet attached to her thigh?!

Star Wars: Visions Season 3

Did you know that season three of Star Wars: Visions has already been out for several weeks? For some reason I've seen zero promotional material or even buzz about it, so thanks to Vulkk for bringing it to my attention the other week.

As someone who's not an anime fan, I was a little disappointed that we were back to all anime, all the time (after the wide variety of animation styles that were featured in season two) but oh well, I guess spotlighting Eastern animation in particular was always supposed to be the show's focus. Either way, I wanted to jot down some thoughts on each short again.

1. The Duel: Payback

As the title implies, this was a sequel to season 1's "The Duel", which had been almost universally beloved. In short, I thought this was good too, but somewhat less interesting to me personally. I was also a dork and had forgotten the details of the original, so I at first thought that it was going to be about the Sith lady from season 1 getting revenge, meaning I perceived the cyborg Jedi coming after the Ronin as a kind of surprise twist. It was only on rewatching the original Duel that I realised that actually, we saw the Sith lady die, so this was always going to be about something else. 

2. The Sound of Four Wings

This was probably my least favourite of the batch for reasons I struggle to articulate. I didn't think it was bad or anything, everything about it just felt kind of generic and uninteresting to me. 

3. The Ninth Jedi: Child of Hope

Another sequel to a popular season 1 episode, though I felt that there was very little connection to the original with this one. The thing that stood out to me about the original Ninth Jedi was the surprise twist, not the generic anime protagonist, so a sequel that follows that character on a completely different adventure was always bound to not grip me in the same way. I still enjoyed it overall though, except that I found the little droid sidekick a bit grating. Maybe I'm just over cutesy characters that always speak in third person. Just how many times do you think the word "Teto" appeared in the script? 

4. The Bounty Hunters

This one was merely okay to me. There were parts that had me intrigued and parts that left me feeling a bit disappointed. The droid actually coming back with his assassin personality activated was a pleasant surprise for example, but I didn't love that the protagonist wore this face mask for the entire episode, making you think that maybe she's sick or scarred or something, but then it's literally nothing.

5. Yuko's Treasure

I didn't think an episode featuring a little kid and a droid shaped like a teddy bear would be my favourite but somehow that's exactly what happened. It just had a certain charm (comparable to Skeleton Crew) that really worked for me.

6. The Lost Ones

Apparently this one was another sequel, to season 1's "The Village Bride", but I only found that out afterwards and again, I wouldn't have been able to tell because what was interesting to me about the Village Bride was the culture of the village that got saved, not the relatively generic protagonist. Still, I liked it as a stand-alone too, as the studio's world building was very strong again. 

7. The Smuggler

In this one I liked the story as a whole, but somehow the English voice actor delivered every line as if the main character was supposed to be six years old (when she was clearly a grown woman) and that really threw me off. Other than that I thought it was cool.

8. The Bird of Paradise

This one was the most visually beautiful episode of this season in my opinion, and I liked that it was more contemplative and had a somewhat open ending. 

9. BLACK 

I have no idea what this one was about beyond the description provided in the episode summary. It's totally psychedelic and impressive from an artistic point of view - and I'll say that I was engrossed for the entire duration, but I also wouldn't want to watch it again. Definitely something different though.

---

As a whole, I feel like this season was perhaps the weakest one so far, though not by much. I just didn't really care that much about the sequels to previous episodes and would have wished for more visual and narrative variety. Still an interesting series though, and I continue to appreciate that it tries to do different things with the Star Wars property.

Tulak Hord Talk

After eight seasons and almost four years of playing on multiple servers, I'm pretty well settled in everywhere, with a growing roster of alts on each server and most of my characters in stable guilds. The one server where I was still feeling a bit "unsafe" though was Tulak Hord, mainly because I hadn't really found a guild that truly covered all my needs and made me feel like it was going to stick around.

You may recall from this post last year that after more than two years of staying in a two-person guild, my attempt to find something a bit more suitable for someone interested in playing alts and doing Conquest led me to a guild that turned out to run an old-fashioned guild website that nobody actually used. I was a bit put out by that but stuck around.

Over time, things got more quiet in said guild. I never actually got to know my guildies really, but I was under the impression that there had been a core group of people that did operations together, and it looked like that had eventually fallen apart. The guild wasn't strictly dead, but going by the numbers on the weekly Conquest board, it at one point looked like I was one of a maximum of five people that were still playing.

I had almost resigned myself to potentially inheriting the guild eventually once the last of the other players stopped logging in, but after several months of this state of relative inactivity, I noticed that things started picking up again, not because the gang was back together, but because the person that the GM title had defaulted to had seemingly decided to go on a recruiting spree. Which was fine by me, but I didn't give it too much thought either.

Tonight though, something funny happened. I was just doing a few more quests on an alt (on Tulak Hord, obviously) to finish off one last weekly seasons objective when someone said "hey Shin" in guild chat. I said hi back but didn't pay it any further mind as I hadn't really had a lot of interaction with anyone in the guild.

I continued to focus on my questing, until the same person said something along the lines of "I'll just go back to DM now" and I swear for a moment my brain was short circuiting. Why was someone speaking English in guild chat on Tulak Hord? And why were they telling me about going back to Darth Malgus? What server was I on again? What the heck was even going on?

I opened the guild panel and looked at the only other person online. Their legacy name didn't sound familiar, but the character name vaguely rang a bell. It sounded kind of like one of my guildies from Darth Malgus, the one who'd inspired me to try doing Galactic Seasons on multiple servers in the first place.

"Xen?!" I typed incredulously, and with my mind still spinning. How could he be here? Had I ever gotten him invited into this guild? No, even I couldn't be that forgetful, surely? What was happening?

He proceeded to tell me that he'd been invited the other day via a random recruitment message, after his last guild on Tulak Hord had kicked him for inactivity. I mean, what are the freaking odds? I just thought that was absolutely wild. Tulak Hord isn't the biggest server, but it's still got a good number of guilds, and the one we are now both in is relatively small, so that was some crazy serendipity alright. 

On an unrelated note, another thing that bothered me about playing on Tulak Hord until recently was that this guild didn't have an Imperial counterpart, so my Imperial alts were still homeless and lost in space. I'd done a bit of research about where I could take them but hadn't come up with anything enticing enough for me to make the effort of actively applying.

Well, the other night I was just about to log off on my Sith inquisitor when someone offered me a random invite to their guild. I checked that the guild name wasn't anything offensive or utterly ridiculous and accepted. So now I'm a pirate on Imp side, and my characters have the guild rank "fish food". We'll see where that goes! 

Another Season of Feasting

The Feast of Prosperity has once again come and gone, and I just wanted to make a short post about how much I enjoyed it (again). I feel like the devs have really managed to hit the spot for me with these seasonal events as I pretty much love them all (except Nar Shadda Nightlife - but even that is "okay" nowadays in my opinion).

A couple of years ago I thought I'd be done with this event after getting all the achievements, but the many decorations have made it worth coming back every year to pick up a few more. The gameplay is fun, and that the event is also extremely good for Conquest points is just the cherry on top.

I simply never tire of the friendly world boss groups, and the game rarely feels more like an MMO and more alive than when you've got a full raid group thundering through the ruins of Coronet Zoo to absolutely steamroll everything in your way and collect exactly three Nexu tongues from mobs that fortunately seem to have way more tongues than you'd expect.

While waiting for those groups to fill, the food serving and cooking takes up just enough time to keep busy, ensuring that you never get bored. (I also like that all the ingredients we are sent to gather actually end up in the kitchen when we do the cooking, from ice crystals to scyk bellies.) It's all just very wholesome and well-balanced.

I'm already looking forward to next year.

 Though bringing this many pets along is probably not hygienic. Oh well.

Flashpointing on Different Servers

One of the major reasons I've really been enjoying the current Galactic Season is that it's gotten me back into pugging. I've enjoyed doing group content in SWTOR with strangers for as long as I can remember, but over the last few years I've kind of fallen out of the habit on my home server Darth Malgus. I think it's mainly because I spend so much time on organising and running things with my guild that my "weekly group content quota" feels more than filled by the time that's all done.

On the other servers though, it's a different story. While most of my characters are guilded at this point, due to time zones I rarely find myself with an opportunity to join my guildies there for group content, so most of the time I'm at the mercy of random strangers who happen to be online at the same time as me. And it's been surprisingly fun!

What's been really interesting about the whole experience though is that doing at least one flashpoint per week on every server, one can really feel the different vibes. I briefly toyed with the idea of taking detailed notes and trying to come up with some sort of objective ranking but quickly discarded that notion, both because it would've been a lot of work but also because things like whether you had a nice group or why you may have liked one pug more than another are really hard to objectively quantify. I decided it was fine to limit myself to subjective observations and let people make their own judgements about that.

To begin with, I'll say that the differences between the servers are actually not dramatic in my opinion. It's not like you'll always have good runs on one server and bad ones on another. So far this season, every single flashpoint I got into was completed successfully, with the exception of a master mode Ruins of Nul where we called it quits on Regnant. However, that particular boss is very tough, we'd given it several decent tries, and it just didn't look like we were getting even close to succeeding. Everyone was very polite about collectively admitting defeat at that point.

I also haven't seen a single hostile vote-kick initiated anywhere, which was interesting to me compared to World of Warcraft, where people will boot you for the most frivolous of reasons. In my SWTOR flashpoints this season, I once initiated a kick for someone who'd been disconnected for a while when we couldn't proceed any further at a checkpoint that required everyone in the group to be present and click, and in another run an individual who'd been kind of toxic themselves actively begged to be kicked to get away from the rest of the group. But that was entirely it.

That's not to say that all players in my flashpoints have been perfect angels, but if there's conflict, people would seemingly rather have a verbal fight about it than simply try to give their opponent the boot, which I find interesting. I could imagine that some might prefer being quietly removed over being insulted in what's supposed to be just a game, but personally I kind of appreciate that this shows that even when things get heated, SWTOR players have an unspoken attitude of "we're in this together, so let's all just get to the end, OK?" where they don't want to deprive someone else of their flashpoint credit even if they find the other person annoying.

Generally, most of my runs have been what I'd call pleasant and quiet: not much conversation and we just get on with things without too much friction. Usually at least one person will aim for every possible shortcut there is, but at the same time nobody bats an eyelid if someone fails to be sneaky and pulls an extra group - you just help to clean up and get on with it.

So that's what's been the same on all servers. Now let's talk about those subtle differences I mentioned:

I feel like on Leviathan and Tulak Hord, you can really tell that these are smaller communities as everything's just a little bit more friendly and relaxed. People are a bit more chatty than average, with everyone always saying hi and bye at the start and end of a run and actually pausing to discuss tactics if there are any questions or hiccups. I wouldn't say these chats are necessarily "nicer" than on other servers (the chattiness can also include rudeness or complaints) but there is a clear acknowledgement of the other players being there and attempts at communication.

You'll run into people with a range of skills, from the one who's never done the instance before to the experienced raider, with most probably sitting somewhere in-between. These servers are small but still healthy communities, where you'll learn to recognise the names of some of the bigger guilds after a while.

This is somewhat of a contrast to Star Forge, whose mega server status has only been increasing over the past couple of years, as people from smaller servers with an interest in high-end or queued content are increasingly transferring off the smaller servers in order to have a larger pool of players to work with and shorter queues. As a result of that, I feel like Star Forge is the server where you have the highest chance of having one or more super efficiency-obsessed players in your group who set a stiff pace because they're already planning their next activity afterwards and don't want to spend a second more inside this flashpoint than they have to. If there's some new degenerate trash skip, you'll probably learn it here. (Me in D7: What's this guy doing, running right through so many groups at once? Wait what, if we just stand here and wait, everything evades? WTF.)

I think this creates an interesting conundrum because in general we'd like to guide new players towards a server that's busy and where queues are popping, but I can't help but get the impression that at least as far as flashpoints are concerned, almost any other server is probably a more welcoming environment for someone's first run, as people are going at least marginally more slowly, so that chances of the newbie just being left behind and panicking over where everyone went are at least somewhat reduced.

To clarify though, I'm not claiming that Star Forge players are unfriendly or anything. I haven't seen that particular situation arise myself, but I imagine most would probably be perfectly fine with slowing down a bit if someone said that they're new and need a bit of help. It's just that the default assumption in group content seems to be that if you're on Star Forge, you're here because you're a veteran player who wants to maximise your efficiency in terms of play time, more so than anywhere else at least.

This is particularly striking when compared to Satele Shan, the other and now smaller US server. Am I saying that everything there is super slow? Not at all, SS players can also be in a hurry, but what has stood out to me there is how much personality players display in my runs there. Both my best and worst runs of the season (so far) have been on Satele Shan.

The worst was a run where one guy was always rushing ahead and ignoring that the rest of the group was still fighting things, while another player who was queued as tank was pulling things willy-nilly without actually tanking them. These two people could hardly have been more at odds with each other, they fought about it, and me and the remaining dps were awkwardly caught in the middle.

The good runs on the other hand were ones where people were chatting happily, asking to do the bonus boss and just generally goofing off in a way that's just such a contrast to the more business-like, in-and-out approach that I usually encounter on Star Forge (and many other servers). It's like everyone who wants a fast and easy ride has transferred off and what's left of the population has a much higher density of absolute maniacs (both good and bad).

Finally, we have Shae Vizla, the Oceanic server where queued content mostly died about three months after its release. The current and previous Galactic Season have been good at creating groups for the featured content at least, but I've got to admit the experience always feels a bit sad to me, because my impression is that you basically get only two kinds of people in these runs: complete newbies who decided to queue up for something for the first time, and seasoned veterans who are only here for Galactic Seasons (and are usually in one of three guilds). 

I'm being a bit hyperbolic of course, but it does feel markedly different from the vibes on Leviathan and Tulak Hord, where you still have this healthy mix of different player types. On Shae Vizla, the newbies presumably don't talk because they're unsure of what's going on, and the veterans don't talk because they're like Star Forge rushers on crack - gotta quickly finish this flashpoint here so I can do it five more times on the other servers!

I'm curious whether others who've done group content on more than one server have had similar experiences or see the situation completely differently. Even if you play on only one server, do you think my characterisation of the flashpoint-playing population matches up with your own experiences there?