Galactic Threads: Things Are Starting to Come Together

With more than 18 months having passed since the last story update, my anticipation for 7.8's Galactic Threads was high, and I'm happy to say that it didn't disappoint.

It's a decently sized piece of story that sets itself apart with what I'd describe as a somewhat more "old-school" vibe, with slightly more running around in the open world and more varied gameplay. As was already revealed during the first previews, it's also structured a bit differently than normal, with three "mini arcs" that can be completed in any order instead of a single, strictly linear narrative. I was a little worried that this might make the shorter arcs feel kind of inconsequential (since by necessity, nothing you do in one of them could influence events in another) but that didn't turn out to be the case.

Let's go through everything one by one, shall we? As usual, there will be full spoilers.

Galactic Threads

The story starts with a cut scene showing us Malgus, Shae and her newly assembled ragtag band from the prison break fighting the Hidden Chain on Tatooine, which includes Malgus reaching out with the Force and downing two small ships by smashing them together in the air. I thought this was a nice callback to the Deceived novel, where Malgus' sheer power is also demonstrated by him stopping a shuttle from taking off by pulling it down with the Force.

That short scene is largely it for "meanwhile, here's what's going on somewhere else" cinematics in this update though, and going forward it's all about our character and their companions. I think it's been a while since I got to take so many good screenshots of my own characters, and I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Back on Odessen, Jakaiah and Rass Ordo arrive in a shuttle and let you know that they are pissed off about Shae's prison break too, as it meant that she effectively abandoned her position as Mandalore. I wonder if there are any precedents for that kind of thing in Star Wars lore? Either way you agree to pursue the matter together, which leads us to the aforementioned three mini arcs that can be done in any order, taking you either to Tatooine, Hoth or Elom. I've played through them in different orders and can confirm that your choice in that regard makes absolutely no difference. I did wonder at one point, when Rass made a complaint about something that included the line "if we got here sooner, this might've been a whole lot easier", whether there might be slight differences in voice lines depending on the order, but that didn't turn out to be true. He says that line even if you go to Hoth with him first. 

On The Run

In my first playthrough however, I started on Tatooine, so I'll start there in this post as well. With the help of Akaavi Spar, you go there to answer a distress signal from a high-ranking Hidden Chain defector. You eventually find her, though it turns out that she didn't actually signal you, which points towards a mysterious third party interfering. Nevertheless you make a deal to help her and her love interest get rid of a band of mercenaries that have been hired by Heta Kol to hunt them down. In turn they provide you with the intel that Heta's fleet is moving through Sith space, seemingly unbothered by anyone even though she doesn't particularly like the Empire, which again, is somewhat mysterious.

Gameplay-wise, this section is probably the least interesting as it involves a lot of running around to first track down the defector's safe house, and then to hunt down the mercenaries scattered across all four corners of the map. I could see some people not being too thrilled by this, but to me, cruising across Tatooine for a story mission actually felt very nostalgic and I even made a point of not always taking the fastest route via quick travel and instead using taxis and my speeder so I could take in the scenery and pause for the occasional dynamic encounter on the way (at least on my first playthrough). I also liked the mechanic for finding the stealthed mercenaries and how you could tell you were getting close by either your character or Akaavi emitting a small startled sound.

Story-wise, Jemala from clan Ha'rangir and her lover Ora are certainly... memorable for their slightly melodramatic behaviour, and I think people were just happy to see a lesbian NPC couple in game for what I think might be the first time. (Darth Krovos and Zasha Ranken are pretty clearly an item as well, but it was never that obvious and depending on your choices you may be responsible for Ranken's death, so less of a happy story.)

It was also interesting to get more interactions with Akaavi that showed more of her character to players who perhaps never played a smuggler and aren't that familiar with her. The letter she sends you afterwards also ties in nicely with her origin story in the base game.

Hoth Pursuit

On Hoth you're after the slicer from Shae's little band, and you're accompanied by Rass Ordo, who continues to be in a very bad mood about the whole Shae thing, which manifests in a lot of anger and disgust about the slicer and how Shae could throw everything away just to do a heist with a low-life like him.

You visit a place called Shai Tenna's Pleasure Den and I was a bit disappointed that smugglers don't get any comment about their previous adventures with Shai. Also, am I the only one who found the concept of a "unique slicer signature" a bit weird? I always thought the point of slicing was to do things without being traced... but that's just an aside.

After a lot of searching you finally manage to corner Greb Besrik the cyborg Mon Calamari (for some reason I found his name extremely difficult to remember and spell correctly) and he confesses that he doesn't know where Shae and her crew are right now, as he doesn't hang out with them all the time, he just sends them stuff via a broker. He just knows that Shae and Malgus are still sticking together, as they seem to have some sort of plan that involves both of them going after the same target for different reasons.

Gameplay-wise, this section also has a lot of running around, but slightly less than Tatooine I guess. Also, the final chase to catch Greb at the end was actually really funny. Usually I'm not necessarily a fan of these kinds of scenarios where you're running after someone who keeps getting away repeatedly, but this one was really well done. I had to chuckle at the bit when you're almost caught up to him and he lets out a yelp, gains a sudden speed boost and just jumps into the ice water. And they make you climb a ladder! I always thought it was weird that they introduced ladders on Onderon as a terrain mechanic and then promptly seemed to forget about them again, forever. 

I needed Illeva to point out that you can see Greb swimming through this tube above you during the chase sequence.

The Library of Nul 

The Elom bit of the story actually starts on Nar Shaddaa, where you help Talos Drellik procure an ancient droid part to repair a droid that's meant to help you access Darth Nul's library. The game repeatedly hits you over the head with how everything about this replacement droid part is odd and weird, to the point that I thought to myself "if this doesn't go wrong in some way, I'll be very disappointed". I was not disappointed.

The repaired droid seems to work fine at first and does indeed grant you access to Nul's sanctuary, where you find old holos of Nul and three small puzzles. It felt like ages since we last got to do a little puzzle as part of the story, though I guess thinking back, there was a short one as part of the story in the Interpreter's Retreat, back in 7.3. I know I've said in the past that puzzles in SWTOR can be contentious, but I enjoyed this little change of pace.

You learn from Nul's holos that she seemingly didn't fully embrace the Sith code but rather warped her old Jedi teachings into something new that suited her better. She also talks about how she did indeed design the machine that Heta replicated with the goal of expanding on her personal power to awaken the Force in people. Her last recording has her explaining that the Emperor is on to her and that she intends to distract him to keep her secrets hidden. At that point the spare droid part suddenly starts transmitting data to somewhere else, and if you don't interfere yourself, your faction companion smashes it. Here too, you worry about what mysterious third party caused this to happen.

I enjoyed the different pace of this section of the story, with minimal movement and combat but instead featuring those three puzzles. It also adds a taste of faction flavour as you're either accompanied by Arn or Major Anri, both of whom have some great, amusing commentary on Darth Nul's little setup. 

Dark Heart of the Fortress

During the intermission conversations between these three mini arcs, Lana updates you about a survey team sent to Ilum to investigate the old ruins of the Emperor's crashed space station (where we also found XR-53). If you ever wondered why nobody looked at that thing before, the implication seems to be that at least part of the stealth technology actually survived and hid it from view.

As the survey team becomes non-responsive and seems to have run into trouble, Lana asks you to go to Ilum with her to search for them. You follow their tracks and eventually find their bodies in the ruins of the station, though it's not clear what killed them. Soon afterwards some of them get up as zombies though, and I immediately thought "uh oh, just like those Czerka guys who messed with the Rakata mind trap on Tatooine" - good foreshadowing there, as you eventually do find a Rakata mind trap, as well as some Malgus holos that seem to indicate that he talked to someone there. You also pull Darth Nul's holocron out of your back pocket and the mind trap tugs at it, though I was a bit baffled why my character would be just carrying that thing around with her so casually. In general, this whole section was really well done in terms of atmosphere though - I was very immersed in the creepy vibes.

You check in on the mind trap and find Darth Nul herself inside, or at least what's left of her mind. She talks about "he who came before" and you conclude that she must mean Malgus, though she doesn't really confirm this, so I'm not sure that's actually who she meant. What's left of her mind doesn't seem to be entirely there anymore (she also has the equivalent of a legacy title under her name that says "Fragments of Intellect") and she attacks you in an attempt to take over your body. After you successfully fight her off, the sparse scenery inside the mind trap comes crashing down and you awake outside to see the physical mind trap fall over, seemingly lifeless.

Back on Odessen, you're given the option to share everything that's happened with your faction or hold back, and you suddenly find yourself with a mysterious recording that someone seems to have smuggled into your situation room. It reveals Darth Jadus of agent story fame, enlightening you that he's been the one leaving hints for you (such as the distress signal that led you to Jemala). He sees the galaxy changing with the events that are already in motion, and wants you to follow his advice on what to do next (without telling you more about that). He also reveals that Sa'har and Ri'kan are not dead (not the biggest surprise in the world I guess, though I didn't expect it to be revealed so soon) and that Ri'kan appears to have taken Sa'har prisoner, presumably in an attempt to get back into Heta's good graces.

We already knew about the Darth Jadus reveal thanks to the trailer from Star Wars Celebration, but at the time I wasn't sure what the context for it was. I'm pleased to see that he seems to be back "properly", though I was taken aback by how different his voice sounded. I was convinced he had been recast, but according to the credits it's the same voice actor (Stephen Rashbrook); he just sounds quite different to me (and I've seen others comment on this too). I guess it must be hard to hit the exact same pitch you once used for a character you recorded some fifteen years ago and haven't revisited since then.

Conclusion

While this update didn't have a big "whoa" moment - the Darth Jadus reveal would have qualified if the devs hadn't opted to spoil it ahead of time - I thought it was really strong in other ways.

I've generally been positive about all the goings-on with Shae, Sa'har and other important NPCs, but I did note as far back as 7.2 almost three years ago that I was getting a bit concerned that we were perhaps spending too much time watching other characters having adventures that didn't really involve us. And I do think that has kind of held true over the patches that followed. I still enjoyed those story updates, don't get me wrong, but you know how sometimes you don't realise you miss something until it suddenly comes back and you go "oh wow, I forgot how good that was"? That's how this update made me feel by limiting its "meanwhile, somewhere else" segment to that brief shot of Malgus and Shae and then focusing everything else on the player character and their relationships with existing companions. I feel like I haven't had a chance to take so many screenshots of my characters just looking cool in a long time! We also get to interact with half a dozen different companions who often have interesting banter that fleshes out their characters or our relationships with them, or that's just plain fun. What's not to love?

In terms of overall plot progression... eh, I wouldn't say that we made huge strides in this update, but I've got to admit the structure with the three mini arcs actually made me appreciate how frikkin' complex this plot they've been building is in terms of what all the different characters' motivations are, and I think this was the first time the writers really managed to pull it all together a little bit.

The Tatooine arc reminds us that Heta is a threat by herself, regardless of her rivalry with Shae and the details of her goals and motivations, while the trip to Hoth deals with the impact of Shae's betrayal and her alliance with Malgus. The visit to Elom finally provides some clear answers about Darth Nul, which on Ilum then get tied back to Darth Malgus. All of these people are converging towards something, and it feels like whenever they all finally manage to meet up, it could result in massive fireworks due to their different alliances and rivalries: Heta hates Shae, who works with Malgus, who in turn doesn't seem to care about Heta but actually appears to have similar ideas as her (wanting to carry on Nul's work) even as he helps Shae fight her! Just thinking about all that makes my brain hurt!

And now we also know that the Kateen siblings are still alive, and Darth Jadus has been planning something too. Where the heck is this going? At this point I feel like all of this could be heading towards a pretty epic finale.

Galactic Season 9 in Review

It's finally done! I completed all Galactic Season 9 meta achievements on all servers. I didn't have to wait with writing this until that was done, but I kind of wanted to, just in case anything that happened towards the end was going to change my mind in some ways - it didn't.

Galactic Season 9 was easily one of my favourite seasons so far. While most of the rewards were solid and the armour sets pretty versatile, my enjoyment was mostly down to the theme. I love flashpoints! I ran the featured flashpoint of the week up to six times per week, sometimes multiple times per night, and it never got boring because no two runs were the same.

I saw people that were in a hurry, and I saw others that were proceeding at a more slow and careful pace. I had groups that tried to skip as much trash as possible and others that killed absolutely everything in their way. Most importantly though, it was almost always good fun. There were a couple of badly behaved exceptions early in the season, but the vast majority of runs were pleasantly uneventful or filled with some amusing shenanigans. It was pretty reaffirming really, both in the way it reminded me of just how much I really enjoy flashpoints and have been missing having a good reason to run them more regularly, and how the majority of the SWTOR community is pleasantly chill and considerate of others in group content.

If I had to cite any negatives, I'd say the fact that the weekly objective was limited to veteran mode only meant that few guildies could be motivated into running flashpoints during our weekly guild event, as vet mode is so easy and quick, I can understand why many didn't see it as worth the extra effort of waiting for a dedicated time and place. I did appreciate though that there was at least an optional master mode objective during quite a few weeks, which I always did when it was available.

The special queue for the veteran mode of the week was a bit of a double-edged sword. Some nights I really would've preferred to just walk in with two guildies and a companion for example, but undermanning like that or even just going in manually with a full group to see the cut scenes was simply not an option. On the plus side though, the simplicity of this system meant that it saw plenty of use, as it was very straightforward with not much room for confusion.

As far as other objectives go, I was glad to see that the addition of all the new dynamic encounters in summer led to much more varied objectives from one week to the next, and we weren't constantly hopping back and forth between Hoth and Tatooine like in GS8. That said, I still felt a bit burnt out on these and mostly skipped those two planets, focusing mostly on the objectives for the starter planets, capital worlds and Ilum instead.

In general I reached a state this season where I spent very little time doing things I wouldn't really have felt like doing otherwise. The flashpoints were always a joy to do, and then I'd just add two or three other weekly objectives from the list depending on what I liked most.

I don't expect to go this hard (going for all the achievements on all servers) next time around, but even so I feel like I'm pretty well set to continue completing the season on all servers without too much stress in the future - more so than before, in fact, as this season was a stark reminder of how comparatively little effort it takes to just max out the reward track. That said, we now know that Galactic Season 10 will "work a little differently than previous seasons" - I'm very curious to find out what that means.

Legacy Level 50 on Satele Shan

Back in September I posted about hitting legacy level 50 on Shae Vizla, and at the end of that post I noted about the three remaining servers where I hadn't maxed out my legacy yet that "I wouldn't expect to ding 50 there this season, but I could see myself hitting that milestone on all three servers in quick succession at some point next year." What I didn't expect when I said that I would ding 50 on Satele Shan literally on New Year's Day!

It basically managed to juuust get in there at the end of the season, as I'd literally just completed my one hundredth weekly season objective and was just doing a couple more quests to hit the character's personal Conquest target when the "legacy level up" pop-up appeared. I actually paused for a moment and went "wait, what legacy level am I again on here", hovered over the bar and it said 50! I hadn't realised I'd been that close already!

Anyway, that's another one off the list. I double-checked The Leviathan and Tulak Hord now and I'm 47 and 48 there respectively, but I'm also fully done with the season, so my alts there will be getting a bit of a break over the next few weeks. Definitely something to keep an eye on next season though!

Once I'm legacy level 50 everywhere, I guess hitting legendary on all servers could be my next long-term goal. I'd definitely post about that on reddit if I ever got it, as while I surely wouldn't be the first person to ever do it, it's still gotta be something extremely rare...

Either way I'd have quite a way to go to that one on most servers, as I've only actually completed one class story on Satele Shan even at legacy level 50, just like it was on Star Forge when I maxed out there.

What to Expect from SWTOR in 2026

I mentioned briefly in my 2025 in review post that Keith dropped a Producer's Letter for Q4 shortly before Christmas. I appreciate that he's been doing these pretty regularly for something like two years now, but most of the time they spend more time looking back than forward, and the little tease he tends to give about what's coming next is rarely enough meat to write a full blog post about.

This one was different though, as he actually gave us a pretty clear road map for most of 2026, something we haven't gotten in a long time. I couldn't tell you for sure when we last got a road map in fact - searching this blog for "road map", it looks like we got quite a few of them around 2017/18, and then the last mention of the subject is this post from early 2020 in which I cite a forum post from Eric Musco stating that they were going to move away from giving us full road maps. Huh! I'd forgotten all about that.

Anyway, the point is we did actually get a road map for the first time in six years or so, and that's definitely worth talking about. Instead of simply reproducing Keith's exact words (the link above takes you straight to the source if you so desire), I also wanted to add some commentary and context to a few of the things he said, to provide additional detail based on what we already knew and to manage expectations.

Firstly, the (in my opinion) most important bit that wasn't part of the actual road map itself was the update that they are still working on DirectX 12 and have made a lot of progress, but since it's still not quite ready they can't give us a date for when this feature will make it into the live game. I'm not the best person to tell you what DirectX is and why it's important to upgrade (in fact, from my understanding, players are unlikely to notice any major changes immediately), but all you've got to know is that it's a back-end system and that the game currently runs in DirectX 9, which came out in 2002. Yes, you read that right, that's oh two! To quote Wikipedia, "at the time of its release, it supported Windows 98, Windows Me, Windows 2000, and Windows XP". I was 19 years old and just out of school when this system came out! I bet some of the people reading this weren't even born yet! So I can damn well see why it's overdue for an upgrade if we want the game to keep running smoothly.

That said, on to the actual road map items. We already knew that the next patch, 7.8.1, will include date nights for Torian and Kira, the next Galactic Season, and (unusually for a point one patch, because of how the voice actors' strike previously delayed it) the next story update called "Master's Enigma". What's new is the comment that "this season will work a little differently than previous seasons" - we don't yet know what this means, but I think it's interesting to highlight, as I was wondering whether they had anything special planned for Galactic Season 10 due the round number. It could be related to that, or it could simply be that the devs felt it was about time to mix things up a bit since the last few seasons have all been very similar with pretty minimal changes. While you could argue that there's no need to change something that works, we MMO players do also get bored if things stay completely the same for too long.

Where things get spicy in terms of news coming from the road map is the sneak peek at the next story update coming after 7.8.1 - which is scheduled for summer and will be called "Legacy Reborn". It seems likely to me that this title refers to the expansion's titular "Legacy of the Sith" in some way, though I'm still not entirely sure what that's meant to be - Darth Nul's? Malgus's? We'll see. Though as a completely wild guess, I'd also love it if this was a double entendre of sorts that included some kind of update to the legacy system. (Speaking of features that have stayed 100% the same for a long time...) But that's just pie-in-the-sky dreaming.

What we do know about 7.9 for sure is this: "As the Legacy of the Sith story reaches its finale in 7.9: Legacy Reborn, we'll be introducing the next story Era just around the corner! Without giving too many spoilers, you can expect quite the shake-up across the galaxy. We'll give more details about the next Era in 2026."

This comment builds on the expansion tease from the last dev stream - it sounds like we'll be getting an 8.0 at the end of 2026!

Before excitement and speculation get too wild though - /Jawaface pointed out that it seems quite deliberate that Keith repeatedly refers to it as a new "era" and not an expansion. Back when I speculated about whether we were ever going to get an 8.0 at all, I said that if we're going to get another expansion, it's important that it lives up to what people expect from an expansion, considering many players' disappointment with the launch of Legacy of the Sith. Keith consciously using a different term may therefore be a deliberate choice to lower expectations - which is of course not something people ever love to hear, but I'm keeping an open mind.

I do think it might mean that we may have to be ready for 8.0 to not necessarily work like previous expansions. Maybe the level cap won't be raised, or there won't be a new operation, or - well, basically think of any feature you'd usually associate with an expansion and consider that this particular thing might not be included this time. To be clear, I have no doubt that 8.0 will still be a sizeable and exciting update and I very much look forward to hearing more about it! Just... attempting to set expectations, you know. (Ted from the SOTOR Podcast also noticed Keith's word choice here and discusses it in his latest episode.)

Either way it looks like 2026 might well end up being the most interesting year for SWTOR (in terms of content) that we've had in a while. I can't wait to learn more!

The Blog's 14th Year Was a Bit of a Dud

Last year I made a big song and dance about how prolific I'd been on the blog (more than 100 posts written for the first time since 2019!), so it makes me a bit sad to have to admit that this year has been the complete opposite, with my posting frequency hitting a new low of around five posts per month, for an annual total of just over sixty.

This puts me a fair bit behind even the second least active year of this blog, 2022, when a last-minute delay to the launch of Legacy of the Sith completely sapped me of motivation in January, and then I had a major funk towards the end of the year due to the bad state operations were in (one of my top three worst times in SWTOR for sure).

It's kind of weird because I didn't really feel particularly bad about SWTOR this year at all. It was still my most played game of the year by a mile, and I don't really recall any periods during which I was having a bad time. The voice actors' strike and lack of story updates just made it less interesting to talk about, somehow. Doing dynamic encounters all year was fine but simply didn't inspire me to do a lot of writing about the game, good or bad. It's almost as if my enjoyment of SWTOR doesn't correlate to my urge to write about it in a linear way:

• When I'm having a great time with it, I definitely want to write about it all the time. I have so many thoughts and I want to get them all on the page while the going is hot!
• When I'm having a really bad time (rare, but it has happened), it also makes sense that I don't feel like writing very much. Maybe I'll make one or two posts to vent but then I'd rather focus on other things that I actually enjoy.
• However, when I'm having a mostly okay time, like I had for most of this year, it's also kind of killer for my inspiration. I may have some fun playing in the moment, but it doesn't leave me with a lot to say about the experience.
• Conversely, when I'm having a slightly annoying time, this is another motivator for me to write a lot, because there are still things I like but they are just being dragged down by all these flaws, and I feel like I basically have to cry out for the devs to fix them so things can be good again. (I suspect the "Knights of" expansions were a prime example of this, as there's no other expansion that I've talked about as much.)

That said, as much as I enjoy psychoanalysing myself, I was also stressed in real life for quite a few months, and played a fair amount of WoW, so those things also took away from this blog in terms of both free time and motivation.

Regardless! Enough of the general yapping, let's look at some of the things I actually did write:

January and February saw the last two installments of my "Around the SWTOR-sphere" column before I dropped it. I still think it's a great concept and there absolutely is lots of community activity that deserves highlighting, but what with my general lack of energy, a project that very much required loads of it was naturally the first thing to go.

I also started the year by writing a wishlist for features I'd like to see in 2025, none of which became reality. Don't worry, I'm used to it. As I was still somewhat energised from patch 7.6 in December, I wrote top ten lists about the new dynamic encounters on Hoth and Tatooine. Even though I waited with writing them to make sure that I had sufficient experience with all the encounters under my belt, I've got to say that a year later, I'd definitely change some of my rankings anyway.

I also wrote a post called "SWTOR Classic - an Attempt at a Realistic Assessment", which surprisingly turned into one of my most popular posts in terms of random Google traffic. Or maybe it shouldn't be a surprise, considering that it's a very niche topic that not a lot of people talk about but that would definitely cross the minds of at least a small subset of players. Lest you think that it being popular in terms of Google must mean that SWTOR Classic is something the masses are secretly craving, we're still talking about fewer than one hundred hits per month here.

By February I was already struggling for inspiration a bit, reaching for subjects like my pet peeves in PvP or whether the newest Cartel Market bundle was good value. When Galactic Season 8's theme was announced to be uprisings, I was not thrilled. In March I also had reason to be sad when the OotiniCast shut down. By April I was talking openly about how unmotivated I was feeling. 

In May I tried to rank all previous Galactic Seasons by how much I enjoyed them. Patch 7.7 dropped and like I said above, I had some fun but it felt lacking without a story update.

At least June was a good month for me, as I got to celebrate earning the Dread Master title from completing the timed run for Dread Palace master mode and my guild conquered Belsavis during Total Galactic War (in a rather degenerate way), finally earning me the legacy title "The Galaxy Conqueror".

I made people come and pose with me on FA-1 Command Walkers to commemorate the occasion. 

In July I had a decent time with the Night Life event after the devs finally made casino chips a legacy-wide currency, and I had a lot of fun joining the New Outriders for a guild event on Star Forge.

August saw me completing the timed run in master mode Scum & Villainy, and Galactic Season 9 launched, bringing with it the removal of cut scenes in the group finder, which I was not too happy about, even if I understood the devs' motivation. Nonetheless, I enjoyed this season's theme a lot more than the previous one and felt that it was off to a good start.

September saw me hitting a few more personal milestones, such as completing all the hidden achievements related to the dynamic encounter "Trial by Fire" on Hoth and hitting legacy level 50 on the Shae Vizla server. (Yes, I'm still there!) I also wrote the super-nostalgic post "10 Moments in SWTOR's History for Which You Had to Be There", which I'm still pretty proud of.

In October I talked about how people shouldn't be too freaked out about the EA buyout just yet, the success of date nights, and how I thought the special Czerka stims used in the last two Galactic Seasons weren't working out so great.

November mostly consisted of more talk about running flashpoints for GS9, until December finally gave us patch 7.8 and the story update we were originally meant to get a year ago. I also got to round out the year by defeating Dread Master Brontes on master mode, which has probably made 2025 one of my most successful years in terms of ticking off challenging old ops achievements.

We'll see how I'll do in terms of blogging in 2026. After this year's low, I'd imagine that the only way is up!

Happy 14th Birthday, SWTOR!

Back in my birthday post from 2023, I said that "the one thing that seems to be a constant with this game is that nothing is constant; that it's an endless roller-coaster of ups and downs" and 2025 certainly did nothing to disprove that theory. After it had a pretty good year in 2024, 2025 was once again a rather challenging time for Star Wars: The Old Republic, this time because of the 2024-2025 video game voice actor's strike.

While it technically started mid-2024, it wasn't until this year that it really began to impact SWTOR. We were originally told that the new story slated for patch 7.6 at the end of 2024 wasn't quite ready yet to go live on the intended launch date, with no official reason given, but with the promise that it would be released as soon as possible. However, weeks of waiting turned into months, and then the next story update intended for patch 7.7 also couldn't go live for some reason, making it increasingly obvious that the lack of voice acting was what was posing the problem, even if the devs seemingly couldn't comment on it in any official capacity.

I guess nobody really expected the strike to go on for that long - at close to a year in duration it certainly clocked in as one of the longest in the union's history. I sympathise with the voice actors' cause so there are no hard feelings from me on that front, and I also think that the devs at Broadsword did the best that they could under the circumstances.

This ended up turning 2025 into the year of dynamic encounters: while the first batch was launched at the end of 2024, the devs soon ended up giving us more achievements to do those same encounters again, new customisations for Bessi that encouraged us to do them yet again, as well as - eventually - even more planets to do them on.

Shintar the trooper gets another year older. 15 was a good number of shots to put into a grid for a change. 

It was all good fun, but I've got to admit that the lack of story definitely put a  noticeable damper on my own enthusiasm for the game. In a way that was actually a surprise to me, because while I do love the story and spend a fair amount of time replaying it in all its different permutations, I tend to think that the main reason the game has been so sticky for me has been my guild with whom I run operations every week. I actually still think that's the case, but going 558 days between story updates (the longest content drought of this type in the game's history) really made me realise just how much I still depend on the story as something to get excited about in regards to SWTOR. Dynamic encounters were fun, don't get me wrong - I played and enjoyed them, and I still do, but it's just not the same without having my character chat and go on adventures with her companions every so often.

I look forward to getting the next story update a little bit sooner as well as hearing what the devs have in store for next year.* If the roller-coaster theory holds any water, then 2026 could be a great time for the game again... until we inevitably crash down in 2027 due to some unpredictable fallout related to the EA buyout or whatever. (I definitely hope that doesn't happen - I'm just a bit cynical.) You've got to ride the wave while it lasts.

Previous SWTOR birthday posts:

Happy Birthday, SWTOR!
Happy 2nd Birthday, SWTOR!
Happy Third Birthday, SWTOR!
Happy 4th Birthday, SWTOR!
Five Years of SWTOR
Six Years of SWTOR
Seven Years of SWTOR
Eight Years of SWTOR
Nine Years of SWTOR
Happy 10th Birthday, SWTOR!
Eleven Years of SWTOR
SWTOR Turns Twelve Today
SWTOR Is a Teenager Today

*I drafted this earlier in the week, and then Keith dropped his Executive Producer's Letter for Q4 yesterday, which includes a roadmap for 2026 that promises two more story updates in the first half of the year to wrap up Legacy of the Sith, and 8.0 coming out around the game's fifteenth birthday. Definitely looking promising!

A Nemesis Defeated

This wasn't the post I was planning on publishing today, but I'm just too giddy not to share it immediately.

Dread Master Brontes is the operations boss about whom I've probably written the most on this blog. Back in 2019 I detailed my history with her in this post, explaining how my group mates and I had been defeated by her nightmare mode incarnation over and over again.

A little over two years ago, I finally ended up beating her on 16-person master mode of all things, and noted at the time: "I just hope I don't need to wait another ten years to tick the box for the 8-man achievement."

Aaand... *insert drumroll here* tonight it finally happened!

Unfortunately there won't be a kill video this time, as my video recording software did not cooperate.

We generally seemed to be a bit cursed all evening. First Mr Commando randomly wrenched his back (he does have chronic back problems that rear their head every so often, but usually not randomly while he's just sitting at his desk), which required a time-out so he could stretch a bit and take some painkillers. Then the friendly guildie who'd offered to fill in for one of our regulars who was absent started having internet connection problems, which led to a couple of wipes and warranted various restarts on his end.

I was in this weird head space where I simultaneously really, really wanted the kill and felt that it was absolutely within our reach (I finally understood how every single part of the fight worked and had the impression that everyone else did too) and at the same time felt weirdly zen about not getting it, almost certain that we'd continue to fail somehow and finish another year without having bested this boss (after all, it had happened several times before, and all the random mishaps described above did not fill me with confidence).

However, in the end, we persisted and were victorious! I'm still a bit bummed that I didn't get a recording (there was some excited shouting for sure) but as I said to my guildies, I'd rather get the kill without recording it than have my recording work all evening and then have nothing to show for it but more wipes. I'm not sure yet what we'll attempt to tackle next, but I don't need to worry about making a decision on that yet anyway, as this was our last progression night of the year and we won't be back at it until January.

Wreckage on Dantooine - A Bold Experiment

Aside from a new story update, patch 7.8 also gave us a new zone that is very unlike SWTOR's typical content updates. The crash site on Dantooine was explicitly designed around being filled with dynamic encounters, with everything being centred around them.

It consists of three sub-zones or biomes, and each one has one of three states or levels. Doing dynamic encounters in the area levels them up, and once all three biomes have hit level three, an instance with a special nightmare-difficulty boss designed for a group of four unlocks for a limited time.

There's no time limit on the level progression itself, so biomes don't regress in levels if there aren't enough people around (unless the planetary instance shuts down entirely). Worst case there just isn't any advancement for a while. Unlike normal dynamic encounters, the ones on Dantooine aren't on a timer, so they just sit there forever until someone comes along and actually completes them. Progress for all encounters applies to everyone taking part, and once it's completed, it goes away and another encounter spawns somewhere else.

It honestly sounds a bit like something out of another MMO, and I've seen people who've played Guild Wars 2 compare it to some of the zones in that game, namely Verdant Brink and Silver Wastes. Having never played GW2, I have no idea how accurate that comparison is, but it does seem very clear that the zone is very "un-SWTOR-like".

My own first impression was quite positive, even if the experience was very chaotic. I did have to roll my eyes a bit when literally the very first encounter I attempted to do turned out to be bugged on launch, followed by another bug preventing me from progressing the introductory quest line. However, I eventually managed to resolve the latter with a workaround and quickly found myself getting swept along by the crowd. I didn't even care that much about achieving anything specific, I just followed the masses around and tried to click or attack things wherever we went in an attempt to get credit for whatever it was we were currently doing. So that was fun.

However, I also heard quite a bit of less positive feedback from other players. All three biomes are very hostile, with various environmental debuffs slowing and damaging you, with the idea being that progression through the reputation track will unlock various counters to that which will make things less painful. Most of the time it's impossible to mount up, and even as a healer I found myself dying quite a bit.

Now, I wasn't terribly deterred by that, but I can definitely see how others might be. The comparison that came to mind for me personally was The Maw from WoW's Shadowlands expansion, which I thought was a fine enough endgame zone at the time but which seemed to be almost universally disliked.

Population is another concern, and I saw someone from Shae Vizla comment that for them, the crash site zone was effectively dead on arrival since there aren't enough endgame players on that server to make it viable. While it's very much possible to progress the zone at a slower pace, many enemies are very tough and have huge amounts of health, to the point that I'm pretty sure that quite a few encounters are not actually soloable. Even as someone who's a big proponent of group content, I find that a bit concerning, and I hope that the devs will at least review the tuning of some of these encounters.

There's one in the glacial area for example that has multiple stages, and on the final stage you're supposed to defeat six champion mobs, three of which have a knockback while the other three have a long stun. Mr Commando and I attempted to duo this as tank and healer and were killed pretty quickly, as we were both simply stunlocked and whacked to death with no means of defending ourselves. We did eventually complete the encounter after a few more people joined in, as with the mobs taking turns attacking and killing different people, we could eventually zerg them down, but it was hardly what I'd call an optimal experience.

At the same time I really want to love the new zone because I really appreciate that the devs are trying something different with it. I guess one downside of trying to keep all content relevant forever is that adding more of the same type of content, be it daily areas or flashpoints, hits diminishing returns after a while. Adding a completely new type of endgame on the other hand has a chance of engaging people in new and exciting ways.

From my point of view, the zone is very beautiful and following other people around to dispatch enemies together can be very zen. The area is also very explorable, as it's been out for a week and even the content creators that constantly gather data and are trying to write guides are still in the process of figuring some things out. A lot of rewards simply drop from killing different mobs, so as long as you keep running along and hitting things, you're bound to be rewarded in some way.

I haven't attempted the four-man boss yet as it's supposed to be super hard and we haven't got a guild group together yet to attempt it in earnest. Having this boss be the "reward" for levelling up all the zones has also been somewhat contentious, as it's odd to let more casual players progress through the entire zone just to suddenly have them hit a wall at the end of the quest line. While Eric Musco has stated that unlocking enough of the reputation buffs should make the boss accessible to all eventually - as they are supposed to massively lower the difficulty - I don't think that's very well communicated in game right now.

Looking at it from the perspective of NiM raiders on the other hand, it's probably a bit odd to be reliant on "the masses" to level up all the biomes just so you can access the boss and work on your progression. I personally don't think it's a huge deal as I'm very much in favour of different types of players working together synergistically, but we'll see what the community reception is like in the long run.

Either way I applaud the dev team for trying something different with this zone, and I at least am absolutely planning to spend a lot of time there over the next few months.

Patch 7.8 Ramblings

Patch 7.8 with the long-awaited story update and more landed this week, and for the first time in a while I felt like there were so many things going on in SWTOR at once, I hardly knew where to start. And I loved it!

I finished my last Galactic Seasons achievement on Darth Malgus last week (which means I should probably write my usual season review soon) but on the other servers I still need a few more weeklies for the last meta achievement, and I didn't want to abandon them completely this week, even if there was new content to explore on my main.

Mostly I just ran the featured flashpoint on each server, which was Legacy of the Rakata this week. And oh my god, the skips! Fortunately there's not too much annoying jumping going on in this one, but I was continually surprised by the number of trash pulls for which I learned that you can literally walk right through them without aggroing anything as long as you walk down a certain narrow line between two specific mobs. I always wondered who was the first person to figure that out and how it spread.

Primarily I wanted to check out the new story of course, but on launch night I saw a few people talking about bugs so I decided to hold off at first, because with the level of anticipation I was feeling, I figured I really couldn't deal with the disappointment of then running into a blocker. Fortunately the aforementioned issues were fixed quickly, and as of the time I'm writing this, I've played through the Galactic Threads story once. I can tell you that my first impression was very positive, but before I write my full review I need to see it a few more times on different classes. It seems like the kind of story that's mostly the same for everyone, but at least one part of it is gonna be different for Imperials, and there were a few other small moments where I found myself thinking "I wonder if you get a different line here if you have a different origin story". I've got to know!

One thing that was very obvious was that this update was originally meant to be part of patch 7.6, which also brought us the XR-53 lair boss on Ilum and the first batch of dynamic encounters on Tatooine and Hoth. Because the story has us going to all these places and there would've been some very obvious synergy there, discovering dynamic encounters for the first time as you're also cruising around Tatooine for the story. As it was, I was like "nope, I don't want to help promote your band right now, I'm 100% on Tatooine encounter achievements, bye". Though I did pause to help out the Weary Travellers at the taxi spot, because I can never ignore those. And on Hoth I helped rehome an ice cat, because I can rarely resist that either. I could just tell that it probably would've been an even better experience if it had come out as originally planned.

One tiny thing I'll comment on in terms of the story - and I guess this could be considered a spoiler if you're a purist, but it's only a small thing that happens literally in the first five minutes - is that I took the opportunity to flirt with Rass Ordo, and for a moment it looked like it was gonna go somewhere, but then he wasn't in the mood. It just made me realise I'm so ready for my trooper to finally kiss someone. Since her creation almost fourteen years ago, she's taken some flirt options here and there, but has never taken it all the way! I sure hope Rass is around in the next update as well.

Next to the story, the other big addition that came with the patch was of course the new dynamic encounter zone on Dantooine. Again, I'll have to make a longer post about that later on, but first impressions are once again positive, even if I had some issues with bugs on day one.

On top of all that, it was the start of a new PvP season, so I once again jumped back into warzones and some lower-level arenas. Within the same evening, I had one Voidstar match that was absolutely beautiful, with amazing, objective-focused teamwork that I see so rarely in a pug, and an Ancient Hypergate where someone yelled insults and ALL CAPS at me after I failed to defend a pylon. I put them on ignore as I've had to do with others before them, but it still always gives me an unpleasant adrenaline rush in the moment to be attacked like that, and no matter how much I tell myself that I don't need to care about the opinions of some random internet stranger, it can be really hard not to dwell on it. Always reminds me of why so many people avoid PvP.

Finally, the devs once again made some minor changes to the user interface this patch. They keep doing that and I'm sure they have their reasons, but it's honestly always a bit jarring and strange from a player perspective. Did we really have to devote development time to making the quest tracker ALL CAPS for example? However, I will say that in this particular case, all was forgiven on my part the moment I noticed that they also added a scroll bar to the quest tracker at last, which is something that filled me with delight. I always hated how that feature always just kind of "gave up" after five missions or whatever the previous limit was and simply added "X additional missions tracked" at the bottom. It's not really helping me to say I'm tracking these missions if I can't actually see any details about them, is it? Well, with the addition of the scroll bar, I finally can. Thanks, Broadsword!

The Subscriber Login Event in the Rear View Mirror

Lots of exciting things are happening in my favourite MMOs, but sadly real life has been kicking my arse lately so I haven't had as much time to play games as I would've liked, never mind writing about them. Still, tomorrow SWTOR gets its first story update in one and a half years, so I thought I had to sit down and post at least briefly - not about what's to come, but about the subscriber login event that's also coming to an end tomorrow.

Back in September I was kind of "whatever" about it, looking at it from the perspective of someone who's never had a reason not to continue subscribing to SWTOR, but now that it's coming to an end I wanted to take a moment to say that I actually ended up quite liking it. It was nice to get something marginally more useful from the weekly login reward for several months.

It was particularly nice for my alts on the other servers, where I spent all my currency on buying Rakata gear for my level 80s, and if I had tokens left over at the end of that I spent those on some extra OP-1s for further gear upgrades. Do I need this gear for anything? Of course not, but it's still a nice thing to have.

On my main on Darth Malgus, I ended up buying the two ship droid customisations and after that, all the different pets. I think at the end I had purchased every single one of them except for one. Did I think they were all amazing? Not really, but on Darth Malgus I have more gear and currencies than I know what to do with at this point, I already had all the emotes that were on offer, and I'm not huge on regeneration toys, so the pets were the next best thing. Especially since they were all originally from the Cartel Market, so now they're in my collections for future unlocking if I should fancy it.

Can I just say that it's kind of funny in hindsight that a single pet from the vendor cost as much as three Rakata gear pieces? Interesting value assignment there...

If you were a subscriber, what did you end up doing with your tokens?

Some of my guildies - who are usually not necessarily representative of the wider player base - were almost aggressively uninterested; it was actually kind of funny. Like, you're already subscribed and the devs are giving you free stuff, don't you want it?

The funniest to me was one particular guildie who's been a subscriber since launch and seems to have remained subscribed out of inertia more than anything, as he doesn't even really seem to play anymore - he just logs on once every two months or so to join us for a social night or something and then disappears again. He also hated the gearing system that was introduced with Legacy of the Sith and was always moaning about the fact that the the gear he got from being carried through an operation wasn't the best yet but required further upgrading.

So naturally, when this event came around, we were all like "oh man, this is going to be great for Nev; finally he can get the 340 Rakata gear he always wanted for simply logging in" - and then he didn't log in until literally the penultimate week of the event. We told him that he still had time to get three pieces if he just logged in four times during the last week, but he didn't do that either. Too busy, he told us afterwards, before stating wistfully that he wished he could just buy gear with Cartel Coins. (I know, I know. But hey, pay to win wouldn't be a thing in any game if there weren't people who liked it.)