Delayed 7.8.1 Dev Livestream Reaction

Soo... there was a dev livestream over a week ago now! I did actually watch it live on my second monitor at the time, while doing an operation with my guildies, and I remember thinking "I've got to get back to this and write a post about it maybe tomorrow or on Friday" - and then things got a bit crazy.

I still wanted to jot down some thoughts on it though, even if it's belated. We know now that the patch will already drop this Tuesday, so I figured I've got to get in there before it'll be no longer relevant.

As had already been mentioned previously, the patch will be called Master's Enigma, and based on the little preview they showed without getting too spoilery, it looks like we're not yet done with Darth Nul's legacy, as she didn't just have that sanctum on Elom but apparently also a starship somewhere. We'll see how that goes!

As an aside, people always complain about there being too much time between story updates, but I've got to admit that this one time they've sped it up I'm actually sitting here thinking "wow, another story update so soon". I've only played through Galactic Threads on a few characters so far, so it feels like I've still got lots of catching up to do. Is it just me?

Anyway, the stream obviously covered a bunch of different topics related to the patch as usual, such as Spring Abundance returning with a new pet reward, the date nights with Kira and Torian, and the newest Cartel Market additions. As usual, I won't go into all of that here. There's a written summary on the official website, and Swtorista, Today in TOR and Vulkk all have their own posts as well. For me, there are just two subjects I really wanted to comment on:

Galactic Season 10 & 11

Keith informed us in his end-of-year Producer's Letter that "[the next] season will work a little differently than previous seasons" and as someone who's a bit of a connoisseur of seasons at this point, I was very curious to find out what that meant.

I'd had some conversations with friends in which we speculated about different possibilities and "bringing back old rewards" was one of those, so finding out that Season 10 will - in terms of rewards - be a mash-up of Seasons 1 and 3 with just a few new rewards added was not exactly a shock. (Season 11 will do the same thing with Season 2 and 4.)

It's not something that's personally exciting to me as someone who already completed all those seasons the first time around, but at the same time I'm actually surprisingly sanguine about it. I could easily imagine others who already have all those rewards being bitter about it ("Not only do they use seasons to recycle old content, now the seasons themselves are recycled too!" - something like that) but personally I actually really don't mind.

I know that I'm in a pretty hardcore minority, and I've seen my fair share of comments and questions from newer players who were interested in one of the companions or armour sets from earlier seasons and were disappointed that there was no way to get them anymore, so I understand that there was demand to bring them back. I'm happy those people get their chance now! Also, I didn't start doing seasons on the other servers until Season 2 (and the Shae Vizla server obviously didn't even exist until Season 5), so I'll have some fun earning some of the older rewards for a second time over there. (Technically I have all of it already unlocked in collections, but this is more fun.)

Also, there was some talk about 8.0 being in development alongside everything else that's happening, so it seemed reasonable to me to infer that putting a little less resource into the next two seasons will free up a bit of extra time for more focus on 8.0, which seems fair enough to me.

Speaking of 8.0...

We still don't know a lot more about what 8.0 will contain, but Eric and Keith dedicated a whole segment of the stream to talking about what their plans for it are in terms of releasing more information over time, which I thought was extremely interesting.

First off, they don't want to tell us too much just yet because the Legacy of the Sith story has two more patches to go and they want to give it a chance to play out in full without spoiling anything or even taking too much attention away from it, which I think is very fair and fits with the devs' commitment to treating the game's story as the most important thing, which is one of the main things I love about SWTOR.

However, they also said that they are planning to release more information in bits and pieces over time, to introduce new features and let us test them on the PTS as they reach a playable state, and I thought that was an interesting and novel approach. Usually expansion announcements are these big, attention-grabbing info dumps, so to know that an expansion is coming without much else, and that additional information will be released piecemeal over the course of a whole year is quite different. It's also a relatively long time to know about it in advance, as traditionally, SWTOR expansions have tended to be announced only two to four months before their launch date.

I'm very curious to see how this will play out in terms of expectations and hype, because on a purely theoretical level, I can think of ways in which this could go either very well or very badly. I'm hoping for the best outcome of course - just saying. Either way, I really appreciate the devs' attempt at being transparent about what's coming, when so much of Legacy of the Sith has been living from one patch to the next, without the slightest clue of what was going to be happening in six months.

One thing Keith and Eric did say about 8.0's content (it was even on the slides) was that they were planning to "create new content, gameplay, and systems that appeal to group, solo, and story players" and that they are aiming to "celebrate the breadth and depth of SWTOR to power new content and systems", which I understood to mean that they won't just be plopping a new planet and five more levels on top of what we have now, but that at least some of the new stuff will be integrated into existing planets and systems, perhaps similarly to how dynamic encounters added something new to do on classic planets. One Keith quote in particular that stood out to me was: "We're going back to old content and do something with it so it feels like new content." Could it be that they'll finally do something with flashpoints again? No, I mustn't daydream too much about specific things I'd like to see, because it's almost never what we expect. Regardless, I look forward to the journey of finding out.