Some Interesting News From SWTOR's 7.7.1 Dev Stream

I was somewhat disappointed by the last two dev streams, but the voice actors' strike ended a few weeks ago, so I was positive that we'd get some good news about the next story update this time, and I was also hopeful that whatever they were going to announce about Galactic Season 9 was going to be more appealing to me than Season 8's uprising focus had been. I did get both of those things, but as I always do, I have some nits to pick as well.

Story is coming... but later and perhaps less than we'd hoped

At least when talking with some of my friends, there had been a hope expressed that the next story patch would be one big "catch-up patch" giving us a bigger chunk of story than usual, kind of like how Echoes of Oblivion and Spirit of Vengeance (which were originally supposed to be separate pieces of content) were both released at the same time after delays caused by Covid.

This... is not going to be the case. 7.8, which will come out before Christmas, will have the "Galactic Threads" story that was originally meant to be included in patch 7.6 last Christmas, and then they'll speed up a little bit and add "Master's Engima", the story originally built for patch 7.7, with 7.8.1, which should then launch at some point early next year and would usually have included only the start of Galactic Season 10 and no story update.

While I'm glad to finally have something close to a date, having to wait another four months or so until the next story drop still hurts - by that point the game will have gone nearly 18 months without a story patch, which is unprecedented in this MMO's history.

The other thing that stuck out to me is that if we're getting the story that was meant to be in 7.6 in 7.8, what was meant to be in 7.8 before that? No story? Ultimately it feels like aside from the delays, we also lost one of the twice-a-year story installments due to the strike, which sucks.

Same thing with date nights by the way - they mentioned working on one back in the 7.6.1 stream, but now we won't even get one with 7.7.1, with the next expected release (Torian and Kira) coming with 7.8.1 next year. 

Galactic Season 9: Flashpoint Resurgence

As for GS9, its theme is flashpoints. Yippee! There will be Czerka buffs involved like there were for uprisings during GS8, which I don't really care about, but I'm good with running flashpoints with or without buffs. Unfortunately it sounded like the objectives will be veteran mode only, which is a bit disappointing to me personally and will not encourage my guildies to group up I reckon, but still, it's flashpoints.

The most interesting bit of the stream to me personally was the devs talking about how they were using the occasion of this seasonal focus on flashpoints to make some changes to the activity finder. A big quality of life improvement they will make is that you'll finally be able to queue as multiple roles again, change roles while queueing (so that you can e.g. do dailies in a dps spec while queueing for a flashpoint as healer) and it will take both of your combat styles into account, meaning you could queue as all three roles if you wanted and have the right combat styles for it. Now, to be clear, only the last bit of that is actually new - both the ability to queue for multiple roles and the ability to queue as a different role than you're currently playing were in the game before but got patched out at some point, I think because they were buggy or causing issues of some sort. Still, I'm very glad to see these features make a comeback at last.

They are also going to improve the loot you get in flashpoints while levelling, though it's not entirely clear what that will mean - I'm guessing more gear that is actually appropriate for your level and combat style, because getting drops that you can't even use or not use for another twenty levels was definitely a thing sometimes.

For the max levels, you'll no longer have to queue for all flashpoints to be eligible for additional daily/weekly rewards, but can exclude a few that you may want to avoid. You still won't be rewarded for just spamming Hammer Station and nothing else, but you can untick a couple you don't like, which I guess is nice. 

No more "spacebar plz"

The thing that kind of shocked me was that in connection to all these flashpoint changes, queued veteran and master mode flashpoints will no longer feature any cut scenes or group conversations; everything will just be auto-skipped and if there was some sort of decision to be made (such as whether to kill or spare the captain in the Black Talon) it will just do so automatically. If you want to see the conversations and cut scenes in the future, you'll need to do story mode (where available) or manually walk into the higher difficulty with some friends.

Now, I completely understand why they are doing this and I'm sure many people will consider this a major quality of life improvement. I made a whole compilation poking fun at people's urge to skip the cut scenes seven years ago. I've seen it all, from the guy who drops group the moment you zone into the Esseles or Black Talon, to endless arguments about who isn't hitting their space bar and why. It was a source of friction for sure.

AND YET. I myself have always loved the group conversations in flashpoints and was generally happy to watch cut scenes if other people wanted to do so too. I enjoy running flashpoints, but I never "spammed" them to the point where getting the Esseles again made me frustrated. (The only flashpoint that I've managed to get utterly sick of is Hammer Station, and that has nothing to do with cut scenes and everything to do with the community.)

I also felt that the group conversations often inspired fun little interactions, such as when a dark or light side choice got people chatting. My guildies have seen me express (not-entirely-serious) outrage at killing the engineers or leaving Asara behind in the Esseles more than a few times. And some of the cut scenes also just genuinely looked nice! I have a whole collection of screenshots of pugs in Czerka Corporate Labs, from that last cut scene that shows your group walking into the room looking heroic.

And all of that is just going to be... gone? Telling me that you can technically build a group manually and walk in to still see the cut scenes is a bit of a cold comfort because let's be real, how often do people do that? How often have you run Kuat Drive Yards since it was removed from the group finder? I just feel like this is going to be one of those things that will end up having negative ripple effects that people won't fully feel until later down the line. Or maybe I'm just a relic of ancient times for having actually enjoyed interacting with my pug mates in small ways, even if there was friction sometimes.

Be free, F2P-ers!

A big change for free-to-play players that's coming with the next patch is that the devs will be dropping a lot of the old restrictions on that type of account. You will now also get sprint at level 1, have all action bars unlocked, be able to hide your head slot  and equip random purples that you get while levelling. Honestly, with some of the things they mentioned I didn't even know there were restrictions for that: What, F2P players couldn't display legacy titles before? Or equip companion customisations? WTF?

Even as someone who's always been subscribed, I think this is great news. SWTOR has had a reputation for having extremely draconian F2P restrictions for a long time - I remember how the limited action bars were a source of ridicule across the entire MMO community when the game first went free-to-play. I think the devs did the right thing by being cautious when they first changed payment model back in the day (mostly because other MMOs that followed suit later and kept crowing about how much more generous their F2P model was in comparison, such as Rift and Wildstar, did ultimately not end up doing well).

However, all of that was over a decade ago, times have changed, and there's just no reason to be quite so brutal with all those restrictions on what's effectively the game's free trial mode. Annoying players with arbitrary feature locks before they've even left the starter planet was just never great, and I hope that these changes will give more people a chance to actually fall in love with what the game has to offer and then spend some money on it happily instead of feeling nagged from the get-go.

What about subscribers though?

So as not to leave subscribers feeling unappreciated, the game will run a new "subscriber login event" from September to December where you'll earn a special currency if you log in at least four times a week, which you can then use to buy some goodies. I kinda raised my eyebrow a bit at one of those goodies supposedly being "endgame gear" but we'll see. I really don't need more free stuff myself, but I can't blame them for trying to offer subscribers a bit more carrot while easing up on the F2P stick.

Say farewell to endless free CC

Speaking of carrots and sticks, regardless of your subscription status, you've long gained 100 free Cartel Coins per month if you've got a security key attached to your account. I often saw delighted comments from people who came back to the game after some time away to find that they'd accumulated thousands of free Cartel Coins while not playing. While that was nice, considering for how long the game has been running at this point, I can't blame the bean counters for concluding that someone coming back after years and immediately finding $40 worth of Cartel Coins in their account was maybe not so good for their bottom line. No, that free CC is not going to go away, but it will only be awarded going forward if your account was actually active in the last 30 days. 

Decos, Graphics, DirectX

Under "other topics about which I don't have that much to say", we have the Feast of Prosperity returning this autumn with some awesome new decos that I'll definitely want to grind for. (I actually broke my habit of ignoring Twitch chat to type "LOVE LAMP" when they showed the new ceiling lights.) 

The character customisation updates continue, with Rattataki getting updated textures next, and dark-side corruption getting a much-needed revamp so that it no longer turns every character into a pasty white dude regardless of their previous skin colour. (I might actually give showing it on my dark-siders a try once this goes live - I previously always disabled it precisely because it changed your skin colour so much and I didn't want to look like an albino axolotl.) Also, after they added all those skin colours for aliens in the last patch, they are expanding on this by adding more hair and montral colours with 7.7.1.

Finally, in technical news that I have to file under "I don't know enough about this to have an opinion but I guess it sounds good", they are making good progress on updating the game to DirectX 12 but there's still some work left to do. 

As usual, if you want ALL THE DEETS, including things I didn't mention here and images of various rewards, here are some other places you can look:

• VOD on YouTube (Twitch had some hiccups and split it into several parts) 
• Official recap article
• Swtorista
• Today in TOR 

12 Things That Are Very Different in SWTOR after 10 Years

The other week I was having a chat with some WoW players I know and the subject of SWTOR came up. Knowing that I play it as my main game, one of them said something along the lines of: "I tried it at launch but it didn't really stick with me. I assume it's a much better game now?" To which I probably should have replied with a simple "Yes, of course!" but since I'm both rubbish at being an ambassador for my favourite MMOs and always have to complicate everything, my answer was some muttered deflection about how I was clearly too biased to make that judgement. Truth is, there are some things that I liked better about the way the game was at launch, which is something I worked through in this post from a few years ago.

But it did get me thinking about what the experience would be like for someone deciding to return now who only played for a little while at launch, or who has at least been absent from the game for more than a few years. With SWTOR's ten year anniversary coming up, I wouldn't be surprised if more people were thinking of checking it out again just to see how it's doing! So I tried to think of some major aspects of the game that have changed since then and compile them in the form of a blog post. Maybe this will alleviate some returning players' confusion... or encourage others to come back if they were on the edge and find out this way that something that put them off back in the day is no longer an issue. Without further ado: Twelve things that make SWTOR very different now compared to how it was at launch.

1. There've been a lot of server merges.

If you still remember the name of the server you played on back in the day... it won't be there anymore. SWTOR launched with a huge amount of servers, just to have to merge them together again and again as the game's population declined. We seem to have settled on there being only five, though that's not as dire as it sounds as they are all "mega servers" and considerably bigger than the average server used to be back in the day. There are three European ones for each of the supported languages (English, German and French), and two US ones for the east and west coast respectively. Note that while the Satele Shan server is nominally considered the west coast server, in terms of physical location, both servers are located on the east coast now.

If you used to or want to play on an RP or pure PvP server, you're out of luck now as neither exists anymore. The RP community just doesn't get much love, period, and world PvP was changed to a purely optional thing on all servers. Basically you have the option to switch to a "PvP instance" on any planet accessible to both factions, in which all players are flagged. There are no special rewards for it though other than sometimes having reduced competition for mob spawns.

2. The game has a free-to-play/freemium business model now.

I know this is a change that happened in SWTOR's very first year, but if you really quit within the first few months, I guess you never would have seen even that get implemented. It's kind of weird to think back to what a drama that was back then, when being subscription-only was considered the gold standard and dropping the mandatory subscription was considered a sign of a failed game. I feel like people have become a lot more chill about that nowadays and seem to consider the business model less important as long as the game is fun and no particular monetisation scheme is too annoying.

The way SWTOR's free-to-play model works is that it gives you access to a huge amount of content for free, but then tries to make you vaguely uncomfortable in terms of quality of life at every opportunity to get you to pony up for the optional subscription. If that sort of thing bothers you, I always suggest subscribing for at least a month if you think you're having any fun at all, as that immediately removes all of the restrictions and unlocks even more content.

The cash shop is fairly inoffensive unless you're a fashionista who needs to own all the outfits as that'll set you back by quite a lot. Note that everything from the Cartel Market can be traded and sold in game though, so if you've got enough credits you can get most things from other players via the Galactic Trade Network.

Aside from cosmetics the Cartel Market only contains a few unlocks that make life as a free/preferred (lapsed sub) player marginally less annoying, but really, if that's your goal it's much easier and better value for money to just subscribe. I wrote a post comparing SWTOR's and ESO's business models a couple of years ago if you find that kind of thing interesting.

3. Levelling has been simplified and sped up massively.

Not that it was ever really hard... but you could die on some solo story missions, and you sometimes had to worry about upgrading your gear or doing some side content for extra XP. None of that is really the case anymore. In terms of combat, I found it quite striking that when Bhagpuss gave the game a try a couple of years ago, he described the levelling journey as such: "Games intended for very small children not excluded, TOR is by far the easiest MMORPG I have ever played." And he's played a lot of MMOs! It does ramp up a bit later on, which is a point I don't think Bhagpuss ever got to, but it's still a far cry from what it was like during the first couple of years, when you could even die on the starter planets if you didn't upgrade and use your skills appropriately.

The XP you get from main story missions has also been multiplied so many times that doing anything but the main storyline(s) is now redundant for levelling purposes and if you engage with things like side quests or group content at all, you'll be over-levelled for the story in no time.

4. Side quests are now hidden by default.

Speaking of side quests or "exploration missions" as they are now called, not only are they not needed anymore to fill your XP bar, someone at Bioware also decided at some point a few years ago that their mere presence was confusing and/or off-putting and decided to make them hidden by default. If you still want to find and do them, you have to open your map and tick the "show exploration missions" box on there to make quest markers appear over the relevant NPCs. You're welcome.

5. The game is fully level-scaled now.

On the subject of being over-levelled for the story, a few expansions ago SWTOR introduced level-scaling. The way it works in most cases is that each planet has a defined level range, and if you are within that range or below, you'll simply play as your current level, but if you exceed it, you'll be down-levelled to the highest "permitted" level for the planet, while keeping all your higher level abilities and secondary stats, meaning that you're still going to be pretty OP. But it does mean that you can't simply run around lower-level planets one-shotting everything, and that you do keep getting XP for doing quests no matter where you are (with the exception of some low-level areas on Coruscant and Dromund Kaas), so if you're enjoying the lower-level content you can do most of your levelling by simply doing that.

6. Travel around the galaxy is faster now.

Something I'd almost forgotten until I re-read the post by Wilhelm that I linked earlier is how annoying planetary travel used to be sometimes, what with having to go to your hangar, loading into your ship, picking your travel destination, getting off there, exiting the space station or spaceport, and so on and so forth. Nowadays, the only reason you'll have to do that is if you have a quest inside the hangar or on your ship while levelling, but otherwise you can open the galaxy map from (almost) anywhere, click on your desired planetary destination and simply go there instantly. You might just have to briefly navigate out of a spaceport or station after arriving.

There are also a lot of other convenient travel options. Planetary taxis are now all available without having to unlock them first. Both quick travel and the emergency fleet pass had their cooldowns shortened drastically, to the point where subscribers with legacy perks have no cooldown on either of them (when it used to be something like half an hour and... twenty hours? respectively).

Strongholds (more on them below) also offer a way to instantly travel to a safe place and back if you need it. And people in a guild with a guild ship can instantly summon a group from anywhere in the galaxy to their location. WoW used to have this as a guild perk called "Have Group, Will Travel" that they took out at some point because it was considered too overpowered or something. Not so in SWTOR! I've written about the evolution of travel in SWTOR in a bit more detail here.

7. There's housing now, called strongholds.

Housing is one of those things that I really don't care that much about in an MMORPG, but I know that there's a dedicated audience for it that considers it an absolute key feature. Again, this is something that's actually been in the game for quite a while now (since 2014 to be exact), but if you left in the first year you might not have known that. You can purchase various apartments and estates on a number of planets and decorate them to your heart's content.

The way decorations can be placed is hook-based (so not completely free-form) but at the same time not as restrictive as in other games that use similar systems, as you can change the layout of hooks you use (e.g. by choosing whether a room should contain a lot of small hooks, a couple of big ones, or a mix).

8. The way companions work has been changed quite a bit.

At launch every class could acquire a total of five unique companions by completing their class story. Each companion had likes and dislikes, and you could only progress their personal story if they liked you enough. They also required constant gear upgrades to remain effective (the same way as a player) and each companion was locked into only being able to perform one trinity role (tank, dps or healer).

With the launch of Knights of the Fallen Empire, everyone's class companions were taken away (once you start that part of the story), though you later get to re-unite with them as the story progresses. However, now all characters get access to (almost) all companions, plus a whole bunch of new ones.

Companion stories aren't locked behind whether they like you anymore, and instead unlock automatically once you've progressed far enough in the overall story. "Liking" you isn't that important anymore either, as affection has been replaced with influence, which also goes up if you make decisions that they hate. Gear also doesn't affect companion performance anymore; instead they simply get stronger as your influence increases.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, all companions can perform any trinity role now, so you're no longer locked into dragging a specific companion that you don't like around just because they're your only healer. They've also been boosted incredibly in terms of power and are much more effective at keeping you alive now, which also contributes to the whole levelling being much easier thing (see point three). Again, if you're interested in more detail, I've written more about the evolution of companions in SWTOR in this post.

9. The gear treadmill is minimal.

Speaking of gear affecting power levels, the gear treadmill in SWTOR is minimal nowadays. With the launch of the last expansion they added a new item level of gear but this has stayed the same throughout the whole expansion, even though it was really easy to max out within a couple of weeks after launch. You don't need to do the hardest content to acquire max-level gear either - people have the option to gear up through different activities depending on what they find fun. Additionally, most gear is bound to legacy, meaning that you can freely send it back and forth between your alts, so that a new alt can instantly wear a full kit of max-level gear once you've ground it out once. If you feel like other games are too demanding in terms of making you grind for gear as you'd really rather just chill and enjoy the story or whatever, SWTOR might be for you.

10. The easier group content is role-neutral now.

I thought about starting with "SWTOR has an automated group finder now" since strictly speaking that wasn't in at launch either, though it did get added very soon after. Still, I can imagine few players being surprised by this. What does throw people off more often is that the easier group content (veteran mode flashpoints and uprisings) has been tweaked to be role-neutral now, meaning that you can run it with four damage dealers if you want - no long queue times to wait for a tank. So if the game puts you into a group with no tank or healer, this is not an error but working as intended! The only thing to keep in mind here is that in somewhat of a contrast to the easy solo-levelling, group content without a tank or healer can actually be quite a challenge (depending on the instance and your group make-up), potentially forcing you to actually take care with pulls and use cooldowns to not die.

11. The post-launch content is not unique for your class.

Many hours of new story content have been added since launch, however due to the game not meeting expectations they had to lose the whole "eight parallel class stories" angle and unify the storyline. If this makes you wonder which character class might be best to return to to get the best experience out of the new content, I've got a post for you here!

Still, it's important to know that there's not as much replayability for alts as there used to be. There is some depending on the content - as there are references to your old class sprinkled in here or there, and some storylines are different for Republic and Empire at least. However, eight unique class stories it is not.

12. There are options to skip ahead now.

I'd always advise players not to skip story the first time around, but if you were stuck on something you really didn't enjoy, or on an alt that stalled out while progressing through a piece of content you found too repetitive to do again, there are options to skip ahead to different points in the story now. So for example if you've only been gone for a few years but got bogged down in the "Knights of" expansions because you really didn't enjoy them, you can skip right ahead to Jedi Under Siege, where the story returns to a more traditional Republic vs. Empire setup.

Are you someone who hasn't played SWTOR in a long time and thinking about returning? Got any other burning questions about what has changed since the last time you played? Feel free to leave them in the comments!

6.3 Preview Thoughts

Last Thursday Bioware did a preview stream for patch 6.3 - now confirmed to be named "The Dark Descent" - similar to what they did for 6.2 back in November. I didn't watch it live, but fortunately a recorded version is once again freely available on both Twitch and YouTube.

Apparently they got a lot of positive feedback about the voice actor interviews they included last time, and I can only agree with the majority that they've been great content and I'm happy to see more of them. This time around they interviewed Moira Quirk, who voices Elara Dorne and Aryn Leneer, and Gideon Emery, who voices Darth Rivix. They were both great to listen to once again, and Charles Boyd uttered the words "sexy David Bowie vampire" in the second interview, which is definitely something to be preserved for future generations.

One thing that was really funny to me personally was that, when Gideon started his interview by saying "thanks for having me" it was as if a switch had been flipped in my brain and I went "oh my god, it's Fenris from Dragon Age" - I had completely failed to make that connection when chatting with Rivix in game (I guess I was too immersed?) but the moment I heard the voice out of context it was like BAM!

Besides the voice actor interviews and a few giveaways, the stream's other two big ticket items were some talk about the story content coming up with 6.3 and the introduction of a new system called Galactic Seasons.

Secrets of the Enclave

6.3's story update will once again be delivered in the form of a flashpoint, continuing the Darth Malgus storyline and taking place in the ruins of the Jedi enclave on Dantooine. I was quite giddy to hear this, considering that I've (somewhat to my own surprise) become quite a Malgus fangirl ever since Jedi Under Siege! My only slight caveat is that this would potentially be the third time that we face Malgus as a flashpoint boss, which even I would consider overdoing it a little in this particular format.

That said, I thought it was interesting that they didn't actually confirm in the stream that we'll be fighting Malgus; they just stated that he'll be the reason we're there, so things might not actually end up going as we expect. (My dreams of a Malgus team-up are not dead yet!)

Characters confirmed to feature are Arn and Aryn for Republic players and Darths Krovos and Rivix for Imperials. These are all people I'm happy to see more of so I'm 100% on board with that.

Galactic Seasons

There is a whole blog post up on the official website about how this new system is going to work, but in a nutshell it sounds a bit like a cross between a limited time event and what other games call a season pass. Over the course of a season (currently slated to last about five months), you'll be able to unlock rewards for completing certain in-game objectives (more if you're also a subscriber) but you can also just spend money to get the rewards right away without playing, or pay credits to catch-up if you've fallen behind.

My reaction to that whole announcement can mostly be summed up as a somewhat resigned sigh. I don't really need the game to give me more stuff for doing the same things I'm already doing. I want story, content, and systems that keep me busy in a fun way. Like the basic login reward system introduced in 6.2, this feels more like another one of those free-to-play "tricks" to keep you engaged for the sake of monetisation, and I don't like that. I don't hate the idea or anything, but it just feels like another one of those little steps in an overall direction that I'm not too fond of. I do worry about one day realising that the water actually has become too hot for this frog.

Because I don't want to sound too negative, I will say that a large part of the player base does seem to love collecting stuff for the sake of owning it, so from that point of view I can see this system being quite a success. If I understand the way it works correctly, it will also offer free or preferred players an additional incentive to subscribe for at least a couple of times a year, even if it's not required to access new story content, which should be good for the game I guess.

Also, being completely honest with myself, depending on the details of how it works, I could see the actual objective-chasing appealing to the part of me that likes being able to combo completion of tasks for different purposes (e.g. doing a flashpoint to advance a character's personal story and complete their Conquest). If I can add "progressing my galactic season" on top of those other things I'm already interested in doing, I could see that having a certain appeal. But I can only wait and see.

What are your thoughts on what's been shown to come with 6.3 so far?

SWTOR's F2P Seven Years In

I still remember when it was first announced that SWTOR was going to convert from its subscription model to a free-to-play game: I was devastated, viewing it as an admission of failure and fearing for the game's future. However, the free-to-play conversion came and went, I stuck with the game anyway and quickly found that it wasn't actually all that bad. Yes, the cash shop filled with silly hats did happen, but for the most part that's been easy enough to ignore and my overall enjoyment of the game hasn't really diminished as a result of the business model change. I just stayed subscribed and nothing much changed.

Due to spending most of my time in operations, I don't know many other players who don't subscribe either. We've had people dropping to preferred status occasionally, but as you can't participate in ops without being subscribed these days, this doesn't tend to last (either they re-subscribe or fade away). Running into a completely free player in the wild is always a slightly bewildering experience because nobody really knows how free accounts work and what sorts of restrictions they are subject to. I also remember grouping with a free player for the heroics on Korriban once and having trouble even communicating with them because of their inability to chat in various channels. Still, my point is that to a subscriber SWTOR's free-to-play model is pretty much a complete non-issue.

If you read certain forums or blogs on the other hand, you'd think that it was actually the game's defining feature. People who've never even tried it will go on and on about how terrible it is to play for free and "lol hotbars", purely based on something they read somewhere once. And others who've never played the game either pick up on this and then in turn spread the word about the supposed evils of SWTOR's business model.

This always makes me somewhat defensive when the subject of the free-to-play model comes up, because while I don't think that all the restrictions are good, people are rarely interested in having an actual discussion on the pros and cons of the system and just want to engage in some good old EA bashing. Which in turn is a completely alien point of view to me as someone who's been playing the game for over seven years now and has always felt that she's getting good value for money out of it.

The end result seems to be that the people who enjoy talking about SWTOR's business model the most are those who don't actually play it (anymore), while those who are the most passionate about the game simply subscribe and play, largely oblivious to any potential restrictions that non-subscribers might face. Like I mentioned in one of the posts I linked above, the people actually playing for free regularly - who would be in the best position to cast judgement on F2P restrictions - tend to be enigmatically silent for the most part.

I've occasionally toyed with the idea of starting a new free-to-play account to do some research on the subject and clear up some misconceptions, but I've seen other people try and fail to do the same, and I'm also honest enough with myself to admit that I'm already unable to keep up with all the existing projects that I've been trying to juggle over the course of the past year and that I hardly need to add to their number at this point.

So I was highly pleased to see that Swtorista, one of the most passionate and knowledgeable voices in the fan community at the moment, basically did the whole thing for me and made a very detailed video about it:



The title is a bit clickbaity, sounding like it could potentially be one of those angry video gamer rants with which YouTube seems to be inundated these days, but her tone is actually as cheerful and entertaining as always. It's most certainly not a rant, but instead a detailed exploration of all the different restrictions that free players face, with Swtorista always adding her own opinion on whether she thinks a particular limitation is useful and serves a purpose or is rather silly. The video is over 40 minutes long but I found that time flew right by while watching it and I was entertained throughout.

I'll also openly admit that while my overall "how much do you know about free-to-play" scorecard was pretty good, there were some items on that list that were completely new to me, such as that completely free players can't place bound pieces of armour in their bank. WTF. In general, the video reinforced my impression that when F2P was first introduced, they must have had a brainstorming session at Bioware to talk about every possible gameplay feature that they could restrict in some arbitrary way without completely crippling the player... and then decided to actually implement the lot of them.

I may be a subscriber and perfectly happy with free players having some serious restrictions, but some of that stuff is so random, it does kind of make you shake your head. (My favourite quote from the video was: "If Billybob wants to play 40 space missions a week for free, just let him.") For example I'd happily see stuff like the restricted number of action bars go the way of the dodo just so that people can stop bringing it up as some kind of catch-all argument for why SWTOR's business model sucks. Sure, those who just love to complain will simply latch on to something else instead, but I'd still be happy to be able to reply that no, that quick bar restriction is not a thing anymore.

Then again, some of the most upvoted comments on the video sadly admit that they specifically subscribed because of some of those silly restrictions, with the limited amount of action bars being one that got called out in specific. That doesn't really make a great business case for Bioware to ease up on the restrictions for free accounts. But I guess we can always hope.

ESO vs. SWTOR: Comparing Business Models

After playing Elder Scrolls Online for a few hours on New Year's Eve, I joked that I probably wasn't going to get back into it for another year, but actually I've ended up playing it casually throughout the past month and even splurged on an ESO Plus subscription too. Turns out that now that I made it over the hump of replaying content that I'd already seen in the beta years ago, I've been rather enjoying myself, though not always in the ways I expected.

I'll probably be able to get a couple more comparison posts out of the experience, but I'm a bit wary of making shallow "first impressions" posts at this point, as these are a dime a dozen in the MMO space and can end up being very oddly skewed, so I don't want to write about anything that I haven't been able to actually sink some time into/research in a bit more depth. So let's start by talking about business models, as these are very straightforward. (Well, relatively speaking. Actually they are pretty complex, but still less so than the gameplay itself.)

In a nutshell, I was surprised by how similar the two games are when it comes to their business model, considering that SWTOR is often decried for having a terrible one, while I mostly keep hearing people gush about ESO's being oh so great. I guess Bioware is still having a hard time with bad PR.

Buy to Play vs. Free to Play

To be honest I've never quite understood the obsession many outspoken MMORPG players seem to have with B2P over F2P. That one-off box purchase on its own isn't going to pay for years and years of content to be developed, so the devs still need to push the subscription option/additional cash shop purchases either way.

That said, having tried ESO I can see one advantage for the player in that the required buy-in means there has to be less worrying about restrictions during the early levels in particular. SWTOR places some pretty brutal chat restrictions on low-level free players, simply because of how much gold/credit sellers have abused the ability to create new accounts for free.

That said, having to spend money to start playing at all is still an obstacle, even if the price of the base game is quite low these days. I know I was unwilling to give Secret World a try until it went free-to-play for example, but then ended up enjoying it enough to be willing to give Funcom some money afterwards, so there's obviously some value to not having a pay wall at the very beginning. I'd love to know how the two models compare behind the scenes in terms of acquisition/player lifetime value.

The "Optional" Subscription

People often criticise that SWTOR's subscription isn't really optional as playing without it you'll feel very limited. I don't think I've ever met a SWTOR player that denies this either, though I think people sometimes don't give credit to all the content you can access completely for free, which includes all the class stories.

ESO definitely doesn't nag you about subscribing nearly as much, though in fairness they also don't have to since you've already given them money by the point you've started playing. That said, I actually found the game pretty unplayable without a subscription by level ten or so, for the simple reason that is the crafting bag.

The crafting bag is a feature that you only get access to while subscribed and is basically a portable hole that can hold infinite amounts of everything related to crafting. The thing that people don't tell you is that if you're the kind of person who likes to click on everything around you that the game will let you interact with, 90 percent of everything you loot will be crafting materials. Since I'm somewhat interested in crafting, I wanted to keep them too, but from level five or so onwards this basically meant that I could barely complete a single quest before my bags were full. By the time I ponied up for a month of ESO Plus, both my bags and my bank were full to burst, yet the instant I subscribed and the crafting mats were automatically transferred to the crafting bag, my normal bags and bank were suddenly virtually empty.

I guess this particular limitation doesn't get as much publicity because I know from experience with my guildies that most players aren't as obsessed with picking up everything that sparkles and will happily ignore large numbers of dropped loot, and what they do pick up they will happily vendor without thinking about potential future use for crafting or anything like that, but I suppose it goes to show that "optional" is in the eye of the beholder. At least I know that I'm not the only one who's struggled with the lack of crafting bag for non-subscribers, as people's opinions on the official forums range from "it's okay; you can circumvent it by making extra storage alts/a personal guild bank/buying additional accounts" to being entirely put off the game by this particular restriction.

Convenience aside, another thing that both games' subscriptions have in common is that they give you a cash shop stipend for every month that you're subscribed. ESO is much more generous however, by throwing in 1500 Crowns per month vs. SWTOR's 500-600 Cartel Coins. While the value of funny money like that can be hard to gauge accurately, I did the maths and the two currencies are actually very close in terms of real life value as well, so ESO really does give you more bang for your buck, which is nice! It's pretty obviously part of their marketing strategy too, as one month of ESO Plus actually costs less than buying 1500 Crowns separately, so the idea is to use the lower price to lure you into subscribing instead of having you simply make a one-time purchase.

General Cash Shop Observations

ESO for some reason felt the need to not have just one but two cash shop icons, because they figured the Crown Crates (random lootboxes) needed their own, which is kind of funny to me. Either way the icons are similarly unobtrusive as the Cartel Market icon in SWTOR.

In general, I like the Crown Store's UI a bit better. SWTOR's store UI is much better now than it was, but ESO still requires fewer clicks in comparison to navigate between categories, which makes it easier to casually browse what's on offer. There are also helpful sub-categories, such as "mounts" being split into "exotic", "horses" or "special". I've often wished that SWTOR had more of these, for example to make it easier to only look at animal mounts vs. speeders, or in the armour section at Jedi styles vs. bounty hunter outfits for example.

Another big plus in favour of the ESO store's UI is that they make it much easier to preview everything before buying. While SWTOR technically has a preview function, it's sometimes disabled for bundled items. Compare this to ESO selling a bundle with several dozen hairstyles in it and letting you preview literally every single one of them before buying (though how to do so isn't super obvious and - like many things relating to ESO's UI - I had to google how to do it).

The general wares in both stores mostly consist of cosmetics of some variety or another, with no power-related purchases. The main thing that SWTOR has that ESO doesn't is that they allow you to manually unlock some of the subscriber benefits (such as the infamous extra hotbars) permanently. The only comparable thing that ESO has is that you can buy DLC content - it's generally free to access for subscribers but unlike in SWTOR, you don't automatically get to keep it if your sub lapses. Also, the current newest "chapter" in ESO or whatever word they use to avoid saying "expansion" is not included in the subscription and still requires an extra purchase no matter what. Another thing that's worth pointing out is that ESO sells some insta-gratification consumables - as I mentioned in my last post, there are mechanics such as riding training and crafting trait research that are gated behind literally months of waiting... unless you're willing to pay up that is.

In general it seems to me that SWTOR's Cartel Market is somewhat better stocked than ESO's Crown store, despite of both games periodically removing items to create artificial scarcity; there's just more stuff to choose from in the former than in the latter.

Funny Money

Now, let's talk pricing! As mentioned above, funny money's whole purpose is to make it less obvious just how much you're spending on things, which it generally succeeds at (especially with additional discounts if you buy larger amounts at once etc.). There is however some napkin maths that you can do, and while doing so I was pleasantly surprised to find that SWTOR and ESO made it easy for me to draw comparisons between the two by having an extremely similar exchange rate. (Note that all prices in this post are in pounds as I'm located in the UK.)

Basically Cartel Coins range in price from £4 to £7 per thousand, depending on which bundle you choose, while ESO's Crowns range from £5 to £8 per thousand. So Crowns are slightly more expensive, but not massively so. The main thing that surprised me was the variance in bundle pricing. I think I've only ever bought Cartel Coins once a long time ago, so I didn't remember how it works in detail, but basically the bundles you can buy range in price from £1.80 to £24. For all the talk about "whales" people like to engage in nowadays, a maximum transaction amount of £24 is hardly daylight robbery. I mean, that's only slightly more than I have to pay for my daily commute. In comparison, ESO's Crown bundles start at £6 for the cheapest one but go up to £110. I wonder how many players actually go for that last one? I think I would struggle to even find enough things in the store that I'd like to spend 21,000 Crowns on.

Anyway, I figured that for price comparison purposes it was both fair and easiest to assume a value of about £5 per thousand Cartel Coins or Crowns. Looking at the different categories you can see some interesting differences.

For example on checking the mounts categories in both stores, SWTOR's ranged in price from about £2 to £13, with most averaging around £7.50. In comparison an ESO store mount will set you back £4.50 to £15, with most of them averaging around £9. One interesting tidbit about ESO store mounts is that the in-game alternatives to them are extremely restricted. I've sometimes heard people complain that SWTOR hides all the good cosmetic stuff in the store - something I've always disagreed with - but even if you see some merit in the argument it's nothing compared to the way ESO handles its mount skins. There are literally only four differently coloured horses plus an event mount available from actually playing the game; every other mount is exclusive to the store.

Another category I compared was that of non-combat pets, where again, SWTOR was a bit cheaper, with the average price for a pet being only a little over a pound, while ESO's tended to hover around £3.50. I suspect that this is simple market pressure at work as pets are not very popular in SWTOR and I doubt they'd sell any at all if they cost more than they do. In ESO on the other hand I see people running around with non-combat pets all the time, despite of their higher prices.

When it came to character looks, I compared SWTOR's armour shells to ESO's appearances, which are slightly different but essentially both grant you a full cosmetic outfit for your character, which I judged similar enough for the purposes of this post. Here ESO is more generous, with prices ranging from £2.50 to £5, while SWTOR's armours can cost up to £13 for some, with most hovering around the £7 price point. I guess this must be one of Bioware's main money makers. I mean, I'm sure ESO players care about their characters' looks too, but SWTOR makes it more of an issue with all the cut scenes making you want to look your most fabulous for the camera. People jokingly refer to the game as "Space Barbie" for a reason.

Crown Crates vs. Cartel Packs

Let's talk about the elephant in the room: lootboxes, oh em gee! I've noted previously that SWTOR has effectively been phasing them out, but the Ultimate Cartel pack is still available, so I guess it counts. As far as I'm aware ESO has shown no signs of shifting away from relying on Crown Crates for its income.

Interestingly, there is a big price difference between Cartel Packs and Crown Crates, with the latter costing twice as much as the former: £2 vs. £1 per pack. (That said, this is still less than I thought either of them were going to cost in real money.) Now, it might be that the ESO crates make up for their higher price with better contents, but to be honest that's hard to judge considering that nobody knows the drop rates for anything for certain, and even if we did know, if the items aren't also sold in the store for a fixed price, there isn't an objective value we can attach to any of them, seeing how people have different opinions on what's a good or a bad drop. One person's favourite mount ever might be another one's trash.

That aside, I do think that SWTOR is miles ahead in terms of consumer-friendliness in this area simply because all the contents of the boxes are tradable. So if you enjoy opening random boxes you can, but if you just want a specific item, you can simply buy it off another player for credits. There is a chance that your particular item might not be available for sale at all times, but in general there is a pretty healthy secondary market for pack items.

I'd previously been told that ESO had this "Crown Gem" system, which was just as good or even better because you can use gems to buy crate items directly, but after having seen it myself I have to call shenanigans on that one. Basically you get gems for disintegrating unwanted junk items from the boxes, such as potions, but they are only worth one gem a pop, which is basically nothing. Bigger items such as pets or mounts cannot be turned into gems at will, only if they're duplicates! So getting an ugly mount that you're not going to use doesn't get you one bit closer to getting the thing you actually want, whereas in SWTOR you'd at least be able to sell it.

Also, and this is something nobody had ever mentioned to me before and that I only learned while looking it up, the top reward tier, which is called "radiant apex" rewards, can't be purchased with gems, ever, so you can only get those via sheer luck.

Really, the only thing I can say in favour of ESO's Crown Crates is that aside from the radiant apex rewards, all the rewards for the current crate season can be inspected via the in-game UI and you don't need to go to an outside site to learn what they are. This would have been a good feature for SWTOR to have too back in the day, though it has now become redundant with the Ultimate pack (as I get that they can't easily give you a preview of every Cartel Market item ever produced).

Trading & Unlocks

After railing against the lack of tradability of Crown Crate items, I do want to mention something positive related to store items and other players in ESO: the game has the option to give store items to others as gifts directly, which I think is very neat. In SWTOR you can give gifts too, but you have to buy them yourself, wait for the bind timer to run out and then send them through the mail or hand them over in person. I think a dedicated gift UI as part of the store is a nice idea.

The other thing I wanted to mention is that (as far as I could tell; personally I still only have one character), all of ESO's cosmetic cash store purchases are automatically unlocked account-wide, whereas in SWTOR you have to pay an additional fee through the Collection UI to get access on all your characters. How much of a boon that is to you depends on your play style I guess - I love creating alts myself but tend to give them all unique looks anyway, so to me automated account-wide unlocks are a moot point. However to players who don't mind recycling a good look, this can be a boon and drastically increase the value for money of purchases in ESO.

Whew, this ended up being longer than expected!

TL;DR: SWTOR's and ESO's business models are remarkably similar. The main differences are:

- SWTOR gives you a big chunk of content for free, but restricts and nags you a lot if you don't spend any money
- ESO's subscription feels more like a nice bonus than a requirement to fully enjoy the game (unless you have a specific play style), largely due to the generous currency stipend
- Both cash stores rely heavily on cosmetics, with no direct power purchases. Both have only a couple of what I would call slightly iffy items in there, such as SWTOR's extra hotbars for non-subscribers, or ESO's unlocks to skip months of waiting.
- ESO's store has the slightly better UI, but SWTOR's has more merchandise to choose from.
- In both cases, the prices for most items are what I'd call pretty reasonable, usually coming in at £5 to £10. I was actually kind of surprised by this, which is funny in itself as you'd think that as a long-time player I'd know better. It gets a lot of publicity when they experiment with releasing something super expensive, but if you look at the everyday items and prices, it's actually much ado about nothing.
- ESO still relies heavily on lootboxes at this point, with some bad luck protection but no ability to trade, which makes them a bad deal for anyone who just wants a specific drop, whereas SWTOR players can get pretty much anything they want from them without having to rely on RNG.

Do you think there's anything important I got wrong or left out? Feel free to add it in the comments and I'll edit it in where applicable.

More Secret World Legends

I wrote about trying Secret World Legends last year in July, and thanks to my pet tank getting really enamoured with the game, we actually ended up sticking with it for quite a while, slowly duoing our way through most of the story one weekend at a time, including all the story mode dungeons. I wanted to hold off with making this post until we were fully done, but in Tokyo we lost steam before completing everything, stopping just before being sent to the Orochi Tower, and since then we've been unable to muster up the enthusiasm to continue for several months now. So I thought I might as well finish up this draft and post it anyway.

My pet tank hit the level cap of 50 in the Scorched Desert zone (he was a patron/subscriber and I wasn't, providing him with a slight XP bonus), while I reached it in City of the Sun God. The interesting thing is that we were only slightly overlevelled for the content at that point, and it's quite clear that characters hitting the level cap before they actually reach the end of the "levelling content" is intended. I guess this way the game is trying to provide a smoother transition to "endgame" than most MMOs, where standard questing tends to become obsolete the moment you hit max level. Thanks to the way gear upgrades work, you'll also keep working on those at the level cap more or less the same way you've done throughout most of your levelling.

The ease of combat I observed in the early zones didn't quite last until the high levels. By max level, fights didn't so much get harder but more tedious, as mobs start to take longer and longer to die if your gear isn't that great (such as was the case for me, and which is yet another way in which the game reminds me of Neverwinter). Only in Tokyo did we really start to feel the challenge ramp up somewhat, with bigger, oddly-shaped and faster-hitting telegraph attacks that hurt more. This means that I probably wouldn't enjoy the combat very much alone, but at the same time it adds value to playing as a duo because you notice a significant difference in terms of speed and ease of progress when you have company.

The silent protagonist continued to annoy me a bit, but I got more used to it. I also learned that I liked cut scenes with more than one NPC a lot more, as the situation immediately becomes more natural if you are silently listening to two people talking instead of standing there like a muppet while being addressed directly. I also came to realise though that for all of the interesting writing in the cut scenes, they are often incredibly disconnected from the actual missions. My favourite example of this was a quest in Savage Coast where the intro cut scene literally just consists of you watching two people play chess, yet this somehow translates into a lengthy chain of killing X monsters and impaling them on spikes. Naturally. (Yes, I know there is a tenuous connection in terms of "taking out the queen", but it's really not much.) There is also rarely any kind of wrap-up. I found this most striking in a mission in Tokyo where a chipper little girl asks you to look for her missing friends, keeps texting you throughout, yet doesn't appear to even bat an eyelash at the fact that most of said friends actually turn out to be dead.

In my first post about the game I mentioned how the infamous investigation missions were a breeze initially, as my pet tank already knew the early ones from a previous character and I basically just followed him around. Once we hit content that was new to him too however, I have to admit I quickly grew to dislike both investigation and sabotage missions. I feel a bit bad saying this, because they aren't badly done, and I'm certainly not someone to dislike puzzles in principle... but all too often I felt that they were disruptive to the overall flow of the game. One moment you're breezing through the main storyline, mowing down zombies or whatever in one action mission after another... and then you spend the next two hours on a single investigation mission, completely failing to progress any of your daily challenges. Often it isn't even the puzzles themselves (for which you can usually look up a solution) but simply that many of these missions love sending you all over the place. Maybe this didn't feel as jarring back when the game as a whole was less fast-paced... but right now it's pretty rough. I will say that it varies a lot though - there were some investigation/sabotage missions that weren't nearly as much of a drag and that I actually quite enjoyed, like the one where you time-travel back to ancient Roman times. I guess it depends on whether you're into whatever's the focus of any given mission (e.g. maths, music puzzles, deciphering different languages etc.) but it's not like they tell you that in advance.

I also mentioned in my previous post how we never tried PvP because the group queue was buggy - this still wasn't fixed last time we tried, but we eventually gave it a go just queuing solo and I have to say, Secret World Legends' PvP is the weirdest MMO PvP I've ever seen. There is currently only one map/mode, which is understandable since they had to prioritise which content to port over first, but it's a 10v10 deathmatch where you are randomly split into "sun team" and "moon team" regardless of faction and it's always over in the blink of an eye. Seriously, I've had matches that lasted less than a minute and I think the longest one I saw was about two minutes? The wait time in the spawn zone is usually longer than the match itself. The funny thing is that it's still quite popular and pops very quickly, simply because for a single minute of effort it's very rewarding. However, running in and hitting a few abilities before falling over dead just doesn't really feel like proper PvP to me.

In the first half of August, the game held its first big event, which was a bit of a mess to be honest, as it consisted of nothing but a 40-man raid boss fight that you could repeat once an hour, which wasn't even very well done. For a game that hinges so much on story, it was very surprising that there was absolutely none connected to the event, not even a text message from your faction leader to tell you to check out what's happening. I heard veteran players say that there was more to it in the original Secret World, but that Funcom clearly couldn't be bothered to rewrite that stuff accordingly and port it over, which is a shame.

The boss fight itself was also decidedly meh. Clocking in at about 20 minutes per kill initially, it mostly felt tedious more than anything else, but it was also full of terribly unintuitive mechanics. Like an NPC yelling "We must reach the next platform", which you are supposed to interpret as "jump off the edge into the abyss to get teleported above your current location". Also, some people need to do this before the actual audio cue in order to kill an add. But not too many or they won't receive a shield and die. Got it? The cherry on top was that the mechanics were buggy on the first day and didn't actually hurt. So when Funcom hotfixed this on the second day, I went in and died eight times during the fight, confused about what was going on since I wasn't doing anything differently compared to the previous day. Good times. Since we persisted, we found that it did get better over time though, whether it's because Funcom tweaked the numbers or everyone just got better at handling the mechanics. By the end most attempts were down to taking "only" 10 minutes and I even managed to not die at all during some of them (heh). To give credit where credit is due, some of the rewards were quite nice. For example I got my first custom sprint animation this way.

The Halloween event that followed featured a similar boss fight, which wasn't nearly as deadly fortunately, and there was a thematically fitting investigation mission too. Apparently former Secret World players were still disappointed however, as the previous version of the game used to contain a lot more Halloween content. I do like the way they handle the daily login rewards for these events, giving players some leeway so they won't miss out on anything good if they miss a day or two, and allowing the boss-related goodie bags to stack up so you can save them for the weekend or whenever you actually have time to work on unlocking them all.

By Christmas we were already only logging in for the seasonal event, and the associated boss fight had descended into complete tank and spank for some reason, which didn't really make sense to me as I thought that they had found a pretty good balance in terms of difficulty and mechanics with the Halloween boss. This newest fight never took very long but was incredibly boring. Still, at least I got a jumper and a woolly hat out of it.

I really wanted to give Funcom some money eventually, since I was clearly enjoying myself enough to make it worth it, but like with Neverwinter at the start, I struggled to find anything that I wanted to buy. Like Neverwinter's VIP, SWL's patron status is definitely a nice perk to have if you are focusing on the game above any others, but for the casual player, it just doesn't offer very much. Faster quest cooldowns are irrelevant if you only play once or twice a week anyway, and the extra skill points assume that you actually have an interest in filling out all the different weapons - if you are happy with the ones you picked at the start, the points you gain as a free player while levelling up get pretty close to maxing those out anyway and nothing else is really needed.

Also - and I never thought I'd say this about any MMO - Funcom really need to get their act together and create a proper store interface. Microtransactions are part of the game and here to stay - not having an actual store where you can see everything that's for sale doesn't change that, it just makes it super awkward for people to just casually browse. Basically, you only run into prompts to pay when you click on certain interface options (such as to expand your inventory), which makes it hard to compare which of these purchases might be more worthwhile than others. Pets and mounts are only available as a long list with tiny icons and basically have to be purchased sight unseen - no, thanks! In the end I just splurged on some inventory upgrades and faster sprinting, which is the kind of purchase with which you can't go wrong.

While we strictly speaking didn't fully finish the existing story, we did complete the vast majority of it, and by the end we were starting to get a feeling of being ready to move on. I'm hoping that an actual new story drop might remotivate us to log back in. (This just in - the story will be going to South Africa in April, ooh!) It reminds me a lot of the way I often see people talk about SWTOR: "Great to play through the story solo/as a duo, but I have no interest in the endgame." All the PvE group content I tried seemed good fun, but like in Neverwinter, I just find the grindiness of the gear progression too off-putting to want to bother with it. Also - unlike with Neverwinter - we didn't succeed in getting any of our guildies to develop any kind of enthusiasm for the game in order to allow us to run group content with a full pre-made group. While fans of the game frequently cite the horror setting as a selling point, my own experience is that it's just off-putting to a lot of people.

I also think that Secret World Legends is somewhat lacking in other endgame areas right now, such as only having one raid. And how can you have a dedicated PvP community when you only have one map and it goes like I described above? It's telling that this still hasn't been changed after nearly six months of this post sitting in my drafts folder, even though other modes existed in the original Secret World. Still, the bottom line for me is that we got many long play sessions out of the story, and if they actually go ahead with releasing more of it now, we'll be back to check that out eventually. Can't complain about that.

Trying Secret World Legends

I mentioned previously that I was trying out another new MMO this month... and this MMO has been Secret World Legends. Yes! For once I, too, am on the bandwagon of bloggers all trying out the new shiny on the block (sort of).

Unlike LOTRO, the original Secret World was an MMO that I never had any desire to play, for one simple reason: the setting. I don't have much interest in horror and mystery at the best of times, but completely immersing myself in a world filled with these things? No, thanks.

I still enjoyed reading about the game sometimes though, mostly because it's a great example of how a loyal and vocal community can greatly influence public perception of a game. From what little numbers we have (such as steam charts), the original Secret World seemed to have a player base of a size roughly in the same ballpark as Wildstar. Yet while the latter is constantly lamented as dying and seemingly no news article can avoid mentioning threats of closure, Secret World was consistently praised as a successful niche game and for supposedly having a payment model that "does it right". I remember I once mentioned in a comment that I didn't think Secret World's payment model was working out well for Funcom and was immediately told off for daring to suggest such a thing. I have to admit I felt quite vindicated when a Funcom dev said pretty much just that in an interview leading up to Secret World Legends' launch: that part of the reason for the reboot was that they needed to find a different way to monetise the game.

But I digress... as I was saying, I was never planning to play it myself, but a couple of months ago my pet tank suddenly got it into his head that he wanted us to try it together, and with the F2P relaunch coming up it was really hard for me to say no. So it happened, and here we are.

For someone who went into the game fully expecting not to like it very much, I found myself strangely attached to my green-haired, bespectacled Templar surprisingly quickly. (Once I had made it through the slightly strange character creation screen, which had everything in hexes... which is probably in line with the magical bee theme from the intro but made it kind of hard to see all the options.)

Reactions to the new tutorial from veterans seem to be mixed, but to me it seemed serviceable. In fact, I could have done with some more information still. Even if you pride yourself in your game being challenging, figuring out how the UI works should not be the main event! I think the main reason I didn't have more trouble than I did was that a lot of keys were mapped similar to how things work in Neverwinter. But as an example of what was lacking: As a "Ravager", I was given a healing skill to start with but there wasn't even a mention of the fact that there is a separate friendly target and that you switch it by using the mouse wheel. That I learned only through reading other people's comments about the game on blogs. (Pretty cool feature though.)

The quality of the cut scenes was also good in my opinion, except for some of the NPCs having awkward, nutcracker-like mouth movements which stood in stark contrast to everything else - but then I also read somewhere that this is a bug and not how they usually look. I immediately disliked my character's silence though, something that I knew to expect from videos and which I'd already found off-putting the first time I saw it. I don't need my quest delivery to be super-fancy, but if you do put work into such detailed cut scenes and voice acting, it has to go both ways. As it is, all the NPCs monologuing on and on while my character just stands there looking like a lump falls into a sort of uncanny valley for me... close enough to believable human interaction to draw attention but then missing the mark, with the final result veering mostly into awkward and unintentionally comical. Maybe it works for people who imagine their character as someone super shy who always clams up in the presence of anything that isn't a zombie.

Don't mind me, I'll just stand here and stare at you blankly... it's my thing.

Since I never played the original version of the game, I can't comment on just how the new streamlining and combat changes compare to the original, but to me they seemed... okay. I never felt lost for things to do, though the sheer rigidity of the level requirements for some quests seems a bit patronising. While questing in a group, I also found the quest tracker a bit annoying as it allows you to pick up several missions at once but will only ever display one, and the game can be very fiddly with individual mission steps - sometimes they update for everyone in the group, sometimes they don't. It's become a running gag how often I had to backtrack because I had missed a "click on this" step somewhere and suddenly couldn't progress.

The combat seems okay so far, though it's a bit hard to judge when things fall over as quickly as they do in the first zone. In fact, while questing with my pet tank we repeatedly ran into the problem that he started attacking a rare mob from range and it would die before I could run into melee, resulting in no loot baggie for me.

My starter class combines fist weapons and blood magic - god knows how I heal people with spiked fists, but considering that I spend my days dishing out healy goodness in SWTOR with a giant assault cannon, who am I to judge? Things may have been simplified compared to what they were like, but I still had to rearrange my bars multiple times already to find a combo of skills that worked for me. In fact, I think I'm still not quite there yet, despite actually willfully ignoring a lot of the built-in complexity for now and trying to keep things simple.

As an example, fist weapons have this mechanic called fury, which you can spend on going into a frenzy, which in turn gives you more powerful skills to use. In theory. In practice, every time I tried this the frenzy state was so short (3-5 seconds it seemed), that I had trouble figuring out what was even going on. Later I deduced that apparently all those exciting, more powerful skills are pretty much the same as my regular ones, only with slightly bigger numbers. I decided to just forget about the whole thing for now as too much of a hassle. If it matters later on, I will revisit it.

Being in a group at all times hasn't really helped in that regard, because as mentioned above things die way too quickly. It has also affected my experience of other parts of the game. Like those much-acclaimed investigation missions that people like to talk about? Well, my pet tank has already done them all on his second, higher-level character, so each one so far has basically consisted of me plodding after him while he mumbled something about "music puzzle here, need to enter the correct notes" while I'd just smile and nod until he was done. (Credit for those things was thankfully shared, so I basically got all those missions done without actually investigating anything myself so far.)

One thing that was a really positive surprise to me was the first dungeon. This already opens up at level 10 and I thought it was super fun. Not very difficult perhaps, but once again I found this hard to judge since my pet tank was constantly instructing me to avoid this or run over there. There did seem to be some mechanics that would most likely have killed a group of completely ignorant new players. Either way I found it extremely fun and atmospheric, and immediately wanted to run it again once we were done. I was surprised in so far as I remember seeing very little talk of TSW's dungeons on blogs and such... I guess that like with SWTOR, everyone is so focused on the unique features of the solo content that the lovingly crafted group content gets treated as a side feature? In my opinion it shouldn't be (in either game). We also wanted to try some PvP but there currently seems to be some sort of bug when you try to queue as a group that will only queue one of you.

Fighting winged Cthulhu as early as level 10? Sure, why not!

Overall, my impression of the game so far has been a lot more positive than I expected. They've clearly made an effort to make it more appealing to people who had no interest in or disliked the previous version, and it shows - even if previously loyal veteran players are understandably annoyed by the result. Whether it will work to give the game a second lease at life... who knows. Even though there's been noticeably less buzz about it on my blogroll than there usually is for a completely new MMO, the "new game smell" is still strong: The official subreddit is full of fun threads such as customer service admitting they are too busy to deal with anything but payment issues or people being totally unable to play the game, or a player complaining that they spent over 400 dollars on lockboxes without getting the items they wanted (whales ahoy). Sustainability is something else though.

The new monetisation model reminds me a lot of Neverwinter's, which is widely criticised but clearly works to support a steady stream of content updates. Specifically the triple currency system is very reminiscent of Neverwinter's (I keep referring to the middle currency as astral diamonds whenever I forget its proper name), and they even had their own version of the Caturday exploit just before launch! Likewise the weapon upgrade system has a lot of similarities to Neverwinter's artifact refinement so far. The question is whether SWL will also copy the overall trajectory of that game's monetisation: which is to be extremely generous at low levels and to casual players, while squeezing those who are highly invested in gear upgrades for all they are worth.

Visiting Middle-earth

It's been a while since I've written an "off-topic" post on here to talk about my impressions of a different MMO. In the past there's been Star Trek Online, Neverwinter (twice, until it graduated to its own blog), and the Elder Scrolls Online beta. I guess it was about time I expanded my horizons once more, this time in the form of writing about trying out Lord of the Rings Online.

It's a game that several of my blogger friends play and/or think highly of, so I've certainly thought about trying it before, but in the end I've never felt motivated enough to dedicate any of my limited free time to actually doing so. What changed recently was that my pet tank and I were talking about what other games we could possibly play together - which is actually always a tricky subject as we have somewhat different tastes - and it somehow turned out that we both had an interest in LOTRO. Unsurprisingly, we were both off to install it shortly afterwards.

For me, that was already the first challenge, as the download kept failing at certain points. Fortunately I quickly found a forum thread detailing a workaround - the issue was caused by my particular combination of operating system and antivirus software apparently.

On start-up, the game didn't give the best first impression to be honest. It showed its age by launching in a tiny resolution with terrible graphic settings which I wasn't allowed to change until after character creation, and similarly the theme tune (which is lovely, don't get me wrong) was blasting into my ears at a ridiculous volume by default.

I let my pet tank pick what race we were going to be, so we ended up as elves. Much has been said about the supposed ugliness of LOTRO's character models, but I honestly didn't find them that bad. They could just do with better facial expressions. My own elf for example looks perpetually bored out of her skull for some reason. I guess this is lore-appropriate ("So tired of Middle-earth... must leave it...") but not very appealing.

Speaking of lore, I should probably say up front that I'm not a Tolkien superfan. I did have a love affair with Lord of the Rings back in high school, when I chose it as the subject of my final English paper, and I also liked the films well enough when they came out (in fact, I had a giant poster for each one in my bedroom at the time). But I gave up on the Silmarillion about a third of the way in because I felt that it read like a particularly boring history textbook, and when I tried to watch the first Hobbit film in the cinema I actually literally fell asleep at one point. So I apologise in advance for maybe not understanding things or getting any lore wrong.

Anyway, the game starts you off in a short solo instance that teaches you the most basic of MMO rules, such as how to talk to NPCs and fight enemies, but that was done quickly enough and I was able to join up with my pet tank. True to our favourite archetypes, he chose to roll a guardian tank and I opted for a minstrel healer, also in part because I've never actually gotten to play a bard-type class in an MMO before. It's absolutely hilarious.

"Look at me, I'm playing music at things and they fall over dead!"
"Wow, you're that bad at it?"
"Apparently so!"

Another very deadly attack simply has me shouting at monsters. The amusement value of that is just endless.

The starter zone gave off strong vibes of an old game that doesn't see much fresh blood anymore, as we were on our own for most of it, only running into one other player at the very end. We did see a couple more people once we moved on to the next area though, so maybe it's just another instancing thing.

One mechanic I found very interesting from the start is how loot works. Basically, you don't need to click on the bodies, things just go into a sort of "temporary bag" automatically, from which you can then claim them whenever it's convenient for you (as long as it's within the hour). This is simultaneously very convenient and made me feel kind of robbed, as in every other MMO I've played I usually have a reputation for "chasing after the shinies" and annoying other people by triggering loot-roll prompts in the middle of combat. In LOTRO, that's just not a thing, and it's easy to forget that you're picking up any loot at all. At one point I picked up something like ten (temporary) copies of what was supposed to be a unique quest-starting item because I didn't notice that it was there and the game just kept throwing more at me in an attempt to make me use it already.

This initially lulled me into a false sense of security in terms of bag space, making me think that it would not be a problem, but this turned out to be very wrong very quickly. LOTRO basically does the same thing Neverwinter does to sell bags, which is to fill your bags with loads of stuff that isn't quite crap, but leaves the new player uncertain of what to do. You know that none of it is very valuable, but you're not really sure if it's safe to throw it all away or if you'll just end up regretting that later. I sold a whole load of stuff that I was sure was nothing but vendor trash, just to find out later that there were repeatable quests where those same items could have been handed in for reputation. Conversely, I held on to various crafting materials for a really long time (at least those go into their own separate tab in Neverwinter!), hoping to be able to sell them to other players instead of vendoring them, but then had to learn that free players are not allowed to list things on the auction house.

What I've seen of the F2P model in general so far had me raising my eyebrows a bit. I've never seen an MMO that is quite so pushy in terms of wanting to make you visit its store before. And to think that people accuse SWTOR of nickle and diming! I suppose you could argue that this allows for an "à la carte" experience, with people only paying for the things they'll actually use, but to me it's still a bit annoying to be prompted to go to the store at absolutely every corner. I thought it was telling for example that the riding skill appeared to be something you can only purchase with LOTRO points, not with in-game currency - now, it doesn't actually cost much and the low amount of points required for this is easily earned by doing some deeds in your starter zone, so you don't actually have to pay for it with real money. But it forces you to get comfortable with using the store and pulls you out of the experience repeatedly. As an aside, anyone know why the store insists on opening in an outside web browser? I swear I've seen footage of people browsing it in-game before...

Anyway, back to the game itself. The questing is very old-school, with your character being sent from one mini-hub to the next, where there are usually a bunch of similarly-themed quests to kill X number of mobs, but I can't say that we've minded that so far. My pet tank and I have mostly been pleased that we haven't encountered any issues with doing quests as a group up until now, whether they involve picking up items, talking to an NPC or doing a short little instance. You'd think that ensuring a smooth experience for people playing together would be a given in any MMO these days, but unfortunately I've had to learn not to take that for granted, so LOTRO definitely gets points for that. Every now and then there is also a little cut scene, which I'm sure must have seemed amazing back in 2007.

One overall impression that's very strong however is that the game is very confusing. Considering I seem to remember LOTRO being cited as a pioneer of quest tracking, it doesn't do a very good job at showing you where you need to go, and the maps are only available in a very zoomed out view that makes them hard to read. The game also absolutely bombards you with information about systems and mechanics early on. By level ten we'd already been told about traits (talents), reputation, crafting, deeds, cosmetic gear, dyes and how to use the store, and my minstrel already had more than one action bar full of abilities. There was probably even more stuff that I'm forgetting right now, and it's telling that even as an MMO vet of more than ten years I've been struggling to keep up. It's certainly helped a lot that I've picked up vague references to certain systems from reading other people's blogs about the game. I can only imagine how overwhelming the experience must be for genuinely new players; the game could really do with spacing some of those things out a bit. Also, timing matters! I had to laugh at the sheer absurdity of the game popping up a big window full of text for me to read when we accidentally triggered a fellowship combo for the first time, something to which I was supposed to react within seconds without ever having seen one before. Who has time to read a tutorial at that point?

Overall, my impression of the first couple of levels has been a somewhat mixed bag. There is a lot to love about LOTRO. The zones look every bit as gorgeous as everyone always says, even in 2017. I could see the gameplay maybe being a bit boring when you're on your own, but in a group it has been very fun. The world is an explorer's dream, and the lore runs deep. But the game's age and sheer amount of systems can give you quite a hard time as a new player. F2P restrictions also keep popping up in odd places. (Hey, check out the wardrobe! No, you're not allowed to use it!) If we do decide to keep adventuring in Middle-earth, I'll probably pony up for a month's subscription - it's only fair. If that happens, I'll likely also make another post about later impressions at some point.

LOTRO-playing friends, feel free to share any tips and advice you'd give to a new player! Also, what's the situation with group content while levelling up? Are traditional levelling dungeons still a thing? I've kind of been struggling to find information on that but keep thinking that it would probably be fun for my pet tank and me to be able to test our tanking and healing skills in a real group environment soon.