Yesterday was dev stream day once again - I'm usually awaiting these with baited breath, but as alluded to in my last post, I actually feel like I'm a bit behind story-wise right now, so my reaction this time was more something along the lines of, "What, it's already that time again?"
That's not to say that I didn't still enjoy the stream. We got a bit more of a preview of 7.9's story update, which is expected to go live at the end of May. As expected, it will feature the big showdown of all the different factions that's been building up to for a long time now. We'll even get to play as some of those other characters to mix things up - they had a preview of someone running around as Lana and a short clip of someone fighting as Malgus. We'll see how that goes! The HK-55 bonus chapter came out almost ten years ago now, and then they never did anything with the idea of playing as another character ever again. I enjoyed it at the time, but on replays it got a bit tedious, though I'm not sure whether that had anything to do with the mechanics or was just due to the chapter format itself. Either way, playing as all these other characters should at the very least be novel.
They were also talking a bit about 7.9.1 already, which they justified by saying that there won't be a dedicated stream for that patch. To be fair though, we already knew that it'll be the start of Galactic Season 11 and that it'll be more or less the same as Galactic Season 10, only with Fen Zeil and Amity instead of Altuur and PH4-LNX. About the only piece of real news was that the DvL bosses won't be returning for that season... yay, I guess?
In technical news, we were once again reassured that the DirectX 12 work is still continuing and that they are hoping to have an alpha for people to test later in the year. There was also an article on the official site about a month ago that talked a bit about the nitty gritty of the work involved in this, which I thought was quite interesting. I hadn't realised that in many ways this update seemingly requires them to rebuild the game's visuals from the ground up.
However, by far the most exciting part of the stream (to me anyway) was the additional information about 8.0. We still know only broad strokes, but honestly, at this point every morsel of information is exciting to me:
- The level cap will indeed increase by five levels (to 85) like in previous expansions.
- The new planet will be Ryloth, the home world of the Twi'leks, and it will come with dynamic encounters.
- There'll be a new operation with three bosses that will launch with story and veteran mode.
- The way we gear up will change again, but they want it to be an evolution of the current system, not a complete do-over like we've had in previous expansions, and it should be more organic to figure out in game, without necessarily needing a guide.
- There'll be new abilities and changes to class balance.
- The story will take a new direction but won't be completely disconnected from what's going on right now, which is why they can't go into it until we've had a chance to play through 7.9.
Ryloth as seen in season 1 of Clone Wars.
They expect to have an 8.0 PTS up in summer, where we'll get to test a lot of the new stuff, and there'll be more reveals to come. The list of new features above is not exhaustive - as established in the last dev stream, they just don't want to spill all the beans at once.
The Ryloth reveal personally excited me the most (as you can tell from this post's title), I guess because for once it's a planet I actually already know, from the Clone Wars TV show. I'm not sure it'll end up being the most visually interesting - it's kind of rocky, so they might be able to re-use some assets from Ruhnuk - but it's the home world of the Twi'leks and I love Twi'leks, so that's a win by itself.
I still don't know how soon I'll manage to get more characters fully caught up to where I want them to be. Being excited doesn't change the fact that I've got a lot going on right now, but the news are definitely encouraging to me personally. For more details on what else was said on the stream, feel free to peruse one of the links below:
I hope the gearing system changes will be straightforward. Sometimes, I think that game developers forget that people play games, in part, to get away from work ... not to get a second job. :)
ReplyDeleteI've come to not mind the way gearing works currently, but it's definitely not super intuitive and quite confusing to explain the first time! I think I preferred how straightforward things were in 6.0, even if the sheer size of the loot showers was often causing inventory problems and some people burned themselves out spamming Hammer Station.
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