A More Classic Experience in Our Future

Today was the day of the long-awaited dev stream giving us the first details about 8.0. The devs didn't mention anything about the story or what to expect on Ryloth yet, but there were some very interesting announcements about mechanical features.

Musco started by talking about some (not super exciting to me, but nonetheless very welcome) quality of life improvements, such as fitted gear being added to collections, toys becoming abilities so they no longer take up bag space, and interactable decorations becoming persistent (so the game will remember what state you left them in).

He also surprised me by announcing something I never thought I'd hear any MMO dev promote as a good thing: that they'll be slowing down levelling a little. Now, he didn't use those exact words - and probably for good reason - but it's effectively what he described, giving the current negative example of new players immediately overlevelling their surroundings massively after only three quests. So I don't think the goal is to make things massively slower, but to rein in those early levels in particular. He did say that they'd give us more details later about which sources of XP would be adjusted exactly. 

That said, this is a nice segue into the biggest new feature they announced: adjustable overland difficulty. (I was doing an ops on my main screen while watching the livestream on my second monitor and I may have excitedly yelled "open world difficulty options" at my guildies over voice, shortly before wiping us on Izax veteran mode.) As a simple toggle, you'll be able to adjust the difficulty of mobs for you personally by upgrading from story to veteran or master at any time, which will increase your damage taken, reduce your healing received, and decrease your XP gains.

Now, this was never a feature I personally clamoured for, but I'm aware that it's something other MMOs have and that I've seen players ask for more than a few times. The reason I wasn't that invested into the idea personally is that I don't think the current difficulty is terrible - shortly after 4.0 it was a joke, yes, but they did retune things a bit around Onslaught and since then I think it's been okay-ish. Yes, low level planets are still easy to steamroll, but if you actually do higher-level content and don't always have your companion set to heal, you can still find some danger in places.

Plus, let's be honest - if we take veteran and master mode chapters as examples of Broadsword's tuning for additional solo challenge, they are not great. They can be challenging alright, but in rather un-fun ways.

So by itself, this kind of sounded... interesting, and nice for those who really want it I guess, but not necessarily that big a deal to me personally. However, there was more!

While you can dial your personal difficulty up and down at any time, there'll also be a new venture focused around it, challenging you to create new characters of all eight base classes and level them through veteran or master mode world difficulty (these characters will be locked into their chosen difficulty and unable to change), fulfil certain goals along the way and earn rewards in the process.

As an old-timer I had immediate flashbacks to the Dark vs. Light event from over a decade ago now, which asked us to level new alts of all eight origin stories as well as complete certain milestones on at least one of them (such as making it through all the "Knights of" chapters).

I actually found myself thinking only the other day how Galactic Seasons kind of fill a similar role nowadays as the DvL event back then by making us re-do old content for rewards, but that they never care about levelling and story, and how it would maybe be nice to have something like that again some day as a one-time thing. The nice thing about this being implemented in the form of a venture is that there's no time limit on it, and the fact that you have to effectively level up in "challenge mode" will actually make the experience somewhat different from a gameplay perspective too.

It's also worth noting that it was stated that veteran difficulty is aiming to make the gameplay more reminiscent of the "classic" experience - my post from last year about the notion of SWTOR Classic and why I don't think it'll ever happen has turned into one of the more popular posts on the blog, and there's been some chatter in the comments about how one could create something at least approximating the classic experience in the game as it is now. Commenter Thander's suggestion from back then actually sounds remarkably similar to what was announced! So one can hope that this feature might also appeal to some lapsed players who would be interested in returning if only they could choose to have a bit more challenge in their everyday gameplay.

We'll see how successful the devs will be in terms of getting the tuning right, but the difficulty toggle will be available to try out on the PTS in a later phase, so we all better check it out then and let them know what we think.

In the meantime, if you want to read more details about what else was announced on the stream, including things like new rewards from Galactic Season 11 and the Feast of Prosperity, check out one of these stream summaries from the usual suspects:

• Swtorista
• Today in TOR
• Vulkk