Back in My Day: Datacrons

 "Back in My Day" is a (very) irregular series in which I muse about how certain aspects and features of Star Wars: The Old Republic have changed over time. After writing my post about Kessan's Landing last month, I really wanted to talk a bit more about datacrons.

Datacrons are a funny subject to consider for this series, because in some fundamental ways they haven't changed at all. That +2 presence datacron you might stumble upon on Coruscant or Dromund Kaas is still in exactly the same place it was in 2011, and you still interact with it in the same way: click on it and you'll get a stat boost. However, some things have changed:

Most notably, credit for datacrons wasn't legacy-wide until Knights of the Fallen Empire, so if you wanted certain stat boosts, you had to pick them up on every single one of your characters. However, the degree to which datacrons affected your character's power level was also somewhat different. Last but not least, as the devs added more datacrons to the game, their approach to what kind of experience players hunting for those new datacrons should have clearly changed.

The Power of the 'cron

I think it's safe to say that datacrons were always considered optional content, but what that meant at launch was a bit different compared to what it means now. +2 endurance grants you about 20-26 extra points of health from what I understand (my own quick testing in game showed about 10 HP per stat point but I saw claims on the forums that it was 13), which was never a huge number... but relatively speaking, it was worth more when your total health pool at max level was 20k as opposed to the 400k or so we're seeing nowadays. I never heard anyone say that it was mandatory to get all datacrons relevant to your class to get into raiding... but it was certainly recommended, especially if you were planning to push into higher difficulties.

There was also the matter of matrix shards. At launch, getting gear for your relic slots was not a trivial matter, and one way to get a really good one was to assemble a "matrix cube" out of three matrix shards, which would form a basic relic with some useful stats on it. The first time I took an active interest in datacrons back in the day was precisely for that reason. As far as I'm aware, this functionality is actually still in the game, it's just that nobody bothers with it anymore because the devs never made an update that would've allowed you to build better matrix cubes than those original level 50 ones.

Hope you like jumping

Because credit for datacrons was character-specific and you needed to physically collect matrix shards on each one, you had to revisit some of them a lot. It is worth noting though that you didn't need all datacrons on every character. Before KotFE introduced the mastery stat, each advanced class had a proprietary stat to themselves (aim for troopers/bounty hunters, cunning for smugglers and agents, strength for knights and warriors, and willpower for consulars and inquisitors), so anything that granted a stat that didn't really do anything for you could safely be ignored.

I actually didn't bother with datacrons for the most part while levelling up my first few characters, and I didn't find more than a couple organically, but the longer I played, the more often I found myself grouping with other people who felt the urge to share their knowledge about datacrons close to our position, so I started to learn more about them over time in a pretty organic way. Things kind of reached a peak when I started regular questing with my pet tank, as he knew all of their locations and wanted to pick all of them up as part of the levelling journey on every character.

When Bioware first announced that datacrons were going to become legacy-wide, I actually wasn't that thrilled, because they were a form of content to me that made playing alts more entertaining, and I didn't like the thought of that going away. I will say that nearly a decade and several dozen alts later, I feel that it was probably the right decision... though part of my enjoyment of playing on other servers has definitely been having a reason to revisit some of those datacrons for the first time in many years.

Datacron gameplay

Unless I miscounted, the game offered 90 datacrons to collect at launch. I would say the ways to acquire them fell into four basic categories (with some overlap between them): simply finding them in hidden locations somewhat out of the way, requiring completion of a jumping puzzle, requiring some sort of item interaction (e.g. picking up the MGGS from the vendor and taking it to the right place), or riding some sort of lift or floating device to a specific location. God knows how many hours in total I spent riding the Jawa balloon on Tatooine... but in hindsight, none of these were overly demanding. If you set out on a fresh character to pick up all of them, it would take several hours of your time, but considering how many of them there are, it wasn't unreasonable (unless you were really bad at jumping I guess).

However, once the devs started adding new datacrons with expansions and patches... they started to get more inventive. The Makeb presence datacron was still in line with what had come before, but the endurance one was an insanely long jumping puzzle that would send you all the way back to the start every time you failed. And then the Rishi one involved an item farm that required a silly amount of grinding - not something you would reasonably want to do on every character. Though at least both of those datacrons were shareable, so that one person who completed the whole journey was then able to summon others to get credit without them having to go through the whole ordeal themselves.

After KotFE we didn't get any datacrons for a while, but once we got to Ossus, I thought it became quite clear that the devs had decided to take a different approach now that datacrons were legacy-wide. If you weren't expected to get to a datacron more than once, they could make it pretty hard and time-consuming the first time around without that feeling entirely unreasonable. Two of the three Ossus datacrons were still pretty "old-school" in the amount of effort required, but the third required you to both jump and puzzle in a personal phase where you couldn't get any help.

We saw a similar pattern with Onslaught, where the Mek-Sha datacrons and one of the ones on Onderon were pretty standard jump or ride puzzles (though I thought the jumping ones were fiendishly hard, if not punishingly long like the Makeb Endurance one) and then the Onderon Mastery datacron was a brutal combo of jumping and puzzling on a timer, making it one of the hardest datacrons in the game so far. Ruhnuk and Kessan's Landing haven't been as harsh in terms of skill requirements, but once again involve a personal phase and completion of a long quest chain beforehand, which to me makes it pretty clear that the devs are trying to make each datacron more of an experience now, knowing that you probably won't be visiting it more than once.

I have no particularly strong feelings about this. I think it makes sense with the way the game has evolved, but it does also mean that datacrons have changed from being more of a collectible power-up that usually supported and sometimes even required grouping in the early days to having more of a solo skill challenge focus now.

Back In My Day: Dailies

"Back In My Day" is an irregular series in which I take one aspect of Star Wars: The Old Republic and look at how it has evolved over time. This particular installment was inspired by me doing a lot of questing on Ilum recently, which got me thinking about how many of the quests there used to be daily repeatable but aren't anymore.

Launch - The Dailies That Weren't Really

At launch, it was very obvious that SWTOR hadn't originally been conceived as a game with daily quests as an endgame activity in mind - until someone at the Bioware offices had a sudden panic attack three weeks before launch or something, and in order to shoehorn the daily concept into the game somehow, they took two quest chains that had been designed to be done at or near the level cap, the Ilum storyline and the Belsavis bonus series, and turned all the missions that weren't part of the main quest chain into daily repeatables that handed out endgame rewards. (I remember some of them gave out purple item modifications, but I seem to remember that this wasn't the case for all of them.)

This went about as well as you would expect. In a post from February 2012 describing my first impressions of the Belsavis dailies, I hilariously noted that I didn't even know where to go and where to start, as there was no "daily hub" or anything, and the daily missions were utterly indistinguishable from regular one-time quests.

Story-wise, a lot of them made no sense either. Now, daily tasks in an MMO require a certain suspension of disbelief most of the time, but there are still ways to make them more credible vs. blatantly hitting the player over the head with how little sense it makes to repeat certain things. My favourite example of this was always the Republic quest on Ilum that had a little astromech droid desperately seeking help and supplies for his owner, a recently crashed fighter pilot... who apparently crashed every day? We used to joke that the guy was really just a hermit who happened to live in a ship wreck and we were basically his daily supply run.

Mechanically, things were pretty bad as well. People were complaining about others not space-barring through the daily quest givers' dialogue quickly enough long before anyone got tired of the cut scenes in flashpoints, but at the same time they didn't just want to have the mission shared with them because they did want to go through the cut scene to farm social points and/or companion affection.

The area also didn't really seem to be designed to have a large number of people questing in it at the same time. Most infamously I remember the quest on Republic side to kill Rattataki leaders, of which you needed three for the quest, and there were only about five in the area, with half of them habitually bugged out and unkillable. Sometimes I'd just sit down and wait for the same guy to respawn three times.

Now, all of this may sound horrible, but it wasn't really that bad. It wasn't well designed for its purpose, but at least for me it also managed to stay below the threshold of actually becoming tedious and annoying. The fact that the Belsavis bonus series included no less than three heroics encouraged people to group up for the whole chain of dailies, and the end result felt kind of awkward but also fun. The payout was also high enough that you never really felt like you actually had to do the whole thing on a daily basis to stay afloat.

1.2 - Into the Black Hole

Patch 1.2 introduced the game's first "proper" daily area, the Black Hole on Corellia. It was a bit of a pain to get to as you had to go through no less than three loading screens to travel there, but it was much more streamlined for its purpose. There was an introductory quest with dialogue on the fleet, but then the actual dailies could just be picked up from a terminal all at once and were neatly clustered around the area.

Bioware decided to keep encouraging people to group up by also adding a heroic mission, as well as a weekly meta quest that required you to complete each mission, including the heroic, exactly once. I noted at the time that the concept of the weekly was very much in line with SWTOR's very casual-friendly approach, in that the best rewards only required you to visit the area once a week. It was also very much worth doing as the weekly also offered a new type of currency called Black Hole commendations, which could be used to buy new and more powerful gear from vendors on the fleet.

1.5 - Experiments in Section X

Section X iterated on the Black Hole and mostly tried to improve it. 1.5 was also the patch that included the free-to-play conversion though, which led to the weird experiment of making the new zone into paid content that you could unlock by subscribing or via a special access pass (which was eventually dropped).

I can't even remember what sort of rewards the missions gave at launch, but they were most assuredly overshadowed by the introduction of the reputation system, which also made Section X the first daily area with a reputation attached and gave players an incentive to increase their standing with the faction just to get access to things like cosmetic armour shells and pets.

The area was also spiced up by featuring the start to the quest chain to acquire HK-51 and having the world boss Dreadtooth path around the area. People with an interest in world PvP were delighted to actually run into the other faction on occasion now - one thing that had been a bit odd about the Black Hole was that even though technically Republic and Imperial players were playing on the same map, their quests were on entirely separate halves of it and they never even crossed paths. In Section X the two factions still had their own separate missions, like in the Black Hole, but they took place in roughly the same area, and the heroic mission for the weekly was even located in the same instance.

The heroic mission in Section X was the one somewhat controversial thing about the area, as it required exactly four people for successful completion - you couldn't substitute someone with a companion as there were several sections where people needed to click on things in sync to bypass some force fields. This was a bit of a nuisance, and was later on removed without much fanfare, though the quest's [Heroic 4] tag wasn't changed. Personally I only found out that I was suddenly able to solo it pretty much by accident.

1.7 - The Gree Revive Ilum

Patch 1.7 introduced the Gree event, the first world event that was designed from the ground up to be repeated, and which re-purposed the previously abandoned Western Ice Shelf on Ilum where the big open world PvP debacle from launch had taken place. While it also featured one instanced and two open world bosses, the main focus was once again on daily missions with which you could earn reputation to unlock some nice goodies from the local vendors.

The biggest controversy here was Bioware's attempt to use dailies more openly to encourage people to engage in world PvP within a small separate area down south, which would not allow you to be in a group larger than four, dismissed companions, and flagged you(r group) for free-for-all PvP. Personally I thought this was quite fun and novel, but some people got very hung up on the mere existence of two daily quests that required you to flag for PvP, despite of their rewards being minimal compared to the regular dailies.

2.0 - Makeb and Galactic Solutions Industries

2.0 was not a very successful addition to the game in terms of daily quest endgame. There were daily quests to do on Makeb, but they were part of the super awkward Makeb Staged Weekly and required you to limit yourself to one mission at a time, which had you travelling all over the damn place and wade through dozens of mobs just to achieve a single objective. Myself and most people I knew did it once or twice and then decided to go back to the old daily zones because they were much more fun.

Rise of the Hutt Cartel also introduced Galactic Solutions Industries as a faction, which asked us to make use of our new Seeker Droids and Macrobinoculars which we had acquired through one of 2.0's side mission arcs. Like the Makeb dailies these were very spread out, across different planets even, though at least the fact that many of them were on lower level planets allowed you to travel largely unimpeded, and quite a few of them didn't even require any combat at all. Unsurprisingly, these weren't a huge hit with people either, though there does seem to be a niche audience for them that appreciates the slower and more relaxed gameplay that they offer.

2.3 - CZ-198 & Bounty Contract Week

CZ-198 was the first daily hub to be introduced post 2.0 and went back to the classic model of having a small area shared between the two factions in which you could just "do the rounds" for some credits, and it quickly became popular because it was very quick and easy to do and therefore a very efficient way to make some money. It was also the first permanent daily area that didn't really differentiate much between the factions, as they both got the same quests. (I'm not counting that Republic players collect kolto and destroy toxin while the Empire does the opposite. It's still "click on these containers five times".)

What was really odd about CZ-198's weekly mission though was that it required you to run both of the local flashpoints in addition to doing all the dailies... which was a bit awkward to be honest. It's probably the reason I got the achievements for running these on story mode twenty-five times more quickly than for any other flashpoints, and I remember trying to always have the CZ weekly in my log before running a random just in case one of the Czerka flashpoints would pop up. This odd system was eventually patched out in 3.2, when the requirement to run the two flashpoints was replaced with a single heroic mission to kill a big droid.

2.3 was also the patch that introduced the second recurring world event, Bounty Contract Week. This followed more in the steps of the Makeb Staged Weekly, by making you choose a single daily quest that you then saw through to form a kind of storyline. It was a little weird, but still made a lot more sense than the stuff on Makeb.

2.4 - Oricon

Oricon always felt to me like it was made by the same team that created CZ-198, only with small improvements: again we were in a small area shared by both factions, both doing the same quests. Even though the change to the CZ weekly to not require flashpoint running anymore didn't come until much later, it seemed like Bioware already felt a bit awkward about that particular design decision, so the Oricon weekly featured a daily in a heroic area instead. It was brutal and I loved it - to this day it remains at least moderately challenging despite of how much heroics have been toned down in general.

What was different was that there were bonus missions for those who had unlocked their Seeker Droids and Macrobinoculars - CZ-198 had only featured a one-time quest for a pet, but the bonuses on Oricon were attached to dailies and therefore repeatable.

More importantly though, there was a much bigger attempt to tie the whole area into a story. On CZ-198, there was an introductory quest that asked you to run the flashpoints, and the flashpoints were part of the weekly, but the dailies were just kind of... there. Oricon took a different approach, by unlocking the daily quests one at a time and tying them into a quest chain narrative that you had to complete once before the missions unlocked as daily repeatable from the nearest terminal. (As an aside, the story was also refreshingly different for the two factions despite of running along the same general lines.) The story quest then cumulated in you being sent to do the two Dread operations, something that generated some resentment among solo players, but that's really another story as it had no impact on your ability to do the dailies.

2.5.2a - Return of the Rakghouls

(Fun fact, I couldn't actually find any patch notes about this... I only know that the event came with this patch thanks to my blog posts about it.) The third big repeatable world event, the Rakghoul Resurgence that would come to rotate between three different planets, took a fairly conservative approach and basically mirrored the basic setup of the Gree event, with a small enclosed daily area, an instanced operations boss and a couple of open world bosses. They just dropped the PvP area and replaced it with another heroic area instead.

What was somewhat revolutionary at the time was that the event was trying to be level-agnostic - the mobs in the tunnels were mostly very low level and would only spawn reinforcements of your character's level once you got aggro, allowing players of (nearly) all levels to join in the fun. The operations boss The Eyeless was also the first boss that featured PvE bolster, boosting lowbies to a high enough level that enabled them to participate. It's kind of ironic that this whole event appears to have been overlooked when they introduced the galaxy-wide level sync in 4.0, which now makes it feel kind of outdated and causes lowbies to get left out of parts of it due to some of the system's limitations.

3.0 - Soloing on Rishi & Yavin IV

Shadow of Revan's two new planets were a funny bunch in terms of dailies. Rishi featured several missions that were daily repeatable, and some of them even had achievements attached to repeating them often enough, but they were scattered all across the area and had no coherent theme or reward structure to them.

Yavin IV was the "real" new daily area of the expansion but required you to complete the storyline first. There was the whole thing with giving you the choice of either doing dailies or doing the Temple of Sacrifice operation to complete the storyline, which was honestly just kind of awkward. The dailies themselves, once unlocked, were decent enough fun and proved very popular. I ranted at the time though that I thought they were actually kind of over-incentivised, with the hugely powerful companion gear that was rewarded by the weekly making you feel like you kind of had to do them to kit out your companions (this was back when their gear affected their power level). What's also noteworthy is that while there was a weekly quest to kill the walker world boss on Yavin, this was completely separate from the regular weekly mission for the daily quests, which could be done solo in its entirety and was therefore the first of its kind to not feature any kind of grouping component.

3.2 - Pointlessness on Ziost

After the fun of Yavin, the dailies on Ziost felt like a bit of a step back. Requiring the completion of both the basic Shadow of Revan story as well as of the Rise of the Emperor patch, they presented the as of then largest number of hurdles to overcome in order to gain access to a new daily area. It wasn't exactly a prohibitive amount of effort or anything, but compared to the ease with which any alt could jump into any of the pre-3.0 daily areas it felt like a lot.

Mechanically it was interesting in that all the dailies were non-combat missions, enforced by the circumstances of the story... but the big problem was that there was basically zero incentive to come back. Where Yavin felt like it was almost showering you with too many rewards, Ziost had nothing, neither a reputation to work on nor anything interesting to buy with the currency the quests rewarded. I expect the value of all rewards to deprecate over time, but I distinctly remember Ziost being the one planet where I did one round of the missions on the day of release, looked at the local vendor, and realised that he didn't have anything of interest to offer even on day one, which was kind of disappointing. My impression is that I wasn't alone in this and that Ziost has remained comparatively unpopular with the masses for this reason... though again, some players did appreciate the novelty of the combat-less mission design.

4.0 - Goodbye To All The Quests I've Loved Before

Knights of the Fallen Empire brought with it a new focus on solo story, and new dailies were not really a part of Bioware's plan because they were considered too MMO-like I guess. Since the devs were busy retuning a lot of content anyway though, they decided to make most of the old heroics soloable while also attaching Alliance endgame rewards to them, which basically means that they morphed from being open-world group content for levelling players into just another set of endlessly repeatable dailies. I hated that, but based on the responses I got to the linked post a lot of people felt the opposite way.

As part of this great, galaxy-wide tidy-up, the former dailies on Belsavis and Ilum were also turned back into the regular quest chains they had clearly been meant to be from the beginning, so you did them once and that was it. I didn't even notice this for a long time, but as with all things, there were people who were unhappy about the change because they had actually still been doing those old dailies, mostly as a way to farm companion affection.

5.2 - Icky Iokath

Nearly two years after Ziost, Bioware brought us our first new daily area in ages in the form of Iokath. While everyone was quite excited about getting a new planet to explore, what we eventually got felt a lot less iterative than the previous daily areas, and more like they struggled to remember how to design this kind of content after a long time away from it. It felt as if they picked a bunch of features from the old areas, mixed in a couple of new ideas, and simply hoped that the end result would be fun. Unfortunately the different parts didn't gel too well and in the end it was more of a slightly awkward mishmash.

There is an initial storyline like on Oricon, and a couple of the quests you complete in it do return as dailies, but most of the repeatable missions are actually quite different. The quests are more or less the same for both factions and take place in a shared area, though it's larger than most daily areas. Travelling around the zone is also very convoluted, making questing on Iokath very time-consuming.

One of the new features was the concept of different daily missions rotating on the terminal from one day to the next, and the player being expected to do more than one day of them to complete the associated weekly quest. There were also several vehicle quests, which were very badly tuned in terms of cost vs. reward at launch, and while Bioware fixed this later, the bad first impression tarnished many players' impression of the planet forever. The vehicles were also meant to encourage PvP, but the combination of the initial high cost to buy them as well as the awkward geography not really encouraging people to meet up made that fall flat on its face as well.

Nearly three years after the last bunch of daily quests that also featured group content, Bioware also decided to include a single world boss on Iokath, the Colossal, and to make a daily quest for him... but since it wasn't required for the weekly and wasn't even marked as a group quest, most people picked it up once, went "mm, nope" once they saw what they were up against (or maybe did it once just for the achievement) and that was that. It's not like the boss drops anything either.

Looking Back And Looking Forward

Looking back at this history of SWTOR's daily quests / areas, I see several different developments over time. Aside from launch and it's "improvised" dailies, the Black Hole's precedent of the terminal with both dailies and a weekly quest was something that quickly became the norm and that has persisted to this day, but other aspects of the system have been more fluid.

First off, there was a lot of experimentation with story. The first daily areas just offered a voiced introduction and then tried to engage you by giving you different things to do on each faction. On Makeb and with Bounty Contract Week they seemed to try to create a sort of daily repeatable miniature story, with very mixed results. The Oricon approach of weaving the dailies into a one-time story was the most attractive way of going about things in my eyes. More recently they have gated largely separate dailies behind doing a longer, one-time story quest, which I haven't been quite as fond of.

There was also a gradual abandonment of group content. The early weeklies up to Oricon all had some sort of group component to them (even if CZ-198's flashpoint running requirement was eventually abandoned as a failed experiment), but with Shadow of Revan that all went out the window. The Colossal on Iokath felt like a hesitant breadcrumb thrown at players who liked to group up, but it wasn't handled very well in my opinion.

Finally, there is an interesting undercurrent of wanting to incentivise world PvP every now and then, most notably with the dedicated PvP area on Ilum but also with the Iokath vehicles, yet people never seem to have taken to it very well. From my experience the best thing to do still seems to be to simply force both factions into a small space and then let them sort themselves out. I've had some enjoyable world PvP both on Oricon and in the Rakghoul tunnels.

In a few days we'll all get to see the game's newest daily area on Ossus. I've mostly avoided spoilers about it, though I hear that there are supposed to be some new heroics, which is something that I at least would definitely appreciate. As far as story integration and world PvP goes, we'll just have to see!

Back In My Day: PvP Warzones

"Back In My Day" is an irregular series in which I talk about how certain aspects of Star Wars: The Old Republic have changed over the years. And boy, has it been a while since I last wrote one of these!

I originally started drafting this post after the Yavin Ruins warzone was released, which got me thinking about how far we've come in terms of available variety of content in PvP. With the big "Summer of PvP (changes)" coming up, I thought it was about time that I actually finished this post. Note that I won't cover all aspects of PvP here - I have limited knowledge of and no particular interest in talking about things like class balance and world PvP, so I'll be limiting myself solely to the subject of warzones.

Apparently I never took a screenshot of my main hitting Battlemaster rank, so here's my first alt hitting it instead.

Available modes and maps

At launch, we only had three different warzones: Alderaan Civil War, the Voidstar and Huttball. The latter actually received quite a bit of attention from critics and was frequently praised for being an innovative and unique type of instanced PvP in the MMO world (at the time). Among the player base it tended to be polarising: On one side there were those declaring it the best thing in the entire game, on the other those who would instantly quit any warzone as soon as they realised it was Huttball. I've had several of the latter type in my guild over the years, though more recently the Odessen Proving Grounds seem to have replaced Huttball as most passionately hated game mode.

Another quirk of Huttball was that, at the time, it was the only mode that would pit teams of the same faction against each other. On servers with a very imbalanced PvP population, this meant that the larger faction would spend a disproportionate amount of time just playing Huttball against itself, which gave people another reason to dislike it.

The following maps and game modes were then introduced to the game over time:

Novare Coast - added in patch 1.2 (April 2012)
Ancient Hypergates - added in patch 1.6 (December 2012)
Arenas (Corellia Square, Orbital Station & Tatooine Canyon) - added in patch 2.4 (October 2013)
Makeb Mesa Arena - added in patch 2.5 (December 2013)
Quesh Huttball - added in patch 2.7 (April 2014)
Odessen Proving Grounds & Rishi Cove Arena - added in patch 4.3 (April 2016)
Yavin Ruins - added in patch 5.6.1 (December 2017)

As you can see, the first additions came quickly and then still more were added at a decent pace for a while, with the biggest gap being the two years between Quesh Huttball and the Proving Grounds.

Ch-ch-ch-changes

Apart from releasing new warzones, Bioware has actually made only a remarkably small amount of major changes to the way existing warzones function (I'm not counting bug fixes, map adjustments to counter exploits and the like).

When Novare Coast was added to the game in 1.2, the idea of same-faction "training exercises" was first introduced. Before then - as mentioned above - Huttball had been the only option the game gave you to play if there weren't enough players from the other faction in the queue to form an opposing team. Alderaan Civil War and Voidstar were modified to support same-faction play two months later, in patch 1.3. Mixed-faction play wasn't introduced until the Odessen Proving Grounds were added to the game, and until the release of the Yavin Ruins it was also the only map that offered this option.

1.3 was also the first time Bioware changed the layout of a warzone, by cluttering up the first room in Voidstar to make it harder to switch from one side to the other. All that junk in the middle wasn't always there! Their reasoning for this change was that too many matches seemed to end with nobody breaching the first door, which was rather boring. Ever since then, your best chance to hold off the enemy has been the second set of doors (after the bridge), where the way from one door to the other is shortest. It's interesting that Bioware's reasoning for many of the upcoming changes to Voidstar has been pretty much the same they gave back then: that there are still too many stalemates in this warzone. The more things change...

2.3 saw a big change to Alderaan Civil War, where until then you had been able to take a speeder from your ship directly to one of the side turrets if you owned it. This made the side turrets quite easy to defend by sheer zerging, and Bioware eventually decided that they didn't like it. They had already previously tried to rein this in by giving the side speeders an activation time in patch 1.1.5, but that hadn't been quite enough.

Another change that I consider major and that came in the aforementioned patch 1.1.5 was that capping an objective would no longer be interrupted by damage-over-time effects. In late Shadow of Revan Bioware also tested the option of making caps unaffected by AoE damage on the PTS, but this was fortunately never implemented into the live game as general feedback was that it was very much not fun. They did however make "fire and forget" AoE like a Sniper's Plasma Probe unable to break caps eventually (in patch 5.3).

Going back to damage-over-time abilities though, do you remember that they used to be cleansable? It wasn't until 3.0 that the ability to remove enemy DoTs in PvP was taken out of the game. As a healer I remember being somewhat annoyed by this at the time, but then again my Commando main had always been powerless when it came to the countless Force-based DoTs anyway, so it didn't end up making that much of a difference to me personally in the end.

Bolster & Brackets

Our beloved Bolster has been in game since launch, though it went through a lot of tweaks over the years. One thing that's interesting to consider is that at launch Bioware was so confident in Bolster that all levels of characters were thrown into warzones together. However, people soon complained about the unfairness of fully geared max-level players smashing everyone else, so that level 50s (max level at the time) were split off into their own bracket as early as patch 1.1.

When the level cap was raised to 55 in 2.0, the levelling bracket was split again, into 10-29 and 30-54, which is how things have remained ever since, though the separation line has moved slightly upwards as the level cap increased yet again (currently the brackets are 10-40 and 41-69).

The 2.0 patch was also when Bolster first took gear rating at max level into consideration. Before then it had only applied to levelling characters, and once you hit the level cap it disappeared, which meant that characters who had only just arrived at the level cap were faced with a nasty surprise when they entered their next warzone, as they were suddenly much weaker than they had been in the levelling bracket. Bioware had initially tried to counter this by handing out cheap (and later even completely free) starter PvP gear, but eventually figured that it was more straightforward to just bake the effect into people's stats (as in, make it part of Bolster) as soon as they entered the warzone. I remember that they got this hilariously wrong at launch though, resulting in characters being at their most powerful if they wore no armour at all - as I noted in my Rise of the Hutt Cartel launch post while being mauled by Imperials in their undies.

Ranked

Ranked 8-man warzones were first introduced in patch 1.3 in June 2012 and were live for a little over a year until August 2013. Considering the brevity of their lifespan, it's quite astounding that there are still people campaigning for them to make a comeback nearly five years later. However, fact is that they were only played by a tiny, tiny minority of players (which Eric Musco has confirmed multiple times by now), which meant they weren't really viable in the long run. My own experiences with them were limited to not being hugely excited the first time I participated, being impressed by the community efforts displayed by those who cared about the system, then finally watching all the dedicated PvP guilds transfer off the server to chase the dream of some kind of ranked nirvana on the then-PvP server Tomb of Freedon Nadd, until the whole system finally collapsed.

Ultimately 8-man ranked warzones were replaced by 4-man ranked arenas, which have also had their ups and downs, including issues with cheaters and win-traders, but since they are still in the game nearly five years later I guess they must have worked out OK. I can't really comment on what's been going on with them otherwise, as I haven't actually set foot in one of them myself since the very first ranked arena season, unless you count the one time I accidentally ended up in a team ranked match with some guildies after the guy who queued us pressed the wrong button (we had meant to queue for normal warzones).

Gear

Finally, it's worth making a brief mention of gear. Without going into too much detail, PvP gearing didn't go through too many major changes before the introduction of Galactic Command, which eliminated all distinctions between PvE and PvP gear. Before that, PvP gear had been defined by its expertise stat, which increased your output and decreased your damage taken in PvP only. (I've actually had a long-time player claim that expertise wasn't in game at SWTOR's launch and was introduced later, but I haven't been able to verify that. It was certainly around by the time I started PvPing, though admittedly that wasn't on day one.)

You've also been able to buy gear with earned commendations since as far back as I can remember. Initially the best gear however could only be obtained from the infamous Battlemaster bags, which awarded gear tokens at random. Later the various PvP commendations that the game launched with were all rolled into warzone commendations, and the better gear could be bought with special ranked warzone commendations. However, since you could also directly trade the former for the latter at a ratio of 3:1, people were able to avoid ranked while still gaining the best rewards by simply doing three times as much regular PvP. Bioware later tacitly supported this by getting rid of ranked comms altogether and just making the better gear more expensive. Nowadays all ranked rewards are purely cosmetic (titles, mounts etc.).

Aside from old gear sets being retired, new sets being introduced and various price tweaks, that's pretty much how things functioned for several years... until Knights of the Eternal Throne got rid of the expertise stat and of PvP gear as something distinct from PvE gear and introduced Galactic Command. However, since then there have been mutterings about maybe reintroducing expertise... so who knows what the future will bring?

As an aside, while I was searching my Google folder for the blog to see if I had uploaded the screenshots used in this post before, I noticed that it kept showing me search results whose file name had nothing to do with the search term (e.g. "Battlemaster"). Then I noticed that it had shown me those pictures because there were people with the Battlemaster title displayed shown in the pictures. Your AI is freaking me out, Google.

Back In My Day: Companions

Since I seem to be on a roll when it comes to writing about companions, I might as well go ahead and finally publish this post, which I've been mulling over in my head for several weeks at least.

"Back in my day" is an irregular series in which I look at a particular aspect of the game and how it has changed over the game's lifespan of currently more than five years. Companions are an interesting case in so far as very little about them changed for the first four years or so, and then Knights of the Fallen Empire changed everything. But let's talk about one thing at a time.

Acquisition

Every class in the game gets to recruit five unique companions over the course of its class story, plus the ship droid, which is identical for all classes within one faction.

The first additional companion to be added to the game was HK-51 with patch 1.5 in November 2012. While his release coincided with the game's free-to-play transition, I thought it was quite obvious that he was still a product of the original exuberance with which the game had launched, when people were still having delusions about SWTOR getting twenty million subscribers and releasing massive patches every month. He had a fully fleshed-out companion story that you had to unlock by maxing out his affection, with slightly different dialogue for Republic and Imperial characters, and acquiring him in the first place required the completion of a lengthy and demanding quest chain. I wonder how many people even bother with it these days... I still think it's a great piece of content and I suspect that it's fully soloable now even where in the past certain stages used to require a group, but it's kind of hidden away, requiring you to go to Section X and talk to that random astromech droid in the base to start the quest chain.

In August 2013, HK-51 was followed up by Treek the ewok as part of patch 2.3. The effort put into adding her was already somewhat scaled back, with no great quest chain required to acquire her; you just had to buy her "contract", either with credits or Cartel Coins, and that was it. And while she also had a full repertoire of conversations she would have with you on your ship, some money was saved by having all her dialogue be alien gibberish. She must have worked out pretty well for Bioware though, as Damien Schubert cited "some months we sell ewoks" as an example of things going well for SWTOR that year.

After that, it was quiet on the companion front for more than two years - while the Forged Alliances story arc and Shadow of Revan introduced Lana and Theron as "quasi companions" during the storyline, they refused to actually join us in combat for the time being.

Until 4.0 that is, when everything was shaken up big time and all of our previous companions were taken away. They were replaced by a bunch of new story characters which were the same for everyone, and a promise that eventually we'd see our old friends again as well. This has been realised in part since then, though many companions remain missing. For those who remain somewhat bitter about this, it might be worth pointing out that before Knights of the Fallen Empire, it looked like our companions' stories might never be advanced again, as it simply wasn't feasible to focus on producing content that only a fraction of the player base would even see. For example continuing the story of Elara Dorne would only have been relevant to about 12% of players (those who play a trooper), and not all of those might even care about that particular companion. By cracking things open and slowly bringing those old companions back in a manner that makes their stories accessible to everyone, we do at least get to see them continue to participate in the ongoing story.

Of course we mustn't forget that Knights of the Fallen Empire also brought with it creature and droid companions as additions to the infamous Cartel Packs. There is something cynical about companions without any kind of personality or story being sold for money, especially when looking back at the rich backgrounds for companions that the game started with, but I can't deny that there's a certain appeal to these guys too. I, too, own an Akk Dog after all.

Roles

One argument in favour of having more companion variety used to be wanting to have different companions available to play different roles. It's easy to forget this now that any companion can play any role on the fly, but at launch companions were effectively limited to a single role. They had "stances" which could be used narrow down their behaviour a bit, for example by having a healer not worry about healing so much and just make them use their damage abilities, but this didn't really make a massive difference. A healer trying to do a bit of dps was still just a healer trying to do a bit of dps, as in: not very good at it.

In case anyone needs a reminder (or wasn't around back then), these were the original companions' trinity roles:

Tanks: Blizz, Bowdaar, Broonmark, Corso, Iresso, Kaliyo, Khem Val, M1-4X, Pierce, Qyzen, Scorpio, Scourge, Skadge, T7-O1, Vik, Xalek

Damage dealers: Akaavi, Andronikos, Ashara, Gault, Jaesa, Jorgan, Kira, Nadia, Risha, Rusk, Temple, Torian, Vector, Vette, Yuun, Zenith

Healers: Doc, Dr. Lokin, Elara, Guss, Mako, Talos, Tharan, Quinn

You immediately notice that there are a lot fewer healers than anything else: This is because every class was given one ranged tank, one melee tank, one ranged dps, one melee dps, and just that one healer. That seems like a sensible distribution on paper, giving everyone a little bit of everything, but in practice the vast majority of players just wanted to do damage while a healer kept them alive, which made for very disparate levelling experiences for different classes in terms of gameplay, depending on when they unlocked said healer. Levelling a bounty hunter for example was easy mode from the start, since your healer (Mako) was your first companion and even joined you on the starting planet, allowing you to go and solo heroic missions right from the beginning - back when this was far from trivial. The biggest contrast was probably the Jedi knight, who didn't get their healer until early chapter two, making the first forty levels with no heals and no crowd control a bit of a slog at times. Smugglers got their healer, Guss, even later, near the end of chapter two, but never felt quite as hindered by this due to having at least a bigger toolbox to work with while getting there.

HK-51 was just another dps companion in terms of his role, but Treek shook up the paradigm by combining both a tank and a healing role in her stances. To me, as someone who likes to tank and heal, that made her pretty useless as I usually wanted a dps companion most of the time, and that was the one thing she couldn't do. For most players however, that tank/healer combo was everything they had ever dreamed of, and Treek was quickly declared overpowered and superior to all other companions.

The ship droids, by the way, were also healers, and you might wonder why more people didn't use them while levelling up if they wanted a healer so badly and their class didn't actually get one until later in the game. The reason for this was two-fold: The first was that the ship droids had no personality or opinions outside the ship, making them boring to have around during mission conversations, but the second was...

Gear

At launch and up until 4.0, companions needed to wear full sets of gear just like player characters, unlike now, where they only really need to wield a weapon to be effective in combat and any dressing up, where available, is purely decorative.

For droids, this meant that they had to be equipped with a full set of "droid parts", which were hard to come by unless you had Cybertech as a crew skill and could craft them. While levelling, you would only very rarely encounter them as drops or quest rewards, and at endgame, you were stuck with the annoyance of the armorings in moddable gear pieces being bound to their slot, so that none of them could ever go into droid parts because no droid part was flagged as being the equivalent of a chest piece for example and therefore ineligible to receive gear pulled out of one. Every now and then Bioware would remember that hey, people wanted to gear their droid companions too, and added some new parts, but as a general rule of thumb their gearing was perpetually neglected until droid parts were finally removed from the game in 4.0.

For non-droids, gearing was a bit easier, but it still took work to not just keep your character geared, but five class companions on top of it. Most people just picked a favourite and focused on gearing that one. In pugs, this could sometimes lead to conflict when people used the requirement to gear their companions as an excuse to roll need on absolutely everything.

It was also a bit confusing though, because like players, companions effectively had classes, and back then, pre-Mastery, different classes needed different main stats (also see my "Back In My Day: Gear" post for this). It wasn't always totally obvious what a companion's class was though: For example Elara Dorne is a soldier in the story, but she wields a blaster pistol, something that neither of the trooper's advanced classes can do, and used to use small, trickly heals like a smuggler. The correct answer was to give her trooper gear, but was that truly obvious? Several other companions wielded weapons like vibroblades and electrostaves, which aren't commonly used by player characters, which could again leave you guessing.

Power

If you didn't keep your companion's gear up-to-date, their decreased power would become quite obvious quite quickly, but even a companion decked out in full tier gear was noticeably weaker than a similarly geared player. Basically, having four real people in your group was pretty much always an advantage unless you had a really bad balance of classes and roles.

To me, this was most noticeable with healing companions, which were strictly limited in terms of how much burst healing they could do in particular, because using their biggest heal on you would place a relatively long debuff on you that would prevent you from being on the receiving end of said heal again. As a result of this, healing companions were at their best if they could spread lots of small heals around in a group - in fact, at this they were better than player characters even then, simply because their AI would allow them to react to even the smallest drop in anyone's health pretty much instantly. If you needed someone to keep you alive against a serious onslaught of damage however, nothing could replace a real healer.

The removal of those restrictions and the general buffs to companion power turned a lot of the game on its head in 4.0. There was a lot of debate leading to companions getting nerfed, then buffed again, then nerfed again (I think) - I honestly lost track. I don't have the exact numbers, but my impression is that they are slightly less powerful now than they were at the start of 4.0, but not by much. They are still powerhouses that make you cross your fingers that a member of your veteran flashpoint group with no healer will drop group so you can whip out a companion instead to make everything easier.

Interestingly, companion affection had no influence on a companion's combat performance originally, just on their crafting efficiency. Different companions also had bonuses when performing certain crew skills. This was also changed in 4.0, when companion "influence", which replaced affection, suddenly made a big difference to a companion's strength (and character-specific crafting bonuses were removed).

Another thing that's worth mentioning is that companion abilities were greatly homogenised with 4.0. I don't think Bioware ever intended there to be massive differences between different companions, but some of them had unique little abilities that gave them additional character and made them more fun to have around, such as Blizz's rocket launcher attack or HK-51's snipe ability. These were all taken out during the great revamp, much to the chagrin of many players... though I'll confess that I didn't pay enough attention to these to really care very much.

The Future?

Companions have always suffered from having to straddle awkward lines. They were supposed to be colourful characters of the kind that made Bioware's single player RPGs so popular, but gameplay limitations prevented you from really having much of an effect on them story-wise - Bioware infamously allowed players to kill certain companions in the beta, but because people regretted it afterwards, players had to be saved from themselves by having that option permanently disabled.

The big 4.0 revamp was supposed to do away with some of these issues, but in my opinion mostly just traded them for others. True, being able to change companion roles on the fly meant that you weren't stuck with the default healer anymore, but with how much of a difference companion influence makes to their power levels and how much of it there is to grind, do you actually want to switch from the one guy you got to 50 to another one that may only hit half as hard? Also, while in the past you had a limited selection for different situations, we now have a plethora of companions... just to not really need them because whichever one we picked as our favourite can play any role anyway. I don't really miss companion gearing though, just staying on top of all of my alts is enough work as it is.

There is also a general tug-o-war on Bioware's end in terms of what kinds of companions to invest in. Add new ones as part of the story when creating new content? Bring back old favourites that people have been clamouring for? Add more funny-looking animals and droids to the Cartel Market? Players probably want all of the above, but with what resources?

My suspicion is that now that leadership seems to be doing a turnabout after KotFE / KotET, we'll see more of a return to old favourites in the near future. But where we go once we got all of them back (whenever that may be), will be anyone's guess.

Back In My Day: Gear

It took me a while to get back to this series, but I haven't forgotten about it. So let's not think about the unpleasant RNG loot boxes looming in the near future for a moment and let's instead take a look at what sort of changes SWTOR's gearing systems have gone through over the course of the last five years, as I continue my look back at the way the game has developed, giving old-timers a chance to get nostalgic and showing newcomers how good they have it in some respects. I started this post thinking that not that many changes have been made related to gear until the recent drama, but while going through the details I realised that there were more of them than I thought.

What We Can Wear

The basics haven't really changed much, if at all. There are five quality tiers of gear: white, green (uncommon premium), blue (rare prototype) and purple (epic artifact), with the orange "custom" gear standing apart as the fifth. I actually remember being confused by this system early on because even though orange gear is highlighted as modifiable, many purple pieces are as well. To be honest I don't know to this day why some are one colour and some another! Also, for some reason the GTN has had a dark purple "legendary" tier since forever but I'm not aware of any such gear actually existing.

There are also still three armour classes: heavy (for troopers, bounty hunters and Guardians/Juggernauts), medium (for smugglers, agents and Sentinels/Marauders) and light (for consulars and inquisitors). Again, these have actually never been completely intuitive. Yes, the heavily armoured knight or warrior vs. the lightly armoured Sage/Sorc in the back makes sense, but I remember as a new player how confused I was by the fact that Shadows/Assassins also wore light armour and even tanked in it. Surely they should at least be wearing medium if they choose that kind of fighting style?

The conversion to free to play and the introduction of the Cartel Market however soon made Bioware realise that they didn't want players to struggle with not all characters being able to wear every purchased outfit, which is why "adaptive" armour was introduced, which can be equipped by any class and will apply the correct armour value for it automatically. Over time, this system has become more and more popular, with certain crafted pieces and endgame drops becoming adaptive too, to the point where I'm just waiting for them to make all armour adaptive and be done with it.

Other restrictions that applied to some of the gear pieces introduced at launch where that they could only be equipped by a certain class (e.g. "requires: smuggler") or required a certain alignment. These didn't seem to be a big hit with anyone though, which is why they are rarely seen anymore these days.

The concept of bind on equip vs. bind on pickup was also shaken up not long after launch by the introduction of legacy gear, which could not be traded to other players but could be moved around freely among different characters on the same account, even if it had been filled with modifications that were originally labelled as bind on pickup. This "legacy gear shuffle" is interesting because Bioware is aware of it and clearly tolerates it, but seemingly they still disapprove of it somehow - else why not simply make all drops bind to legacy and spare us the hassle of constantly having to pull mods out and having to mail gear back and forth? Maybe they like that it serves as a bit of a money sink.

The Look

I think the way we look in our gear is probably one of the aspects that has changed the most, and not because the artists at Bioware do a better or worse job at coming up with armour sets these days than they did at launch.

Originally we were just very much at the mercy of randomness when it came to our looks. I remember that while levelling for the first time as a trooper, I ran into quite a few solid armour sets - the problem was that one had blue stripes, another green markings, another yellow highlights, and somehow you always ended up with different pieces from each set, with the result making you look like a bit of a clown. The only way to keep a consistent look was to wear a full set of moddable armour, but those were quite rare and hard to come by.

The second picture I ever posted on this blog. The colour clash is real, but at the time I was actually praising the game for offering believable and non-sexist gear throughout.

Over time Bioware eased our pain by adding the "match to chest" option, which at least reduced the worst of the colour clash (first for player characters, then for companions), and later there was the introduction of dyes. (Though some dyes are quite offensive to the eye in their own right!)

The free-to-play conversion and the introduction of the Cartel Market were a big deal as cosmetics suddenly became one of game's main money-makers. Not only could you buy entire sets of gear from the CM directly, the random loot from the Cartel crates flooded the market with tons of moddable armour sets - not all great, but you suddenly had a huge selection, making it much easier to build a consistent look.

Of course another big change came comparatively recently, with the introduction of the outfit designer - and while I wasn't too keen on it at release, I've definitely come around to appreciating it. The two big changes it brought to the game was that it reintroduced unmoddable gear into the pool of possible outfit selections and that it completely decoupled your stats from your looks, meaning that you could change either as often as you wanted without necessarily having to worry about adjusting the other.

Basically, I think that we are in a much better place now when it comes to looking the way we want. It's quite noticeable even when I run a low-level pug that almost everyone is usually quite well-dressed and not randomly mismatched. The only thing I do miss sometimes is a bit of consistency in the way the classes/factions look. There is no real difference in the crowds on the Republic and Imperial fleet anymore, and in PvP - at least at the start of a match - it can be annoyingly distracting when an opponent manages to successfully throw off your initial target selection by being dressed in a way that makes them look like a completely different class.

Stats

If you joined the game before Knights of the Fallen Empire, the biggest change that comes to mind here is of course the introduction of Mastery, as for the game's first four years, each base class and its mirror had their own stat: Aim for troopers and bounty hunters, Cunning for smugglers and agents, Strength for knights and warriors and Willpower for consulars and inquisitors. However, this was eventually deemed too confusing, so that all these stats were rolled into a single one called Mastery.

Interestingly, the concept doesn't seem to have fully penetrated throughout the player base, as you can still hear stories of pug raids refusing to give for example items with "Force Lord" in the name to anyone who's not a Force user, even though the stats are now useful to everyone and the name is but a relic of olden times.

The secondary stats at launch were accuracy for damage dealers; power, critical strike, surge, alacrity for dps and healers; and defense, shield and absorption for tanks. Not much has changed about that, though a little: For example surge, which affected the size of your crits, ceased to exist as a separate stat and was rolled into critical strike so that single number would now not just affect your chance to have a crit but also how big it was going to be. The amount of accuracy required to hit the optimal number has been changed more than once. Alacrity used to not affect ability cooldowns, only their cast time. And power used to be treated as equal to the other secondary stats, which caused people to not want anything that didn't happen to have power on it - until it was eventually recognised that it was simply far more important than the other secondary stats so that every item now has a base amount of power on it and then the other secondary stats share the rest of the item budget.

Speaking of things like item budgets, we used to not pay as much attention to the item rating because there was also another number on display, the item level - this was changed in patch 2.7 to minimise the confusion caused by having multiple numbers on the same item. (Fun fact: I initially found this change confusing by itself because I was so used to the much lower item level numbers.)

Another thing that is worth mentioning under this header are changes to set bonuses. Up until 3.0 only five pieces carried a set bonus: head, chest, hands, legs and feet. With the Shadow of Revan expansion, the previously unloved bracers and belts received a set bonus too, with each set gaining a six-piece bonus in addition to the existing two- and four-piece bonuses. At launch, the set bonuses were also tied to the armour shell instead of the armouring, which was not popular as it completely negated the option to transfer modifications to a different outfit if you also wanted to benefit from the set bonus. (I poked fun at how this caused hitting max level to mean transitioning to a ridiculous look in this post.) Set bonuses were moved from shells to armourings in 2.0.

Gear Acquisition

At launch, gear acquisition worked quite differently from how it does now, though it still worked through a combination of drops and currency purchases from vendors. In PvE, you could get set bonus gear both from hardmode flashpoints and from operations. Nightmare mode was initially a bit tacked on and didn't have its own gear tier, dropping only more of the same stuff you already got on hardmode, making it essentially a "for fun" exercise.

PvP was a bit of a nightmare in more than one way, not just because level 10s were getting put up against fully kitted out max-level characters, but because the first gearing system was pure RNG horror. Not only did you have to reach valor rank 60 to even be allowed to equip any of the best gear, it came out of loot boxes at random, making a full set a truly rare sight. This was removed quite quickly and replaced with the classic commendation system that we all know and love, though there was also more faffing about with getting people geared for PvP by trying to give them free starter PvP gear for a while. This was eventually obsoleted by the introduction of max-level bolster, which also didn't exist until Rise of the Hutt Cartel. After the introduction of ranked PvP, we had ranked commendations for a while, though those were eventually retired again too.

The tier sets from flashpoints disappeared with 2.0, when they became "outdated content" (at the time) and the loot tables were filled with some higher-level non-set pieces instead to help you gear up for the new Rise of the Hutt Cartel endgame. After that the system remained pretty close to what we have today for quite a while though, with three tiers of commendations buying you non-set bonus gear from vendors while the different tiers of set gear could only be obtained from operations, with each step up in difficulty dropping higher level versions.

Crafting deserves a mention as something that used to be extremely profitable as you could reverse engineer high-level item modifications and then craft them for selling to other players, which was a popular pastime among raiders that had already got all the gear they needed out of the operations. To some extent you can still do this today, however it seems to be much less of a thing, and Bioware seems to have had a bit of an on-and-off-again relationship with letting crafters create useful gear, meaning that some tiers could be reverse engineered while others could not. In this respect I actually look forward to what 5.0 will do for crew skills.

Did I forget anything important or was there something you would have talked about in more detail that I glossed over? Share it in the comments! Also, while I do have a couple more ideas for this series, I'm also open for suggestions if there is a topic that you would particularly like me to cover.

Back In My Day: Travel

With SWTOR rapidly approaching its fifth birthday at the end of the year, I'm thinking that the game's old enough now for us to start waxing nostalgic about how much better things used to be "back in the day" - or how they were different at least. I don't think that SWTOR has undergone nearly as many changes as for example World of Warcraft did in its first five years, but things have changed nevertheless. In light of this I wanted to start a series of posts detailing some of these changes - both to indulge in nostalgia and to let newer players know how much better they've got it these days (or what they missed out on in some cases).

For starters I'd like to cover the subject of travel, which is one of those areas that has definitely seen a lot of changes.

Walking

Free players may feel like second class citizens these days for not getting Sprint at level 1, but back in the day none of us did, and the starter planets are all small enough that they were clearly designed with the intent to be easily traversable even at slow speeds. Sprint wasn't unlocked until level 14. Yes, this meant that you could enter a PvP warzone without it - I remember doing that once and then never again, after how horrified I was by how slow I was at getting to the side turret in Alderaan Civil War.

Vehicles

In case you've ever wondered why this blog doesn't have a "mounts" tag but only a "vehicles" one, this is because at the game's launch vehicles were the only mounts we had. The first animal mount wasn't introduced until patch 2.3, when rideable tauntauns were added to the game.

Use of those early speeders was also a lot more restricted than it is now. If it still annoys you that you get dismounted in the Senate Tower on Coruscant, just think of what it was like when this happened in every single spaceport and space station, and that at a time when people had to walk/drive back to their ships all the time.

You also couldn't train the first rank of speeder piloting until level 25. Again, this is still quite apparent from the way the planets were designed, as Coruscant/Dromund Kaas, Taris and Nar Shaddaa aren't that big compared to some of the later planets. I remember being really relieved to get a speeder by Tatooine, as that's when things really opened up.

Speeder rank was initially also tied to the vehicle itself, so once you upgraded your skill, you needed to buy a new one that was actually faster. I remember doing quite a bit of research about that before I settled on my Ubrikkian Raider back in the day. The downside was of course that once you were capable of travelling faster and more securely, you never wanted to ride the older and slower vehicles again.

Taxis

It wasn't that long ago that we had to discover each taxi point first before we could travel to it (except for Makeb), but with 3.2 this requirement was removed, which in a sort of interesting turnaround has made travelling around a new planet by taxi the fastest way of helping with its discovery.

Initially, some taxis also weren't fully linked up - Dromund Kaas was infamous for this, always forcing you to leg it between the taxi pad at the Kaas City entrance and the one inside the city if you wanted to cross the entire map. The teleporters on Belsavis also weren't all linked up the way they are now.

Quick Travel / Fleet Pass

I remember when I first started playing SWTOR, I was hugely impressed by the quick travel feature - and that was when it had a half hour cooldown! This was because I was coming from WoW, where you can only set your hearthstone to one location at a time (though I think they've added extra options since my time). In comparison, SWTOR's ability to choose to quick travel to any point on the planet once you had discovered it was absolutely amazing. In addition to that you also got the fleet pass once you hit level ten, which allowed you to return to the fleet once per day (!). In terms of questing dynamics this meant that you generally used the quick travel option to "get back to base" after finishing one area of the map (though it might not always be off cooldown) and the fleet pass was reserved for the end of the evening when you were done with everything else.

A lot has changed since then: if you're a subscriber and have all the legacy perks unlocked, neither quick travel nor the fleet pass have any sort of cooldown on them, but even without those perks the cooldowns are much shorter than they used to be. On planets this means that once you've discovered a part of the map, you can hop from any quick travel point on it to another, at no cost and with no cooldowns, making taxis completely redundant unless you've only just landed on the planet for the first time. (I don't remember the last time I used one of the taxis on the fleet...) Likewise there's nothing stopping you from using your fleet pass for absolutely everything on the fleet, even if you already are on the fleet and just want to get back to the centre of the main station quickly.

Another important change to quick travel points is that nowadays they simply unlock by proximity. It used to be that you had to click on each one to unlock it, which led to many a "d'oh" moment when you were in the middle of hostile territory, wanted to return to base quickly and realised that you'd forgotten to manually unlock the nearest outpost's quick travel point on this character. Some were also notoriously bugged and would constantly reset themselves back to being "forgotten" - the one in front of the Dread Fortress on Oricon was a well-known offender, as was the Raider's Cove cantina on Rishi.

Terminals

Outside of the means of travel mentioned above, travel between planets originally meant using your ship - the one method of travel that hasn't really changed much since launch and one that's very slow and inconvenient. If you were on the fleet and wanted to do dailies on Belsavis for example, you'd have to run/drive to the correct hangar for your class, board your ship, use the galaxy map to travel to Belsavis, exit on the Belsavis space station and then travel down to the planet every time.

Terminals were Bioware's first attempt at alleviating this issue a bit by placing terminals at key locations that would instantly allow you to travel to your ship or to prominent daily locations with a single click. I remember it originally being such a hassle to always remember the way to the correct hangar for whatever class you were on at the time, but with the terminals placed at every hangar entrance this became a non-issue as every terminal would simply allow you to choose "your ship". Doing the rounds around the different daily planets also became a lot easier once  you didn't have to board and disembark from your ship anymore between each planet.

Strongholds & Legacy Travel

Over time, Bioware introduced more and more ways to quickly get from point A to point B. It started with additional legacy travel unlocks that would function like the quick travel or fleet pass option and quickly take you to various places that required visiting more frequently, such as your faction's capital world or a planet with dailies.

However, the ultimate in travel convenience was introduced with the strongholds expansion - I even dedicated a whole post to this. Strongholds allowed you to travel to your stronghold instantly and from anywhere - and afterwards you could chose the option to be returned to exactly where you had come from (unless you logged out in the meantime - then it will take you back to the same planet but dump you at the spaceport/entrance). This means that you never again had to worry about things like running out of bag space in the wilderness or unexpectedly needing something from your cargo hold - your stronghold could be modified to contain all these services and was only a click away.

Guild ships also finally introduced the option to "summon" other people to your location as it's usually called in fantasy games - finally allowing everyone to slack off when you needed a large group of people to move to a specific location and alleviating everyone else's annoyance with that one guy who was always the last to make his way over. People quickly discovered the usefulness of this feature to get people to difficult to reach datacrons en masse - however I believe that at least the ability to do this with the fleet datacron was later patched out; I'm not sure about others.

Conclusion

Travel is one of the areas in which the game has changed the most in my opinion, since it's become a lot more convenient over the years than it used to be. Originally you always had to use your starship to travel everywhere, but nowadays you pretty much only do this for the base levelling game, with endgame being dominated by using terminals and quick travel options to get around.

I remember in World of Warcraft I always felt that the increasing ease of travel (flying etc.) diminished my feeling of being inside a virtual world a lot, but curiously I never really had this feeling in SWTOR. I think the reason is that the stuff we skip in a game like WoW are zones that we actually used to play in and that we don't really perceive anymore when we fly over them, while the space between planets in SWTOR has always been irrelevant to the experience. I suppose I feel somewhat less of a connection to my ship now since I don't board it as often, but to be honest I never felt very attached to it anyway, and since the stronghold expansion my strongholds have always felt much more like a home to me than the ships ever did.