I Was Wrong About Levelling Difficulty

I'm now up to having spent a double-digit number of hours testing the overworld difficulty toggle on the PTS, space-barring my way through various starter experiences over and over while dying quite a lot at times. And it's not just because I want to be a helpful tester - it's because it's been fun.

When the difficulty toggle was first announced, I said this that I "wasn't that invested into the idea personally [because] I don't think the current difficulty is terrible". Who cares if nothing on the starter planets can really hurt you? More difficult content absolutely still exists in SWTOR, you just have to advance some way into the game before discovering it.

After actually playing through the starter and capital planets on veteran and master difficulty however, I've changed my mind about that. Not that challenging content still exists - obviously it does - but the experience reminded me of something that had been lost and that I'd honestly kind of forgotten about.

In SWTOR's first year, I often compared its gameplay to World of Warcraft's Burning Crusade era. In this post for example, I described the game as offering a combination of Dragon Age style storytelling with a multiplayer option and more enjoyable combat. In this one, I noted how much I enjoyed medpacs actually feeling useful when levelling up, something that had already been lost in WoW at the time. I'd genuinely forgotten that this was ever a selling point for me. (Which is amusing because that post was titled "Things You Didn't Know You Missed".)

The reason I fell as hard for SWTOR as I did back in 2012 wasn't just because of its story - it was the whole package, and that included engaging gameplay throughout the levelling journey. I've gotten so used to just speedrunning alts through each planet, only stopping at class story instances and nowhere else, that I'd forgotten what it used to be like to not do that.

The slower levelling via the veteran or master mode toggle just changes things so dramatically. You pick up side quests because you actually need more XP instead of being massively overlevelled almost from the start. As a side effect of that, you poke your head into every little corner of the map and take in so much more of your environment. You kill so many more mobs, and because they actually hurt, you pay attention to what type of mob you're fighting and which one should go down first. Your surroundings are no longer just a minor obstacle on your way to the next cut scene; they are engaging in their own right.

To me at least, this also works to actually enhance the storytelling. Take Korriban as an example - it's supposed to be a dog-eat-dog environment that is harsh and deadly, but you don't really feel that when everything is a breeze and you're in and out within an hour. That soldier at the entrance to the Tomb of Ajunta Pall just looks like a massive wuss, complaining about k'lor'slugs when they don't seem to do anything to you and die as soon as you so much as sneeze at them. Turn the difficulty up to master, struggle to not get overwhelmed by the damn critters yourself on your very first quest, and suddenly he's much more relatable.

The same concept applies on the other starter planets: Hutta is so much more unpleasant when it hurts. You can tell that Ord Mantell is a warzone when fighting your way through a village actually takes some effort. The flesh raiders on Tython are a much more credible threat when they also threaten you.

I get that this isn't for everyone, and I'm not pretending that I myself would've enjoyed levelling every single one of my alts this way over the course of the last ten years. When I'm just looking to level another [insert origin story here] to see a different romance option, I don't necessarily need to linger too much along the way. However, at this point it has been so long since I last had to do more than the bare minimum while levelling up that being reminded of the fact that it doesn't have to be that way has been really refreshing.

I'm pretty sure that once Masters of the Force goes live, I'll be making liberal use of the difficulty toggle even outside of ventures. Sure, there'll be situations where story difficulty will remain my choice as well, especially if I want to get something done particularly quickly. However, I think I'll be happy to slow down just as often, and it'll be fun to actually have the option to do so.