A Dev Speaks - Great News for Fans of Operations

On Wednesday my ops team went on the PTS to try out the first boss of the new operation there. I won't go into too much detail because I don't want to spoil anyone here, plus it was obviously only the first version of the fight, so things are still going to be subject to change. In a nutshell, we had a fun time puzzling out what to do as a group of friends, but for a story mode, that first iteration felt very overtuned - just too much going on and too much damage.

I posted my feedback on the PTS forum and read what other people had to say about their impressions so far. Swtorista seemed to have a similar experience to mine, and added that she was not sure what the devs' intent for story mode even was, in terms of how difficult they actually want it to be nowadays. I have strong opinions on that myself, and wrote a whole post a few years ago about how the SWTOR devs have failed to hit the mark on story mode ops difficulty again and again, but it's true that they haven't even officially commented on the subject in over a decade as far as I'm aware.

So imagine my utter astonishment when someone highlighted to me that there was a dev response to Swtorista's question and other things on the PTS forums today. You can read the post for yourself here if you want, but be aware that it contains a lot of detail about the mechanics of the first boss of the operation.

That said, I think there were some exciting spoiler-free revelations in that post, which I really wanted to shout about so that more people would hear about them.

First off, the least important one but still interesting to me:

In the first few days of testing, there were roughly 1,800 attempts on [the new boss] across Story and Veteran Mode, with 104 kills.

Who says nobody in this game cares about operations anymore? Considering that I'd expect only a tiny fraction of the player base to bother with downloading the PTS, never mind putting a group together to actually test group content on it, those numbers were delightful to see.

But the real kicker came towards the end of the post and had nothing to do with the new operation in specific:

If my name [Martin Smith] sounds familiar, it may be because I was part of the original launch team and worked on Operations until I left BioWare in 2016. Broadsword brought me back to focus on Operations content.

There've been times over the last few years when I've had conversations with people in which doubt was raised whether SWTOR even had a dev dedicated to operations anymore, or whether the one ops they put out once in a blue moon was just someone's side project. So to not only have it confirmed that there is indeed a dedicated ops designer now, but to also hear that he's an OG whom Broadsword specifically brought back to work on operations again was crazy exciting to hear. I don't know if that'll mean that we'll get more operations at a faster pace in the future (relatively to the once every three years or so which we've been on for more than a decade now) but for the first time in a long time I feel at least a bit of hope in that regard. Martin (the dev) continues:

My goal is to make the best Operations content I can, but to do that I need your feedback. I want to know what you want from future Operations, and what you would most like to see fixed or changed in existing Operations.

I am working on improving the process of making new content and building better tools to help design, build, and balance Operations more effectively.

Again, this is just so amazing to hear. My #1 thing to fix about existing operations would still be to nerf Dominique on story mode. Recursive blast just requires too much coordination, and the freaking monstrosities that spawn in at the end to root and stun you - thereby preventing you from doing the mechanic correctly even if you're trying - also need to go in my opinion.

I've got to admit, I'm now wondering whether he already spent some time looking at the old ops before starting work on this new content. (I don't know how long he's been (back) at Broadsword.) The reason I'm wondering is that my guildies and I noticed new voice lines in existing operations recently - not newly recorded, obviously, but stuff that was already there but just wasn't playing for some reason. Scyva suddenly has more things to say about Izax now in Gods from the Machine! And tonight my guildies and I did Dread Palace on the PTS for a laugh (currently not tuned for level 85 yet) and in the Council fight at the end, there was suddenly an extra voice line at the start of the phase with the two ghosts - trust me, I've spent so much time in there over the past couple of years, me and a guildie could immediately tell that this line hadn't been there before. It just seemed like such a random thing to suddenly fix years later... but maybe an ops designer who was reviewing old fights and noticed a bug not triggering a voice line might do such a thing? *insert meaningful eyebrow wiggle here*

Truth is, I have no idea whether those things are related, but it's hard not to see them as signs. For years now I've had to tell guildies that operations obviously weren't a priority for the SWTOR dev team anymore and that everyone needed to check their expectations on that front. Without wanting anyone to get overhyped, this is the first time I feel like endgame group content might have a real future in the game again after all.