A Good Time to Come Back to SWTOR

A couple of months ago I got a very surprising DM, from a player who had been in Twin Suns Squadron with me throughout 2012 and 2013. He'd decided to finally get back into the game and wanted to re-join the guild as well. I've got to admit that he and I hadn't been super close back then, so after more than a decade I barely remembered more than that he was English and had always seemed kinda nice, but that was still more than enough reason to welcome him back with open arms.

Our guild has pretty low churn, so it's not unusual for someone to take a prolonged break - sometimes several years long, even - and then come back and be happy to find that they are still in the guild and able to immediately pick things back up where they left off. But someone coming back after thirteen years was definitely a longer absence than anyone had ever returned from, so his level 55 trooper did need a re-invite, which I was happy to provide.

Since then, he's been online most days and is often hanging out in the social channels. I was honestly pretty delighted to see him go through all the expansions he'd missed in real time, based on which achievements were popping up in guild chat each evening. Ooh, he just finished Shadow of Revan! Ooh, he's doing chapters now! Etc.

I'm pretty sure he's fully caught up by now, but the achievements have kept on coming. The other night I congratulated him on unlocking Bessi, and he replied with something along the lines of "I just keep finding new things to do; it's great!"

While someone coming back after this long may be an unusual situation, I've also noticed an uptick in more "regular" returners, people who've just been away for months or a couple of years at most. Steamcharts also recently registered the highest player count for SWTOR since around 2023.

It just feels like a good time for that kind of thing. Knowing that there'll be a new expansion at the end of the year has people excited. If you got bored of waiting for story updates at some point during Legacy of the Sith and checked out, that storyline is now wrapped up and you can come back and play through everything you haven't seen yet in one go.

Additionally, we're also at the end of Galactic Season 10 now, with Season 11 probably starting in August, and both of these have been bringing back companions from previous seasons, giving people another chance to pick them up now if they missed them before. With only a few weeks to go it's too late to organically complete the Season 10 track in its entirety, but the companions are right at the start of the track so it's not too late to play a bit to just unlock those.

As a reminder, these are the followers you can still unlock from now until July 27th:

• Altuur Zok Adon, the companion from the very first Galactic Season that ran from April to September 2021,
• PH4-LNX, who was originally available to earn between October 2022 and March 2023.

Season 11 will then give you a chance to grab these two companions if you missed them before:

• Fen Zeil, who was previously earnable between February and July 2022.
• Amity, who was the main reward from Galactic Season 4 between March and August 2023.

 So if you haven't played in a while and happen to read this... I'm just saying!