Testing the Open World Difficulty Toggle on the PTS

Yesterday Eric Musco did a let's play stream to talk more about the new overland difficulty toggle coming with 8.0. I wasn't able to watch it live, but I did watch the recording today. Most of it is him just doing laps on Hutta and answering questions from the chat, but it did make me keen to log into the updated PTS to see the new open world difficulty toggle for myself. (Though one interesting reveal that came up during the stream was that after almost fifteen years, they'll finally raise the legacy level cap from 50 to 60 - just after I hid the legacy experience bar from my UI since I'd maxed it out on all servers, hah.)

Anyway, since we were asked to provide feedback on how the difficulty feels on the first two planets in this round, I rolled up a new Commando and jumped straight into the master difficulty setting. To recap, the difficulty toggle increases your damage taken and decreases your experience gains and your healing received. It doesn't affect your damage output, item or credit rewards, or the health of mobs around you.

I did the first few quests and it was certainly noticeable that I remained at level one for much longer than I usually would, but mob difficulty didn't seem too bad at first. Sure, they did more damage to me than normal (which is a very low bar to clear on the starter planets) but I can't say I felt particularly in danger.

However, as I moved from quest to quest and my experience bar barely moved, I noticed the levels of the mobs around me quickly getting ahead of me, which is something that hadn't happened to me in a very long time, and their damage also became more noticeable. In Taloran Village I suffered my first death when a stray Hammer Shot pulled a second group at the same time as I accidentally body-pulled an extra silver mob on top of that. On normal story difficulty that wouldn't have been a problem, but here I died. Different, for sure.

As an aside, the way I'm questing on the PTS is the complete inverse of how I usually level in the live game. Usually, I watch all the cut scenes - even though I've seen them all before - because I want to immerse myself in the RP aspect of it all and am always hoping to encounter the occasional piece of dialogue that I either haven't heard before or at the very least haven't encountered in so long that it's as good as new to me. The combat in-between is not terrible, but relatively mindless, as everything just gets swept away with little effort.

On the PTS, I space-bar through everything because I don't want to spend time on the RP aspect, I don't want to get too invested in characters that will just get wiped anyway, and I'm paying more attention to the gameplay because that's the focus of the testing.

That said, something funny happened as I continued to work my way through all the Ord Mantell missions (both the class storyline and all the side quests): I actually got really into the gameplay. While I had virtually no buttons to press (back in the day I approached something close to a full action bar by the end of the first planet, while I basically had to blast my way through the entirety of Ord Mantell with nothing but Explosive Round this time), the increased difficulty and reduced XP really transformed the experience.

Because XP gains were so stingy that I was falling behind even while doing every single optional mission including all the bonuses, I started to feel a genuine hunger for XP like I haven't felt in this game for over a decade. I kept looking for more dynamic encounters to do just so I could go up one more level. I longed to level up and gain a new ability (even if that last one didn't really end up being fulfilled in any meaningful way during this particular adventure). I actually put med packs on my bar and got excited about gear upgrades

While the moment-to-moment button pressing was not challenging or complex at this level, everything hitting so much harder meant that I had to take care when moving around so I wouldn't accidentally over-pull, and when dealing with multi-mob groups, it was vital to quickly focus down the easy targets to reduce the amount of incoming damage. It reminded me a bit of WoW Classic to be honest.

And then I got to the Separatist volcano base. I remembered that place being quite threatening back in the day, and the trooper class mission in there was possibly the most difficult quest I ever encountered while levelling (I actually talked about it in this post from February 2012.)

Needless to say, I was very curious to see what the experience was going to be like on this new master difficulty, and it did not disappoint. Me at level 7 vs. groups of three mobs each - all level 9-10 and several of them including a strong mob as well - was an absolute disaster. The first time I would've died, the game bugged out and suddenly teleported me back to Fort Garnik, but I travelled right back into the volcano to get back into the fray. 

I managed to down a few pulls near the phase entrance by quickly nuking a single mob and then running out before his two buddies could kill me, but further in I would usually die before being able to flee, so that it became a slow zerg of kill one, die, revive, kill another, die, revive, kill the last one of the pack. I could've tried to go out and gain some more XP before trying again I suppose, but I was too stubborn for that - and I did succeed in the end. It was so satisfying! Mr Commando told me that I was weird for being so delighted by dying over and over again, but it was genuinely fun to me.

I did manage to complete the rest of the base without dying after that, though some fights were very close affairs (as in, me finishing with something like 10 HP left). Once I got my companion, I also went back to do the heroics, which were also very doable, though I had to take some care here too. However, the champion mob for the Savrip dynamic encounter just flattened me and Jorgan in a blink.

I finished the planet at only level 9, and I'm actually weirdly excited to dive back in and do the Esseles and go to Coruscant. It's funny because there's a part of me that is telling me I shouldn't get too into this because it's only the PTS and I don't want to burn myself out before it all goes live, but all I can say is that the difficulty toggle made for a really fun, nostalgic experience for me. I wouldn't want to be required to level every single character like that I suppose, but nobody has to.

The point is that outside of ventures, you can toggle the difficulty up and down at any given moment as it pleases you. I keep seeing people get confused by that and ask questions like "but doesn't that mean you can cheese the difficulty by doing x, y and z" but the point is that there is no special reward for this. The reward is that it's more fun. The ventures are somewhat different, and in those you won't be able to turn the difficulty down once you've committed to it. But outside of that, there is no cheese - there is only choosing what's fun for you.