The Dantooine Crash Site Five Months Later

It's been more than five months since the Jannimak crash-landed on Dantooine and I wrote about how I thought it was bold of Broadsword to experiment with a new form of endgame, though I also saw the potential for problems with the way certain mechanics worked. I wanted to take some time to look back at how things have panned out for me in practice, because not everything has gone as expected, at least for me personally. I obviously can't speak for everyone.

Firstly, I've not been as persistently engrossed by the crash site as I expected, and I think it's the first in-game reputation grind they've added that I didn't max out in close to the minimum amount of time required. At the time of me writing this, my reputation rank on Darth Malgus is still only Hero (the 4th out of 6 in total).

Usually, with a new daily area, Mr Commando and I would do the weekly mission there every week and max out our reputation in short order. He's not into SWTOR anymore to the degree that I am, but that's the kind of thing he still logs in for. However, Mr Commando didn't like the crash site on Dantooine at all. I did briefly mention our abysmal run through the area together in my original post, and he basically told me he never wanted to go back there again. Countless deaths to overtuned encounters aside, he just didn't like the whole gameplay of it one bit I think.

There was one week when there was a seasons objective to do 15 Dantooine encounters, and since I figured that this is something that should be pretty fun to do as a group, I co-opted the latter half of my guild's social night for it. Even that turned out to be a bit of a mixed bag though. It's true that having a dozen people in an ops group made every encounter pretty quick to do, but it was also like herding cats, as people's experience levels ranged from "had been grinding the rep to the max every week" to "had never stepped foot in the area before" and it was challenging to keep everyone working together. The newbies needed guidance on where to go and what to do for each step of the introductory quest chain, while the more experienced players constantly wanted to wander off somewhere else for reasons such as "oh, I see that one encounter is up over there, I still need that one for the achievement so I'll just pop over there quickly". In the end, people said it had been fun, but I felt exhausted and didn't really want to go back to do it like that again.

So I've mostly been on my own in terms of working with GSI (the other one), and I kind of found that it didn't gel very well with the way I usually play. For example, long-time readers of the blog will know that I'm very motivated/guided by Conquest. When I decide to play a character in a given week, I usually want to play them enough to earn 100k conquest points and not much more, and then I switch to an alt. And for a conquest player... Dantooine is kind of meh!

You get a small amount of points for each encounter you do, but you could complete that objective faster and more easily on pretty much any other planet. Aside from that you get a good chunk of points for advancing the reputation from each encounter completed, but that's only once per day. At the same time, the place lacks many sources of easy points that you'd find pretty much everywhere else: there's no "complete missions" objective, nothing for killing enemies, and no harvesting nodes to gather (except for a few enemies that can be bioanalysed or scavenged).

So from a Conquest point of view, the best thing to do is basically to go and do one encounter per day for the rep and leave it at that. Even that can be awkward to do because due to the limited quick travel options available, just getting to the encounter can take longer than the encounter itself sometimes, meaning I haven't always bothered.

Lest you might think that this means I haven't actually spent that much time on Dantooine, there is an aspect to this that I haven't gone into yet: As mentioned above there was a seasons objective in the first week of this season to do 15 crash site encounters, and a couple of weeks ago there was another one to do 25. And I've actually gone and done those on all servers, racking up over 250 encounters completed in those two weeks alone.

(If that makes you go "Shintar, how that does gel with you saying that you haven't been that enthused about the game and that you've been finding the current Galactic Season too grindy?", I never claimed to be an entirely logical actor. Yes, doing all those dynamic encounters was grindy as heck too, but it just happened to be something I wanted to do at the time.)

Doing this gave me a very different perspective on the zone. Firstly, it's definitely more fun and feels more "worthwhile" when you're doing more than one encounter at a time. The most entertaining thing is probably when you manage to get a "train" going with other players that just surges from one encounter to the next, dispatching each one quickly and efficiently. However, that's not something you even get a chance to experience everywhere, because which server you're on makes a huge difference.

While interest in the crash site has generally dropped off since its launch, you can still go there on Star Forge for example, and on this biggest of all servers it'll be bustling at pretty much every time of day. If you ever find yourself going to Dantooine there and it seems a tad quiet, it's usually because the game actually spun up a second PvE instance and that one doesn't have as many players in it.

Compare this to somewhere like Shae Vizla, the tiny APAC server, and it's like night and day. On Shae Vizla it was rare that I'd even run into a single other player most times. On the plus side, this taught me a lot about various encounters, because when they fly by really fast it can sometimes be hard to tell what's happening. When you're the only person doing anything on the other hand, you get to see every single stage properly and actually have to learn what to do because there's nobody else there to hold your hand or help you out. I learned to solo certain tough encounters via use of crowd control and kiting, but I'm still convinced that there are some that just aren't doable alone. There were several times I found the glacial biome stuck on the "Cryonest Matron" transition encounter for example because that one's just too overwhelming and with no groups around that area was basically dead and could no longer be played.

There was exactly one time I managed to get it down, when I think I happened to be on at around APAC prime time on a weekend and there were at least a few other people in the zone. When glacial went into transition, we all converged there and managed to take it down with the whole five of us or however many we were (not a huge number).

The other servers were all in-between. Darth Malgus and Satele Shan always felt reasonably busy. Tulak Hord had some good times and some bad times, and Leviathan was also very quiet but not quite as bad as Shae Vizla. So I don't think this area (and any similar ones Broadsword decides to create in the future) does the game any favours in terms of the perception that certain servers are dead or dying.

Another aspect of the Datooine experience that hasn't worked out quite the way I'd hoped have been the reputation rewards. It was my understanding that as you went up in levels, you'd unlock counters to the various hazards that would make all three biomes less painful to traverse on all your alts. However, this turned out to not be the case, as access to the console that gives the various immunity buffs is actually locked behind completing the intro quest chain at least up to the point where you get sent to the core on every single character.

As someone who's done encounters on Dantooine on something like twenty different alts, this meant that each and every one of them had to do at least ten encounters without any of the buffs, which in practice has meant that I've only been able to use the reputation rewards very rarely, and the vast majority of my time has been spent on foot, suffering from debuffs, regardless of my reputation rank. Needless to say, this has sucked. Fortunately this is something the devs have said they will actually rectify in the next patch, so we'll see how much that improves my experience.

Regardless of that though, the rep rewards I've actually had a chance to try have all felt kind of half-baked to be honest. Like the fact that the immunity console only lets you apply one buff at a time when the way the whole zone works encourages you to hop between different biomes every twenty to thirty minutes, meaning you have to constantly switch buffs and pay for a new one or stay in the same area way longer than makes sense.

Same thing with the weird taxi pass, only with that one the problem is the other way round: the taxi pass allows you to hop back and forth between different biomes more quickly - for half an hour. But I just said that the game encourages you to switch every twenty to thirty minutes (whenever an area transitions basically), so you buy the taxi pass to use it... once? Twice at max? All these different pieces just don't fit together in a way that makes sense to me, so I've been largely ignoring them even when I did have access. Which again, is kind of disappointing.

Finally, there's the NiM-level core boss at the end of the quest chain, for which you need to have pushed all three biomes to level three to unlock access to it for two hours at a time. People were sceptical about that setup from the beginning, but I was more sanguine about it. Truth is, it hasn't really worked out for me either, though not in exactly the way I expected.

Getting the core to be aligned isn't that much of a problem at least on Darth Malgus, as it does happen reasonably often, but the timing can be a random and that is a problem for a group of middle aged raiders with average jobs and families that usually carve out a specific time slot to do progression content with their team. Without wanting to sound judgemental, I get the impression that most of the people who have successfully tackled the core are not limited by such constraints, for example because they stream as part of their day job. This also aligns with the fact that the only time I've seen the core myself (not killed it) was when I was helping out Swtorista and friends on one of her streams.

On Darth Malgus, I've grouped up with random guildies who just happened to be online a couple of times and went inside to have a look, but we didn't even make it past any of the mini bosses. They really are super hard and you can't really expect to take them down with any old group. The buffs are supposed to help, but you'd really need the whole group to have them, and I clearly underestimated how many of the people I run ops with just don't engage with casual content like a rep grind at all. So you've got all these hurdles of needing people to be able to be online at the right time, they need to be sufficiently skilled, and they need to have had an interest in grinding the rep, and that's just too many obstacles. I'm not personally upset about this because I don't feel like I'm missing much, but it does feel a bit like a design failure to have this content that will only ever be seen by a miniscule part of the player base, not just because it's hard but because it also has these additional hurdles to access on top of the difficulty. 

A couple of months ago I filled out a dev survey about Dantooine and I did put a lot of what I said above in the answers to the questions there. One question that stood out to me was that they asked whether I thought that Broadsword should invest in making more planets/zones like the Dantooine crash site, and my answer was "not exactly like this, no" because I think it has too many issues that the devs are unlikely to want to go back and address. (I was actually very surprised when they announced on stream that they were going back to change things like the intro quest chain being mandatory on every single character.) I still think the idea of dynamic encounters as endgame has potential, and as I said, the basic gameplay of running around with a group of people to do encounters can be very fun. I just feel like on Dantooine, the puzzle has too many pieces that don't fit well together and prevent the experience from being as fun as it maybe could be.

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.

Looking forward to 7.8

I learned long ago not to get too hyped about new content for my favourite MMOs as it's too easy to end up disappointed, but then, what's life without a little bit of happy anticipation? Patch 7.8 can't be more than a few weeks away now, and I'm very much looking forward to us getting our first story update in one and a half years.

That alone would already be something to celebrate, but this week we found out that there's more to come in this patch. Keith had already hinted in his producer's letter at the start of the month that Dantooine would be in for some dynamic changes, and then last week the official YouTube channel dropped this nice little teaser video:

I had a bit of a chuckle at Musco describing Dantooine with the words "it's usually pretty quiet there" when that planet is either being raided by pirates or overrun with swoopers on the regular, but either way the news of the Dantooine stronghold and the devs trying something new with the dynamic encounter system there were great to hear. With both story and new gameplay in the pipeline, this may well shape up to be the meatiest content patch we've received in a while and I'm here for it.

Side note: If you're someone who doesn't always keep up to date with what's been happening in SWTOR recently, I've got a new permanent page for you called "The State of SWTOR", which is linked from the sidebar on desktop and the drop-down menu at the bottom of the page on mobile. I'm planning to keep it updated on the regular and we'll see whether it gains enough traction to reduce the number of people asking on the subreddit how the game is doing every day.

The Abundance Festival in Review

I wrote about the Festival of Spring Abundance at the start of the month when it first came out, but now that it's about to wrap up I wanted to write another post about it to reflect on how it's gone.

For me personally at least, this new event has been a massive success. I took part in some of the activities pretty much every day, completed the little event storyline on nine different characters, and ground out enough currency to buy most of the rewards I really wanted on Darth Malgus, which included the Nightshift Tech armour set for one of my agents as well as at least one of each decoration. I can definitely see myself coming back for more of the potted plants though, as they tend to be one of my favourite types of stronghold decoration. The only slight regret I share with Intisar is that the armour set is character- instead of legacy-bound.

I also got all the achievements except the one that is still bugged (so nobody could get it) and the one for the rare fish that is completely RNG-dependent. All in all, I enjoyed this event enough that I can see it competing with Life Day for the position of being my favourite seasonal event in SWTOR - except they're both such chill events, they'd probably be happy to just share first place.

The daily missions were easily my favourite part, because they were both fast and easy while still awarding a lot of Conquest points. Okay, so the dancing one was pretty much a matter of getting paid for taking an AFK break... but I'm not someone who minds a freebie every now and then.

The pie baking and eating was probably the most fascinating to me, though I was a little disappointed that there wasn't as much complexity to it as I originally assumed. When I first learned that there were achievements for eating a perfect and a bad pie for example, my mind instantly went spinning with all kinds of theories about how to make my pie qualify as perfect ("bad" seemed obvious since you can select the wrong ingredients while putting your pastry together), but I then found out that your skill in preparing the pie actually has zero impact on its perceived quality when someone else eats it by clicking on it on the table; it just seems to be completely random.

What still remained fascinating to me though was that people seemed to bring real life food preferences into the baking process. What I mean is that most days, when it came to choosing which pie to bake, I took a look at the tables to see which of the four types had the least representation or was maybe even missing entirely, so I could fill the gap for anyone else who was still on the weekly pie-eating mission. And the vast majority of the time, it was either the Deepwater Dac Pie (tentacles, gross!) or the Pitted Ka-Olive Pie, but mostly the former. Bestine Threeberry Pie and Sweet Spore Tarts were almost always represented, I can only guess because they looked and sounded like something one might actually want to eat in real life. I just thought that was kind of amusing.

The weeklies were a bit of a mixed bag for me. The creature rescue was extremely adorable the first time I did it, but once I realised that it was the exact same set of creatures every week, it became my least favourite just because it required so much running around. I'm pretty sure the sheer amount of planetary travel involved also cancelled out most of the reward money.

The cultivation daily was similarly time-consuming, and once again I was slightly disappointed to see us planting the exact same crops every week, especially considering that the prerequisite seed procurement mission sent us to a different planet each week. You'd think they'd actually make us pick up different seeds while doing that. I did enjoy making Mr Commando do the mission with me though to get the achievements tied to completing it as a group.

The egg hunt I generally enjoyed, though the experience could vary a lot depending on which server I was on as well as the time of day (I did some of the event stuff on Star Forge and Shae Vizla as well). Yavin IV was very easy for example, since the area is large and offers good visibility, with the roaming Massassi not really posing much of an obstacle. In general, the eggs were not as hard to spot as the livestream in which the event was first announced had led me to expect, but the fact that players were competing for spawns could be a real pain in the neck. The Rishii Village location was the worst in my opinion since it was both small and featured a lot of verticality, which made it hard to do a good "circuit" of the area and competition could be extremely fierce. While trying to poke my nose into every nook and cranny, I also managed to get stuck between buildings more than once, to the point where using /stuck actually killed me instead of moving me. Death by egg hunt, what a way to go.

The one-time story quest was much shorter than I expected. I thought that it was going to be a mirror to the Feast of Prosperity, giving us a new story step for every week of the event, for a total of four missions, but in reality it turned out to only have two parts, both of which were quite short. I can't say I really minded though, as this meant that it actually felt very doable as something to complete on alts. For comparison, I haven't actually done the Feast of Prosperity storyline on many characters due to its length. My only gripe with the Abundance storyline was that even though the cut scenes were KOTOR style and all the talking was alien gibberish (so there was no voice acting cost tied to giving additional choices), there was no dialogue option to account for your character not actually knowing Juna Helos from the Copero stronghold story. It felt kind of wrong that all my alts were just supposed to know her automatically.

Still, all of these were ultimately very minor complaints, and overall I've had a grand old time. I already look forward to revisiting this event next year to earn some more plant decos and work on those last two remaining achievements.

Spring Abundance

This week's patch 7.5 brought with it three major new features, all of which I'll write about at some point. However, the one of which it was the easiest to get a general impression was undoubtedly the new seasonal spring event, called Spring Abundance Festival.

Unfortunately it's been a bit hard to locate during its first week, as the mission terminal they put on the fleet is in the exact same spot as the Gree event terminal, which was also active this past week, causing the two quest starters to overlap almost completely. With a bit of careful hovering you could find the right spot to start the introductory mission though.

From the looks of it, there's going to be a story mission that unlocks a new step each week like there is during the Feast of Prosperity, and completion of the first part is also required to unlock the various repeatable event missions. It's a bit longer than most event-type intros, but still not too bad to do on alts. One thing I noticed though was that other players were constantly photo-bombing my KOTOR-style cut scene; I wonder if the devs forgot to tick some box to hide other players from these?

Based on the general theme of the event, I expected a degree of similarity to the Feast of Prosperity, and I think it's fair to say that there is, though I'd argue that Spring Abundance manages to be even more chill. After all, the Feast still has you going out hunting world bosses and there's a bit of pressure to serve those meals in time. At Spring Abundance, aside from having to kill about a dozen mobs for the introductory mission, there are no such pressures. Just chill, 100% of the time, catching fish, baking pies and dancing at the May holo pole.

I've seen some people snark about the very idea of having these activities in SWTOR, but to be honest I don't get why. I thought it was a bit odd that we were sweeping floors for the Gormak as part of the main storyline, but as a side activity like this? Why the hell not? Nobody can be hero of the galaxy 24/7, and who says even a Sith can't enjoy a bit of gardening in their downtime?

The daily activities are cute, fast and fun, and everything gives Conquest points too, which is a nice bonus. One thing that's interesting to me is that the mission structure is a bit different from the usual in that there isn't a weekly that requires you to do x number of dailies, but instead there are several weeklies that are tasks of their own that can only be done once a week, plus the dailies which you can just repeat every day for fun (and profit).

Particularly clever to me is the way they used this for the pie baking and eating, as there is a daily to bake pie, but the mission to sample different pies only requires you to do so once a week, so even if it was quiet and not all pies were available to eat when you first showed up, you can try again the next day. Right now the event is pretty much the opposite of quiet though, mind you - people seem to happily and enthusiastically be taking part at all times of day from what I've seen. There are some pretty nice rewards to be earned as well (though I haven't decided yet what I'll go for myself), so this event just strikes me as a winner all around.

7.5 Dev Stream Highlights

Yesterday it was time for another SWTOR dev stream, hurrah! As usual, this is not the place to find all the details about everything that was said, but rather a summary of what I thought were the most important points, with my own opinions sprinkled on top. If you're looking for something more comprehensive and less editorial, let me point you towards one of the sites below instead:

• Swtorista
• Today in TOR
• Vulkk

Now, on to my own thoughts...

7.5 Story "Desperate Defiance" on Hutta

We got a little more detail about the next story update coming with 7.5, without really getting into spoilers. As previously established, it will take place on Hutta where we'll be interacting with a number of new characters. My favourite of these was a Hutt called Yusinduu with a cool new look.

Again, without really going into spoilers, they said that Sa'har will follow up on what was said at the end of the 7.4 story, and apparently how we respond to her will have an impact on her development going forward - curious to see what that means.

My only slight disappointment was hearing that the new area on Hutta won't contain a new daily area or anything. It's not so much that I'm particularly dying to have a daily area in every patch, but it kind of sounds like there's literally nothing there other than whatever you do for the main storyline, which sounds kind of wasteful to me if true. We'll see I guess.

Graphical Updates for Hutta

They'll use the addition of the new area on Hutta as an opportunity to also give the planet as a whole a graphical update, which sounded good to me. I mentioned it in the past when they made similar changes on a smaller scale on Tython and Korriban.

The only thing that threw me for a bit of a loop was how utterly different the skybox looked in the footage with the updated graphics. Hutta's sky is currently dominated by yellow clouds that cause the whole planet to be basked in a yellow-ish hue, while the updated version seems to feature a uniform grey cloud cover that looked like it strongly changes the vibe. I don't know how I feel about that yet. If you like the yellow, go and take some screenshots while it lasts I guess!

Below you can see before and after shots of the sky over Jiguuna that I took in the live game and on the PTS. I'll admit the change didn't feel as drastic in game as it looks in the screenshots and the new version is definitely much crisper and more detailed.

I'm curious whether this update will also affect the Karagga's Palace operation, since it is also set on Hutta so might be sharing some assets (but I can't be bothered to check that out on the PTS).

Dantooine Spring Event 

We currently have Nar Shaddaa Night Life in summer (which will start on the 9th of July this year by the way), the Feast of Prosperity in autumn and Life Day in winter, so there was a gap in the calendar that the SWTOR team wanted to fill with this new event. It's going to be full of chill activities like growing crops, dancing around the Star Wars equivalent of a May pole, hunting for eggs (random Easter vibes?), looking after animals, baking and eating pies, and finally... fishing. Yes, after more than twelve years, SWTOR finally gets its own version of fishing!

I don't know, I can't claim to think that this was something that was desperately needed, but I've enjoyed it in other MMOs that have it as an activity, even when it worked in very different ways. The appropriately Star Wars twist on it is that you basically make a little probe droid do the work for you, the notion of which amuses me greatly.

Yes, I actually logged into the PTS to check this out.

I think this sounds like a lot of wholesome fun and I look forward to experiencing it in full once the event goes live.

Our Own Little Basilisk Companion

Another thing that will happen in 7.5 is that Lane Vizla finally manages to fix that little basilisk from Ruhnuk and it will become our companion - a proper one that fights and everything, not just a non-combat pet. It'll be called B3-S1 or "Bessie" for short. However, there'll be a twist, as we'll have to train the little bugger to truly make it ours, which will involve something called "ventures" and will require you to take Bessie out to do dailies over the course of a longer period of time. I have to admit my initial reaction to this were somewhat mixed feelings.

On the one hand: new companion that we actually have to work for and build a relationship with! Yes! I'm 100% on board with that concept, and we haven't really seen anything like this since the release of HK-51.

However, from the way it was described, I'm not sure why we need a new "feature" with a new UI just for this instead of it simply being a quest chain or tied to an achievement, because it doesn't sound that dramatically different from anything already in the game. In fact, it sounds a lot like yet another way of making us go back to old daily areas, which makes me somewhat less happy. Also, I'm waiting for clarification on whether there's going to be an option to just unlock Bessie for your alts via the legacy system after you've jumped through all the required hoops the first time.

PvP Season 6

This was a bit of a weird one. First off, they announced that they'll be changing the launch timing of PvP seasons and have them more regularly start alongside the big patches. I'm in favour of that in so far as it should avoid some of the weird overlap issues that have been occurring with Galactic Seasons sometimes, assuming that those will continue to go live on the x.1 patches between the major ones.

However, then the devs also said that they wanted to make PvP seasons longer to give people more time to complete them, which sounded fine enough to me, but then they also want to add extra levels and make each level require more points... someone on the forums immediately did the maths and it sounds like you will still need to play pretty much just as many matches each week as before, only for more weeks, which doesn't really sound like an improvement.

Also, they talked about adding warzone medpacks and adrenals as rewards for the extra levels, which made every PvPer go "what?" - you already get more of these through normal gameplay than you could possibly use (because of their internal cooldown, you literally earn them faster than you can click them), and every character that does PvP already has hundreds if not thousands of these. That just seemed... odd. I hope they'll review that particular plan based on people's feedback.

What Now?

There isn't an official launch date for 7.5 yet, but we're probably looking at a late May/early June release.

The Public Test Server is up and you can check out the graphics updates, the spring event and some of the "venture" stuff there if you like (no story content though).

The reward code they gave out during the stream this time was "MalgusWhen", which grants a Darth Malgus in-game poster decoration - if you don't already have it, because unfortunately this one's a repeat of a reward they handed out previously. If, like me, you already had it, you can still enter the code and it will say that you successfully claimed it, but you'll get nothing. It's valid until May 16th.

Speaking of things that are valid until May 16th - in order to celebrate Star Wars Day, there's also some other goodies available. Logging in between now and then will grant you another floating cube droid non-combat pet, there's double XP going on, a Cartel Market sale, and a 50% off Collections sale. Enjoy!

Republic Saboteur, Part 3

It's been a while and a half since I last wrote about my Republic saboteur character. I think I put her on ice for a bit since she's a smuggler and at the time I felt that I should prioritise getting my "main" smuggler fully caught up with the story first before taking this one any further. Also, she'd just hit Echoes of Oblivion, which is an excellent piece of story content but not the most appealing in terms of replayability. 

Anyway, to mirror my series about my Imperial saboteur, I still wanted to write a third post about her journey through the rest of the Onslaught story after Objective Meridian, up to the Legacy of the Sith launch content. There've been a few additional saboteur choices in the updates that have been released since then, but I haven't decided yet what I'm going to do about those, if anything at all. Maybe I'll make a sort of summary post at some point to talk about how 7.2 and beyond have treated both Imperial and Republic saboteurs.

Anyway, I'd actually like to start with a comment on the Dantooine pirate event, whose little story tidbit strictly speaking takes place before Onslaught, but which I often do whenever, since it's not really important to the main storyline and only accessible once every couple of months. I didn't mention it at all when writing about my Imperial saboteur, so I was quite surprised and perplexed when I did the Dantooine dailies on my Republic saboteur and noticed differences! For example the mission to "take back" supplies from Imperial Pillagers has you delivering them right back to the Imps at the end, which I thought was hilarious but also kind of blatant? And the one with the Republic traitor has you warning him so that he can get away instead of being killed. So much detail for saboteurs in a daily area that isn't even active most of the time! I was most pleasantly surprised. In hindsight I do seem to vaguely remember that for Imperial saboteurs, at least the mission where you sabotage the farms also may have had some sort of choice and I simply forgot to write about it? I'd have to go back and double-check some time when the event is active again.

Anyway, to get back to the main storyline, in "The Task at Hand", the immediate follow-up to Objective Meridian, saboteurs are told that things are not going well for the Republic. There's a conversation choice where you can recommend fighting Hutts that are demanding bribes.

When Lana brings up Balmorra and Zenith, the saboteur option is once again to ask her to not even bother. I just find it kind of amusing that regardless of which faction you're on, "don't bother with weapon shipments on Balmorra" is sabotage either way.

When I started Secrets of the Enclave, I was surprised by dialogue that had Arn stating in an insecure tone that Tau was away on another assignment on Balmorra that he didn't know the details of, something I didn't remember encountering in any of my other playthroughs, but I'm not sure whether that was actually related to being a saboteur, as I seem to remember reading that there are some conversation choices - regardless of your overall loyalties - that drive Tau and Arn apart somewhat? It's not something I've researched in great detail.

Like on Imperial side, I had the option after the initial briefing to tip off the opposite faction in regards to our impending Dantooine trip, and I was amused that NR-02 thanks you but tells you that Imperial Intelligence already knew about it anyway. I thought that was an interesting touch and shows them being a step ahead of the SIS. After landing on the planet and seeing the Empire there, you can further complain to your companions about how the Republic is always too slow and therfore frequently loses to the Empire's ruthlessness.

The big thing that caught me by surprise in this flashpoint though was that after the fight with Lord Ziliss, I had the option to send the others away, implying that I was going to "take care" of her by killing her, just to then hand her a kolto pack and send her on her way. That was another delightfully overt act of sabotage that I hadn't expected - I guess because Imperials get no such option due to Rivix always killing the Republic Captain, even if you want to spare him.

Finally, while doing Manaan, the main thing that struck me was that it was funny how unimpressed I found myself by Gallo's rants about the Republic as a saboteur. It's not as if I'm here to work for them either, you know! When it comes to blowing up the ion cannon, the saboteur option was to weaken the blast so that some ships would be able to escape, which I didn't think was too impressive.

However, what I didn't anticipate that when it comes to choosing between saving Gallo or the kolto, the saboteur option is to save neither! For all the scummy things I've done in the name of sabotage (still haunted by shooting Narlock in the back), this one was a bit too much for me. It just had too much of a "watching the whole world burn" vibe, which I didn't think suited my smuggler, so I just decided to sacrifice Gallo in order to save the kolto. I don't think this is saboteur-specific, but I was surprised to hear Admiral Rava actually reveal why Gallo had beef with him at the end, something I'd always wondered about. Did I really never choose the kolto over her before? Huh.

Anyway, I was still curious how that saboteur option of saving neither would have played out and specifically how you'd justify such an action to Arn, so I looked it up on YouTube and was surprised to find that if you choose that option, your character pretends to save Gallo and her men but then sabotages the pod so that they die anyway? Cold, man.

Once everything's said and done, Darth Xarion himself gives you a holo call to congratulate you on your good work, and like on Imp side I wasn't really convinced. Sure, I did some sabotage, but more than anything I still helped the Republic drive the Empire off, which seems like it should've been the bigger deal...

And that's it for Republic saboteur options up to 7.1 - oh, except for one more bit that doesn't really have anything to do with the main story but that I noticed when I picked up the one-time story mission for R-4 Anomaly: I thought it was very odd that it's given by Jonas Balkar even if you're a Republic saboteur, because as a smuggler my character had never actually met him! And he doesn't introduce himself either. That seems like an oversight to me (and a problem that Imp side doesn't have, because while Imperial saboteurs don't really interact with Darth Xarion, they've at least met him during Onslaught so getting a call from him doesn't seem completely random).

Still, all in all I've got to say these saboteur playthroughts have only increased my appreciation of the Onslaught story content - I think that short of the original class stories, Ossus to Manaan is probably the series of updates with the most complexities and variations influencing different outcomes in the game. It's not entirely bug-free and there are some bits and pieces where certain choices feel like a bit of a stretch, but still, it must've been a humongous piece of work to script all of that, and in a manner that still mostly makes sense for so many different choices.

Peace Out, Again

My pacifist character Pacis hit the level cap taking part in the Feast of Prosperity. Again!

I last wrote about her back in April, when the introduction of Amity inspired me to pick her up again as she could finally go on adventures with a (supposedly) fellow pacifist friend for the first time. I was really hoping that this would rejuvenate my interest in the character and the project, but it didn't really work out.

Having the two of them hang out on Dantooine and doing the peace time dailies did initially give me a bunch of new things to think about. For example I was baffled when I found Pacis drawing a lightsaber one day, considering that unequipping her weapon was one of the first things she ever did. 

Eventually I realised that the following had happened: I had completed a Conquest on her, which rewarded me with a gear create. I haven't found crates from solo activities to be very reliable when it comes to detecting which piece of your gear needs an upgrade the most, but it clearly noticed that I was missing a weapon and therefore rewarded me one. And of course another change that came with 7.0 meant that if one of your gear slots if empty and you receive an appropriate piece of gear for it, it now gets auto-equipped, so I hadn't even noticed that saber sneaking in there. What can I say, this game really wants you to be ready to inflict violence!

The other thing that happened was that while gathering on Dantooine, a slicing node gave me my first rare crew skill mission. Considering how long Pacis had been doing this without ever getting one before, I kind of wonder whether there's something preventing you from getting these if you don't actually have a companion that could run missions... or maybe it was just bad luck.

Either way, she had Amity now, so I was of course happy to send him out. As I awaited his return, a vision of a whole new future for Pacis briefly unfolded in front of me. Crew skills as a pacifist activity! I'd actually have to read the mission text again to make sure it was compatible with her ideas though. And she could drop one or more of her gathering skills to start crafting instead! A true pacifist's career!

However, I don't think I even contemplated this for five minutes before the idea lost its lustre. Crafting is a peaceful activity, sure... but Pacis wouldn't be the one actually doing it, and it would be no different from any of my other characters sending their companions out to do stuff for them; she would just be worse at it than those with larger, more developed companion stables. Plus the materials would come out of my legacy-wide material stash, fuelled by all my regular characters who'd done who knows what to acquire them. It just didn't seem very... satisfying.

So that idea went nowhere and I just continued running the Dantooine peace time missions for a little while - until I got a bit annoyed with Conquest. As I already alluded to in my last pacifism post, Conquest as a pacifist post-7.0 is annoyingly hard. Doing one round of dailies on Dantooine, she now just gets "Dantooine: Mission Complete", "Missions: Bonus Missions" (for petting the Kath Hounds), the one for getting a crew skill skill-up and the one to harvest ten gathering nodes. That's not a lot, and meant that I had to be diligent in doing those tasks every single day of the week or she wouldn't be able to hit her personal Conquest target.

Maybe you're wondering why it matters, but I really like Conquest as a pacing tool and like to hit my personal target on all characters I decide to play in a given week. Inevitably, a week came when I forgot to log in and do my Dantooine round one day, which caused me to barely miss my personal target for the week and made me quite annoyed. After that I kind of stopped playing her again, except for doing a bit of swooping at some point (I think?) - though I still haven't looked further into those one-time swoop story missions I meant to attempt two years ago.

Until the Feast of Prosperity came around again that is, and I decided to leave Dantooine to do charity for the Hutts again, which is such a nice and peaceful pastime, while also being great for both Conquest and XP, and resulted in Pacis eventually hitting level 80.

I'm a little disappointed that I didn't feel inspired to do more with her on the way to the new level cap, but I'm also reminded of this post I wrote back in 2021 about how my pacifism experiment had essentially become a solved problem. That's still the case, plus 7.0 also took some of Pacis' more fun tools away, such as the ability to CC multiple targets or to keep missions with quick travel items in her log to get around the galaxy at any time. So it's just generally not as fun as it used to be. Which is fine I guess, as this was only an experiment and I have allll my other characters to play with. But it's still a little bit of a shame as well.

Maximum Pacifism Achieved!

At last, the time has come! Last night my pacifist Jedi Pacis hit level 75 after another round of Cantina Rush on Nar Shaddaa. The Feast of Prosperity turned out to be nothing short of a fountain of XP for her. Two daily quests each for cooking and serving food plus a weekly associated with both, plus the ingredient gathering that she could at least do when it involved picking fruit on Belsavis or gathering ice crystals on Hoth. Three weeklies completed then also granted the meta weekly, and all this with double XP - what more could you ask for?

The only slight disappointment was that she couldn't do any of the one-time story quests past the intro. The mission to Rishi doesn't require any combat and therefore would have been compatible with her ideals, but alas... Rishi doesn't have any heroics or other accessible quick travel options, so she can't actually go there.

Want to know what was the first thing I did upon hitting max-level? I went to the fleet, bought the "Go to Sleep, Go to Sleep!" Tactical and then returned to Tatooine to rescue Raith's loved ones. Yes, I never deleted that quest from my log and it had been staring at me from my mission tracker ever since. The funny thing was, after I used the double CC to peacefully remove the toy robots from the chest, I ran into another player on my way out who was just barrelling through and killing all the mobs anyway. If that had happened back during my first visit, I could have completed that quest over a year ago, but of course at the time nobody else just happened to come through at the right moment.

As for what's going to happen to Pacis now... I don't know, I'll probably let her participate in the Feast some more and then give her a bit of a break. Next time the swoop event comes around I might have a go at seeing how many of the one-time story quests for that I can do - I picked them up last time with the intent to just do them whenever, but then found out that the quest NPCs on other planets also disappear when the event isn't on, so you can't progress the off-Dantooine steps during that time either. When LotS raises the level cap to 80 I'll probably get her up there as well at some point, but certainly not as a priority over my regular characters.

I would say something about what a long, strange trip it's been, but it really hasn't been all that long. I created Pacis back in August 2019, over two years ago now, but the only reason it took this long to level her was that my interest in the project has been very on and off. Her actual /played time after hitting the cap was only two days and six hours, which isn't long at all, especially when you consider how much her pacifism hobbled her ability to level up normally.

Either way this has been a very interesting experiment. In a way I was both surprised by how much full pacifism limited me and by how much I was still able to do despite of all the additional limitations I put on myself. As an example of the former, I'm thinking of things like being unable to click certain quest items or use a lot of abilities without a weapon equipped (even when the ability didn't sound like something that should require a weapon), or how many side quests didn't even unlock without having made sufficient progress on the main storyline. And of course there was being unable to leave Tython via shuttle after having fully explored the map at level five.

I actually think that you wouldn't be able to replicate Pacis' exact levelling path today, since she only managed to "escape" the planet via the Pirate Incursion quick travel option to Dantooine, which was originally accessible from level one, however this has now been patched out to require level twenty (at least according to this event guide by Vulkk) and is therefore no longer an option.

On the other hand though, I was surprised by the sheer amount of quests that didn't strictly require any fighting or killing, despite of SWTOR's early levelling being very much designed in the classic "kill ten rats" tradition. As players we just tend to kill everything that's in the way because it's the "natural" and easy thing to do, and the game also pretty much assumes that you will do this - it never ceased to amuse me when some NPC dialogue referred to me supposedly beating people up when I had done no such thing.

Travel without a ship was also more feasible than I had expected. Generally speaking, the game really expects you to do your class mission up to the end of Coruscant at least and to definitely get your ship asap... without it, you can't freely fly from planet to planet, you can't accept guild ship summons, and you can't use the "exit to planet" option from a stronghold. But the quick travel items added for heroics in 4.0 and later even for some other missions make no such distinctions and were a surprising godsend in terms of getting around. I would have been quite content to level from 5 to 75 purely by running the two dailies on Dantooine (though that would have been quite boring) but being able to planet-hop via these quick travel items certainly made things a lot more interesting and varied.

EDIT: This was a big enough deal for me that I also made a post on the subreddit.

Peacefully Sauntering Towards the Finish Line

Once again it's been a really long time since I last wrote about my pacifist levelling project - in fact, this time the break has been longer than last time! No special story about embarrassing myself this time; I just didn't feel like playing as much at the start of the year and then simply ended up forgetting all about this little pet project for a while.

I haven't been entirely idle however - at the moment Pacis is back on Dantooine and making her way through the mid-sixties. During the summer she participated in the Nar Shaddaa Nightlife event a bit, and she's done the swoop races a few times as well by now. Really nice non-combat acitivity, that, though the best thing about it from this particular character's point of view is actually that picking any of the Dantooine courses gives you a quick travel item to Dantooine... meaning that by keeping that mission in my log semi-permanently, Pacis is now able to return to her peaceful home at any time, not just when the Pirate Incursion event is on.

I've been thinking about whether I should attempt to do anything special during my last ten levels to the (current) level cap, though I'm sure I'll get there soon enough just by inoculating Kath hounds and digging up relics once a day. I might travel around a bit more, but I haven't decided yet.

I think one reason my interest in this project has been stagnating is that it's a solved problem at this point. The early levels were the most interesting, as it was a challenge and a puzzle to figure out where I could find sources of XP at low levels without fighting anything and with extremely limited travel options available. At this point however, Pacis has it pretty good to be honest, able to use the heroic terminal on the fleet to quick travel to most planets and now with the swoop quest able to return to Dantooine at any time as well. While I could technically try to uncover more non-combat missions for her to do, she's got a wide array of heroics available for XP and gear already if I really wanted to push it; it would just be kind of repetitive.

Either way, I expect that the next time I'll have an update on this, she'll either be 75 already or at least very close to it.

Pretty Fly for a Jedi (Enclave)

Oh look, 6.3 is here; feels like I wrote about the preview for that patch only yesterday! How time flies... *cough*

Naturally, there's lots to talk about, but I wanted to start with something relatively simple: expressing my appreciation for just how damn good-looking the new story content is.

I mean, I've always been happy with SWTOR's art style (even though I know it's not everyone's cup of tea), but there's been a clear improvement in the design of new environments over time, which - in my opinion - reached its current peak with the release of Copero. Since then, I think the SWTOR artists are sadly often somewhat hampered by their own setting - I criticised Spirit of Vengeance for being kind of dull to look at not because the artists designing the flashpoint did a bad job, but because there's only so much you can do with three ships' worth of running through corridors.

With that in mind, I was all the more delighted to see that the new Dantooine environments are absolutely gorgeous. Sure, there's a bit of running through tunnels as part of the flashpoint too, but a good chunk of it actually lets you enjoy the beauty of Dantooine and I loved it. It also makes for an interesting juxtaposition to see your character and their allies look somewhat grim-faced, with their minds on a serious mission, while they walk through dense flowerbeds for example.

Speaking of faces, it also struck me with this update just how much better the artists and their tools have become at rendering believable facial expressions. Around KotFE/early KotET I seem to remember reading a dev comment about how they were very proud of how much they'd improved their facial expressions with that expansion but to me personally the results were still a bit... "meh" at the time. I don't know if the artists just got overexcited by all the new possibilities, but to be honest I thought the expressions were often awkwardly exaggerated. I actually can't find a screenshot of it right now, but I'm sure many players will know what I'm talking about when I say that the player character in particular often made a sort of weird "o-face".

In this update on the other hand, I found it really striking how good the facial expressions were throughout the whole thing. I took particular delight in the variety of faces Darth Rivix pulled depending on his mood, but they were never silly or over the top. There were also a lot of really subtle eye movements to convey the feeling that characters are thinking - I just really enjoyed it.

This was also enhanced by some really good camera work. I'm not really very well-versed in the art of film-making, but even so I couldn't help but think while playing through some older content recently that a lot of the old conversation cut scenes - for as revolutionary as they may have felt ten years ago - are nothing but endless sequences of a simple shot/reverse shot. Not so with new content like this, where the camera angle changes at least slightly with every shot and a lot of really cinematic and plain good-looking scenes are created - I mashed my screenshot key pretty hard on my first runs through the flashpoint on both factions but still missed a lot of great moments that I'm definitely planning to try and re-capture next time.

Finally, the voice acting also deserves a shout-out, as it seemed snappier than usual in places, with fewer awkward pauses, and the last boss of the flashpoint on Empire side in particular was an absolute delight to listen to, as the actress put so much emotion into the performance - again, simply delightful.

It's just great to see how much the game has evolved in that respect, and I can only hope that the team will continue to deliver consistently at this high level. More thoughts on story, mechanics, and of course the new Seasons system to come!

Pacifist Lost

Once again it's been quite a while since I talked about my pacifist Jedi Pacis. I recently decided to pick her up again and thought that this would be as good a time as any to write a little catch-up post about what's been happening to her.

The last time I wrote about her, the Nar Shaddaa Nightlife event was still going on and I was enjoying doing some non-violent dailies on Nar Shaddaa. After the event ended, I went back to my previous plan of working my way through all the levelling planets, with Hoth being the next one on the list. Unfortunately, Hoth kind of broke me. There just weren't a lot of pacifist-compatible quests there, and the map is so big and not particularly visually interesting, I just got somewhat tired of it about halfway through.

Pacis hit the milestone of level 50 somewhere along the line, and it occurred to me that it had been a really long time since she left Dantooine, the planet that I more or less consider her home. I actually found myself feeling kind of homesick for the place, plus there was the added incentive to return there some time to try out swoop racing. (Interestingly, the introductory mission to the swoop event doesn't provide you with a quick travel option to Dantooine if you don't have a ship, meaning that the only way for Pacis to get there was to use the option to travel to Dantooine that appears in the activity window during the Pirate Incursion conquest. Convoluted.)

Anyway, I used the next pirate event to return, and once the pirates had gone and peace had returned to Dantooine I started doing my daily round of digging for relics and patting Kath hounds as if I was level ten again. What nostalgia!

Unfortunately I had barely been at this for a few days (or it might even have happened on the very first night of being back, I can't remember for sure) when I did something incredibly stupid. Considering the chill and relaxing nature of the quests, I was watching something else on my second monitor while driving around to inoculate Kath hounds, being somewhat distracted. This is how I ended up hitting a quick travel item instead of the injector one time, which was still on my quest tracker from a leftover heroic, meaning that one loading screen later, I was suddenly off Dantooine again, with no way to return for who knows how many weeks until the next Pirate Incursion was supposed to come around.

I think I may have actually yelled "nooo" at my screen when I realised my mistake, and then just stared at my character for a bit, dumbfounded. That'll teach me to not pay proper attention while playing I guess. Either way I was so put out by the way I had managed to completely ruin my own plans that I didn't feel like playing the character for a while.

I did suddenly remember her during last week's Pirate Incursion though and made sure to use this opportunity to take her back to Dantooine. Today when I did my round there I made sure to click the right item every time (plus I don't think she currently has any heroics left in her log anyway). It felt really good to be back. The swoop rally is also supposed to come around again in a couple of weeks, which should allow for a nice yet still pacifist-compatible change of pace in a familiar environment.

Swoop Bike Event First Impressions

Fun fact: I fully downloaded the PTS when this event was being tested, with every intention to have a look at it in advance, but then never did. Clearly I'm just way too lazy and prefer to wait for stuff to hit live, so once again kudos to those of you who actually did play on the PTS and whose feedback surely made this new event better than it would have been otherwise. That said, here are my own early impressions after the first day on live:

The terminal announcing this event on the fleet is huge, noticeably bigger than the usual ones. That said, if you don't have the introductory quest, it's not really obvious that an event is going on when you first land on any of the three featured planets - they could do with some sort of announcement or event NPC at the spaceport to create additional awareness in my opinion.

Arriving at the event area on Dantooine, I was pleased by how extremely atmospheric it was. The decorations were loud and colourful, and the area was bustling with both NPCs and players. In typical Star Wars fashion, the swoop track was only delineated quite roughly and very open, meaning that players were crossing it everywhere, and in some places you could even aggro mobs onto it if you were sufficiently bad at navigating. It felt exciting and messy and fun.

On my own first round of the track, I accidentally left the emergency brake on for the entire run and was confused why this "race" was slower than walking speed. This is why it's a good thing that I don't have a driver's licence in real life...

Once I got the hang of things though, my rides got better and much smoother. The bikes don't exactly go at breakneck speed (I think without the speed boost it's quite close to that of normal speeders actually) but if like me you're not really good at twitch gaming that's a good thing anyway. Some of my guildies were already bragging to each other about getting the "perfection" achievements, but I was just glad whenever I was able to complete a race without failing one of the mandatory objectives. At its base, the whole thing is not dissimilar to that one daily quest on Ziost where you repair the broken speeder.

The three planets offer tracks with very different vibes to them - for example the jungle on Onderon makes for a very tight experience as you race through tunnels and narrow ravines, while Tatooine is extremely open.

To mix things up further, you got the three different swoop gangs, who all make you race the track in slightly different ways. My favourites so far are the Horizon's Razors who focus on speed and are simply about going fast and collecting some power-ups along the way. Next we have the Pit Screamers who love to show off and ask you to do things like go through hoops and make big jumps as you go along. The Blatant Beks are my least favourite so far as they require you to blow up some barrels while driving past them, and I'm finding it challenging to keep steering my swoop while also throwing explosives. I should probably keybind that ability properly to make things a bit easier, but even so it's an extra thing to do besides just making sure you're driving the right way.

I was actually slightly disappointed when I realised that you couldn't go again without having the daily quest, because it was sufficiently fun that I wanted to keep going. Good thing I have lots of alts...

For once I'm actually intrigued by some of the reputation rewards as well, because besides the "usual" decorations and armour sets, there are also "fun" Tacticals you can buy that make you do things like jump off your vehicle with a flair when you dismount. (I haven't seen a preview of this or anything, I only have the item description to go by.) That sounds like it would be quite a fun thing to have when you're cruising around and not actually in combat with anything.

The Task At Hand

This week's patch brought with it another small story update that was previously advertised as similar in scope to Hearts and Minds, and in my opinion it more than lived up to expectations. I'm really starting to like these smaller non-combat updates between the larger, more action-packed ones. It makes for excellent pacing and reminds me of how in the base game each planetary mission tends to be proceeded and wrapped up by some kind of briefing, plus you often end up spending time on your ship to chat with various companions.

6.1's story focuses first and foremost on the Alliance sorting out its new relationship with the Republic or Empire. (Consider this your spoiler warning... more details to follow!) Republic players get visited by Master Gnost-Dural and General Daeruun again, while Imperials get to meet a new character by the name of Darth Rivix. I appreciated that both visits include a little bonus mission that you can skip if you want to snub your guest(s) a bit and/or just don't feel like doing it again while replaying the thing on your umpteenth alt.

For Republic players the focus is on your visitors having arrived with a refugee ship in tow that they rescued from pirates and the Alliance offering to render some aid. I liked how on my trooper one of the people I helped said that she remembered me from Tatooine. Now that's a throwback right there!

Imperials meanwhile get to show Darth Rivix around Odessen base if they are so inclined, and Rivix sure is an interesting character. At a glance he reinforces something I've stated before, namely that all the newer Sith characters seem almost too nice compared to the many insane types we had to put up with in the base game, but Rivix's behaviour is so over the top that it's pretty much in a league of its own. From the get-go he assures you that his success is based on your success, he's not like other Sith, and if you do take the option to give him a personal tour he'll keep piping up with comments that are hard to describe as anything but sucking up to your character big time.

I enjoyed taking him at face value on my Marauder (she's a bit vain and only finds it natural that she should be admired, plus she's so convinced of her own superiority that she's not too worried about anyone trying to betray her), but I considered it equally fun to rebuff him at every turn on my agent (who has every reason to be suspicious of Sith at all times).

I saw Intisar propose on Twitter that Rivix might be a Zeltron, which would align with his looks and would provide an interesting explanation for his behaviour beyond "he's really just nice" or "he's hamming it up in order to manipulate you".

Anyway, on either faction (once again speaking purely from a loyalist point of view as I still don't have a saboteur), I found it interesting how there were differences in dialogue based on whether you had decided to fully rejoin your old faction at the end of Onslaught or opted to remain separate. If you're back in the fold there'll be comments about bringing in more troops and establishing supply lines, while independence results in much more careful inquiries along those lines.

On both factions your talks conclude with your character wondering whatever happened to Darth Malgus, followed by a brief scene in the style of "meanwhile elsewhere" that gives us as players (if not our characters) a hint on the subject matter.

On Imperial side you see Malgus waking from a proper nightmare about Empress Acina torturing him as he tries to resist her conditioning, and the medical droid he travels with telling him that this is something it can't help with. Malgus suddenly seems to have an idea though and sets course for Dantooine.

On Republic side we get a view of a peaceful farm on Dantooine where a man is repairing some droids when a woman who is revealed to be a Force user runs up to him and tells him that she can feel Malgus coming.

I have to admit that as someone who doesn't have subtitles on, the latter scene confused me initially - who was this woman and what was her connection to Malgus? But on my second run it suddenly occurred to me to check the dialogue log to see how the characters were listed there, and as it turned out they were Aryn Leneer and Zeerid Korr, two of the main characters from the Deceived novel! (I assume the third woman present must be Zeerid's daughter then.)

I read and reviewed that one back in 2012, but to be honest I've retained little of what it was about. (Skip to the next paragraph if you want to avoid spoilers for the book.) Mainly I just remember Malgus stopping a shuttle from getting away with the Force (yes, eight years before Rise of Skywalker) and rescuing his Twi'lek love interest just to kill her. And Aryn falling from a great height... for some reason... and using the Force to slow herself? Really need to add that one to my list of books to re-read.

Anyway, in game we wrap things up with a bit of conversation that is sadly exactly the same for both factions, as Kira and Scourge give an update on their mission: the transport with Satele and her students hasn't responded to the signal and its location is unknown, so they want to send out T7 and some probe droids to look for it. Your character is okay with this.

You also learn that Scourge is really having a hard time with being among the living again as he gets super angry and struggles to control his feelings. I think there is also a romantic interaction with him for Jedi knights at the end, which I haven't seen though and don't actually want to spoil for myself.

All of this doesn't take very long to play through at all, but there are enough differences between different characters that it's actually fun to go through all of your alts to see the different variations. It's great to see SWTOR going back to its roots in that regard, even if we don't have completely different class stories any more.