When Will We Get 8.0? Will We Ever?

This was a topic that I discussed with Ivano on the podcast, but I still wanted to write a blog post about it as well, since it's something that's been on my mind for a while. With it having been more than two and a half years since the launch of Legacy of the Sith, it's also a question I'm seeing people ask more and more.

The short answer is: We don't really know. If it's happening, it's unlikely to be soon. As of me writing this in September 2024, we have no official information on the subject. No, that post on Today in TOR was an April Fools joke.

Now for the long answer.

The problem with talking about future expansions for SWTOR is that it has never had what I would call a regular expansion cycle akin to other long-running MMOs, where you can count on a new expansion pack being announced once a year or every other year.

If we look back at the game's early years, we did get expansions at something close to a yearly pace for a while: Rise of the Hutt Cartel came out in early 2013, Shadow of Revan at the end of 2014, Knights of the Fallen Empire in late 2015, and Knights of the Eternal Throne at the end of 2016. That may actually seem kind of regular at a glance, but it wasn't really. RotHC was originally meant to be free content for subscribers but was later repackaged as an expansion. Then we got Galactic Starfighter towards the end of 2013 and Galactic Strongholds in mid-2014, and while people tend to not think of those additions as expansions nowadays, they were marketed as such at the time, meaning that for a while we were getting a major content drop almost every six months. Shadow of Revan actually felt kind of cut short, seeing how it was only current content for less than a year.

Then Knights of the Fallen Empire came around, promising to completely change the game from the ground up, and it did indeed introduce many changes that impact our gameplay to this day, such as level scaling and companions being way more powerful than they were in the game's first three years. The flow from Fallen Empire chapters into Eternal Throne on the other hand was so gradual it made the two feel almost like a single expansion... and then it just stopped.

I think it was around this time that I remember a dev saying that they weren't even sure they were going to do expansions anymore because they might just keep adding regular content patches without all that hullabaloo instead. They did eventually change their minds about that, but Onslaught didn't come out until the end of 2019 almost three years later.

When Legacy of the Sith was announced for late 2021, it felt like the team was really getting back into the groove, but then 7.0 turned into a big flop. (To be clear, I think they've released a lot of good content since then, but 7.0 at launch was just underwhelming in a lot of ways.)

And that's really the crux of the matter as I see it. People (both players and developers) like MMO expansions because they generate hype, promise exciting new things and give lapsed players a reason to check back in. From a developer's point of view, they can also be used to charge extra for a big bundle of content all at once.

However, SWTOR hasn't benefitted from that last one since 2014, seeing how they've never wavered from their "all content unlocks with the subscription" model that was introduced with KotFE in 2015. And well... Legacy of the Sith was great for hype before it launched, but then not so much. Those Twitch numbers I looked at the other day showed engagement with the game dropping to a two-year-low shortly after the expansion's launch, kind of the opposite of what you want out of a big release like that!

A really terrible expansion can harm your game just as much as a good one can lift it up; it's not an automatic win. I never played Rift myself for example, but from everything I've heard, interest in that game absolutely tanked with the first expansion because the new content went into completely the wrong direction for the player base it had built. And of course there's always Star Wars Galaxies' infamous New Game Experience. Legacy of the Sith was fortunately not on that level and interest in SWTOR seemingly recovered around the time 7.1 came out, but I still think it was a close call and reminded everyone that a bad expansion can actually be worse than no expansion at all.

The point of all this waffling is that SWTOR has never had a regular expansion cycle due to the many changes in direction it's had over time, and with the current business model it doesn't actually benefit from an expansion nearly as much as many other MMOs. While the team at Broadsword seems happy with their new home and has been doing a solid job continuing to pump out content, they are still small and I'm honestly not sure whether it would be the best use of their resources to reduce work on the regular patches in favour of building up to a bigger release again.

It's not that I wouldn't love to see another good expansion, but after the dud that was LotS' launch, I really don't want to see them mess up like that again either. I had a decent enough time in 7.0, but seeing how unhappy it made many players and listening to the game get panned left and right was no fun at all. If they are going to give us another expansion, I feel it needs to at least match Onslaught in terms of scope, which launched with a new playable species, two planets, distinct storylines for Republic and Empire, a new flashpoint and a new operation. If they can't honestly commit to that, I'd rather they stuck to focusing on giving us the best possible new content from one patch to the next, even if that doesn't get them as much press as an expansion launch would. Just raising the level cap by five again and revamping the way gearing works for the umpteenth time in order to call it an expansion would do the game more harm than good in my eyes.

Playing Story Catch-up

With Galactic Season 4 in the rear-view mirror for now, I've been able to set myself some more free-form goals again. As I've noted previously, it's not unusual for me to feel the urge to focus on some actual character/story progression at this point in the "season cycle".

This time around, I got quite philosophical while thinking about the subject though.

I remember during the game's first few years, it was relatively easy to get caught up because obviously, there wasn't as much story content back then as there is now, but also, in the days before level sync you kind of had to do the new content on every character you actually wanted to level up.

Then level-sync came around, and while I did love the way SWTOR implemented it in general, it did kind of mess with the flow of levelling. (Fun fact: I still maintain that spreadsheet to keep track of which character has done what and it's a godsend.) Plus KotFE was not very fun to replay so there was even less incentive to actually get characters up to that point in the story and beyond.

Then we got the Dark vs. Light event which encouraged you to level lots of alts without any need to do the story, meaning I ended up with all these (close to) max-level characters that hadn't really done anything other than run some flashpoints and participate in PvP and GSF. I really did not do well with progressing any of these alts in terms of story either.

My interest in making some progress on that front was revived for a bit when Bioware first made the change that made it possible to earn Conquest points by just doing story content, but that didn't last for long, and then Galactic Seasons were introduced and since then it's been mayhem as I constantly feel compelled to jump through the hoops provided by the seasons objectives instead of focusing on other things.

I had a closer look at my story progression spreadsheet and honestly, for as much as I claim to love SWTOR's story content, my progress over the past few years has been pretty pathetic. KotFE and KotET came out in 2015/16, yet it took me until 2020 to get one of every class/origin story through that bit of content. Since then I've tried to keep those eight roughly up to date with the current story, but I've not even been very consistent with that. I mean, I don't expect to get all of them through every new patch within a week - that would be pretty repetitive and boring - but I realised that a couple of them had barely even started on the 7.0 story yet.

And the alts stuck before the Knights expansions have it even worse! Many of them are barely any younger/newer than those "main eight", and yet an astounding number of them never even did the Shadow of Revan expansion. Content that came out almost a decade ago!

So my personal goal for the time being is to get all the characters that are meant to be caught up with current content actually up to the current content (aka patch 7.3), and to make a bit of a push to get a second of each origin story through KotFE and KotET. Now, that one's still going to be difficult and somewhat repetitive, so I'm not setting myself a deadline here, but I want to at least make a bit of an effort. I mean, how did I get three smugglers through KotFE but only one knight, consular and inquisitor? Those expansions aren't even that bad on those classes.

I tried to date my previous playthroughs by referring to old screenshots, and it was interesting to see that while I got seven characters through KotFE and KotET within three years of those expansions first coming out, I didn't play through either expansion even once in 2019 and 2021. I can do better than that!

(And yes, I get that if you're a more casual SWTOR player who rarely even does any of the story content on more than one character, all this might sound a bit insane, but for me this is my main game and I love my stable of alts. I can definitely do more with them than I have been doing.)

No KotFE Nostalgia for Me

I realised that with SWTOR having turned ten in December, this also means that it's already been six and a half years since the release of Knights of the Fallen Empire. Sure hasn't felt that long to me! Like it or not, the two "Knights of..." expansions made huge changes to the way SWTOR works, many of which can still be felt today, long after the narrative has pivoted away from Zakuul, and to me a lot of these still feel relatively "new" somehow. Looking back at my blog archives, I found this post from 2016, when Bioware was promoting Knights of the Eternal Throne, in which I was talking about how I thought that KotFE had been a pretty good expansion really.

Is it time to get nostalgic for good old KotFE yet? A thread I saw on reddit the other week certainly seemed to think so. Reading it did make me wonder just how many years it had actually been since I last started a character on the KotFE expansion content. I explained in this post from 2019 how KotFE and KotET are kind of mental roadblocks for me that I simultaneously don't want to deal with but also don't really want to skip, so I've got exactly one character of each class caught up with current content and everyone else lingers at some point pre-KotFE because I just can't get myself to make the jump that would require me to abandon my companions and commit to hours and hours of story content I'm not crazy about before I can get back to a happy place.

These ponderings combined with a desire to finally, for the love of god, get a Republic saboteur character into current content, actually got me to pull the trigger on launching my slightly dark side smuggler into KotFE chapter one.

I'm only a few chapters in at the time of writing this, but I can already tell that no, I definitely haven't secretly been longing to get back to this. The first few chapters are a wild ride and quite fun in their own way, I won't deny it... but knowing what's to come, the story's flaws are glaringly obvious now. Back in the day I was willing to give Bioware the benefit of the doubt while always hoping for a better outcome later. Sure, the transition from the Emperor as we met him on Ziost to Valkorion in KotFE chapter one made absolutely zero sense, but hopefully there'll be an explanation for that later, right? Unlike back in 2015, I now know that the answer to that turned out to be "not really". (We did get some closure with Echoes of Oblivion eventually, but that was several years later.)

The early KotFE chapters also set up a lot of characters as really intriguing, just to completely drop the ball on them later. Koth's introduction is super fun, but then contrasted with his care about Zakuulan civilians and his worship of Valkorion to create conflict. At the time, that could have gone in all kinds of directions, but now I know that he mostly ends up whinging a lot until the game gives you an opportunity to kill him off if you really didn't get along with him.

Likewise, Arcann and Vaylin are introduced as powerful and brash, but also with hints that their relationship with each other and with the rest of their family could be more complex than it initially appears. But nah, Arcann is just an angry man-child (until a Voss ritual magically reforms him, or not), and Vaylin is simply an angry psychopath to the end, with any attempts to evoke empathy for her ultimately not going anywhere.

However, the biggest problem is that the very first chapter, with the iconic scene of Valkorion asking you to kneel, is nothing but a sham. You're technically given the choice to reject him (I mean, you did just spend the previous expansion opposing him), but ultimately the game doesn't actually give a damn about that and railroads you into doing what he wants you to do anyway. There are a few conversation choices where you can say that you don't actually want to sit on the Eternal Throne, but they become fewer as the story progresses, because the writers need you to want the throne, so after a while that's all you're allowed to say, never mind how your character would have felt from a logical point of view.

Similarly, the story just decides that you hate Arcann and want to personally bring him down, and again, the odds are that this might make no real sense to you. In chapter one, he either helps you kill Valkorion, or he kills Valkorion himself and then just uses you as a convenient pawn to shift the blame. And yeah, he freezes you in carbonite for five years after you pass out, and that's something your character would surely be angry about, but not like "I hate you with all my soul and want to take over your Empire now" angry (unless you're a Sith I guess). Ironically the sorts of things that could have been used to justify you being really mad at him, such as the lost time, missing companions and the damage he's done to Republic and Empire, are downplayed at every point because who cares about all that old stuff, we're in "Keeping up with the Valkorions" now.

Basically, I think that in hindsight KotFE and KotET are actually quite a bit worse than I perceived them to be at the time, at least in terms of how the plot treats the player character, and in terms of hours of build-up that just end up being wasted.

"OK," you might say, "so the story was bad, but don't you think the chapter format was kinda good? New story content every month! Imagine how good SWTOR would be if we got those kinds of story updates but for Republic vs. Empire..." (someone did actually leave pretty much this as a comment on my blog once). But to that I still gotta say: "no, thanks". Sure, chapters with a more coherent story would be better than what we got, but I still don't miss the chapter format in general, for a number of reasons:

• Bioware was only able to release story content like that on a (roughly) monthly basis by pretty much stopping development on everything else about the game. I like the story, but I also want planets, flashpoints, operations etc.
• KotFE/KotET chapter length was largely created by cut scenes that don't involve or even show your character and are therefore the exact same on every playthrough, plus by making you fight hordes and hordes of boring/unavoidable enemies, which I consider unnecessary padding that I can do without. I know we're all still mad about 7.0 delivering too little story, but you know what? I've played through that story on six characters already and can honestly say that I enjoyed it every time.
• As mentioned in the previously linked post about story skipping and the issues with replaying KotFE/ET, pausing in the middle of a chapter is awkward, meaning they are not well suited as content that you can easily pick up and put down.
  
• The nature of chapters has meant that a majority of their content has to take place inside phases, with whole locations like Asylum and Vandin only existing within that story and not being available to re-visit outside the chapter, making the galaxy a smaller place. Even when Bioware tried to add a proper outdoor location for KotFE chapter fourteen in the form of Darvannis, it kinda fell flat because there wasn't really anything there other than the chapter phases (though for a while it was good for harvesting crafting materials I guess).

So yeah, I can only speak for myself but I absolutely do not miss KotFE's story, neither the content nor the format. I'm only slowly developing a desire to get more characters through it because Bioware keeps adding more content after it that I actually enjoy replaying and that I want to see from the perspective of different classes.

PSA: Struggling with Chapters?

I've got some videos on my YouTube channel of me killing a number of KotFE and KotET chapter bosses on veteran and master mode. You can find additional info about that and links to everything in this post - one of the few pieces of blog content I've put out over the years that vaguely resembles something like a guide.

I've noticed that over the last month there's been an increase in people watching and commenting on these - now, some of that might simply be more people playing the game again after the launch of the expansion, but it's not just that. A lot of players seem to be struggling even with story mode at the moment - as was highlighted by fellow blogger Roger from the Contains Moderate Peril blog:

Stuck fighting Vaylin in Visions in the Dark – KotFE Chapter 12. Firstly, why haven't I got the option of a companion? None are available according to GUI. Plus being a ranged DPS class is a real liability in this boss fight. Any suggestions? #SWTOR

— Roger Edwards (@ModeratePeril) March 14, 2022

He eventually got the fight down, but was not at all happy with the experience. I did try to assist a little on Twitter, but it's not a great format for giving detailed advice on anything. Above all I felt like I must be missing some crucial bit of information, considering that he was playing on story mode, which is often so easy that it borders on boring... heck, my last post on here was about a story fight that is so easy that it can literally complete itself without any player input.

Then again, we've also just had a new expansion and that can sometimes cause strange things to happen with tuning. A boss fight having the wrong damage and health values for its designated difficulty is certainly something we've seen happen before, but without more information it was hard to judge what exactly was going wrong.

The post I linked at the start already contains a bunch of generic advice for beating the harder fights in KotFE and KotET chapters, but I suppose the overall tone of that is aimed at players who are already at a more advanced level since they're intentionally looking to challenge themselves with the higher difficulty levels. I thought I'd use this post to present a few bullet points for more casual story players that might find themselves stuck on a fight.

• First off, make sure that you've got all your active abilities on your bar by checking the abilities tab (by default bound to P). The class changes that came with Legacy of the Sith may have caused some things to disappear from your bar. You can also change your ability tree on the combat styles tab of your character sheet to see whether there are any abilities there that you can swap around to be more useful in the particular situation that you're stuck in. If you've just been playing through the story and not much else, there may well be a number of buttons that you've never bothered to use before because you simply didn't have to. However, if you're struggling to stay alive, make sure you find all your damage reduction or self heal abilities and then remember to actually use them during the fight - all classes have at least a couple of these. This is particularly pertinent for fights like the one against Vaylin in KotFE chapter twelve, which was the one Roger struggled with.
• The fight against the Purifier Droids in KotET chapter four seems to be giving people the most trouble at the moment. First off, try using the somewhat counter-intuitive strategy demonstrated in this video here. It's counter-intuitive because according to the story you're supposed to be defending the room you're in, but in practice it's much easier to run out and fight somewhere else. If you're still struggling though, it's worth noting that Bioware has acknowledged this chapter as currently bugged (too many droids, potentially also an issue with the additional NPCs not engaging properly). There's a patch meant to be deployed next Tuesday which is supposed to fix a load of bugs, but I don't currently know whether this issue will be one of the ones addressed.
• It's worth knowing that while chapters can only be progressed solo, other people can join you to help out with a fight. To do this, invite them to a group, right-click on your portrait and there'll be an option somewhere to invite them to your instance, which should give them a teleportation prompt. This might not work in all situations (I found this out the hard way when I wanted to help a guildie kill the rancor in KotET chapter six but it kept putting me in there in Zakuulan knight disguise and therefore unable to fight), but it's a workaround for some.
• Finally, if you're just replaying the story and actually already know what happens because you previously did it on another character, keep in mind that if your level is high enough, the console on your ship should let you skip ahead to the start of KotET (if you're stuck in KotFE) or Iokath (if you're stuck in KotET). Potentially you can skip even further ahead to Ossus, but I'm assuming that you do actually want to play through as much story as possible. You might not like this option since it will resolve important story choices for you automatically based on a template, but I'm just mentioning it as another possibility if you're stuck and really want to move on.
  

Companion Returns: Vector, Iresso, Akaavi & Mako

More than two years ago I wrote about the first four Alliance alert missions that Bioware released to return more of the then still-missing class companions post-KotET. I found their shortness a bit disappointing, but was nonetheless excited for the first bits of class-specific content in years and looked forward to seeing the other four that were scheduled to come out soon after.

Would you believe that it actually took me until recently to see the last of those, as I only completed KotET on my bounty hunter the other week? At this point, talking about these companion returns isn't news anymore and I doubt anyone else really cares what I thought about them, but I've had this post sitting in my draft folder for almost two years so I'm going to finish and publish it, damn it!

Vector

This was probably the one I was looking forward to the most, considering that Vector is my favourite romance from the original class stories. He's also someone who actually manages to deliver the pathos of how heartbroken he was without his partner convincingly (in my opinion), unlike some other companions.

The only thing that made me raise an eyebrow a little was his story of how the Empire apparently "conscripted" the killiks to use as cannon fodder? That sounded odd to me, considering that I always got the impression that they were a pretty powerful faction, so I'm not sure how an already extremely weakened Empire would have been able to get them under its thumb just like that, but whatever I guess.

Lieutenant Iresso

Basically, Felix had a horrible time, the Republic abandoned him in his time of greatest need, and he'd like to just stick with you again if that's alright, kplzthx? I felt pretty neutral about this one, probably because I've always felt kinda lukewarm about Felix Iresso as a companion. I don't dislike him, but he's not one of my favourites either... I just didn't find him all that memorable.

The only thing that I was curious about was whether I'd be able to romance him if I hadn't romanced him before - my Sage actually kissed him once back in the day since I'd somehow manoeuvred myself into a companion conversation where my only options were 1) kiss him, 2) kiss him, or 3) say something mean, so I went for the kiss just to have her back out immediately afterwards because "oh noes, the Jedi code". This was apparently not sufficiently relevant to bring up again though, and having turned him down back then, there was no option to flirt with him this time around.

Akaavi & Mako

Now this is the one that held this post back, because while I did the smuggler version quite some time ago, I also wanted to see the quest from a bounty hunter's point of view and well... refer to what I said in the intro paragraph. It was also the most disappointing mission out of this lot of companion returns.

There wasn't actually that much difference between how the two classes experience it either: You get an alert that one of your missing companions has been spotted doing some bounty hunting on Tatooine, so you go there and find them in the company of the other companion. They quickly go from "hey, it's you" to "I met this other gal and she helped me out" to "let's hang out again just like old times" and it all goes by so fast it feels a bit like you could blink and miss it. I hope/assume it's a bit more interesting if you were in a romance...

I didn't mind the brevity so much on my smuggler since she honestly wasn't that close to Akaavi to begin with, but my bounty hunter had always been close to Mako, treating her like a little sister and encouraging her to hook up with Torian, and there was no reference to any of that. You also aren't really told anything about the other class companion other than that they are a friend and will want to come along. It was just a remarkably unmemorable affair.

I'm glad that from Ossus onwards Bioware went back to incorporating the returning companions into the main storyline again, even if it was in minor ways sometimes, as I feel that those returns have all been a lot more satisfying than these super short and rather disconnected Alliance alerts.

Looking Back on Three Years of KotET

Seeing how we only have six days left until the release of Onslaught, it's about time I wrote the post looking back on the current expansion that I've been meaning to write for a while. It's not exactly a tradition, but nothing about Knights of the Eternal Throne has been traditional!

In fact, it probably featured the biggest period of upheaval for the game since its launch year and the free-to-play transition, at least from a player perspective. Business-wise, I'm sure the first year was a much bigger deal, what with the many unmet expectations and resulting lay-offs. But from a player point of view, it wasn't actually such a bad time, considering the sheer amount of content that was being released.

Knights of the Eternal Throne on the other hand was a bit of a mess from the beginning. The story was solid, but it was originally meant to go on for much longer and was quickly cut short (for whatever reasons).

After the heavy single-player focus of KotFE, there seemed to be some renewed interest in releasing group content, but initially only in the form of uprisings, which were a bit awkward. I really wanted to like them, but ultimately I was not at all inspired to repeat them unless I was going for an achievement or something. I couldn't quite put my finger on why they just didn't grab me for the longest time, until a commenter described them as flashpoints with the interesting bosses taken out and more of the sort of trash pulls put in that everyone always wants to skip.

And of course there was Galactic Command. Not going to re-hash that story yet again! Let's just say that it was quite a disaster at launch; it was probably the period of time in which I was the most unsatisfied with SWTOR gameplay-wise that I've ever been, and it made several good people I knew leave the game for good. Boo!

The first couple of months after launch mostly seemed to be dedicated to damage control. We will be getting back to Republic vs. Empire, honest! And you'll get a new operation too, even if it's only one boss at a time!

The release of Iokath in April 2017 was true to this change in direction, but felt somewhat clumsily done. Yes, we were getting back to Republic vs. Empire, but the plot felt like it had been written with a single destination in mind and little concern for whether it made sense how we got there. Iokath also featured our first new daily area in years, yet it was awkward to navigate and initially released with several dailies actually costing you money instead of awarding it (yes, really).

In May, Keith Kanneg becoming the game's new Producer gave many of us new hope for improvements. And ultimately, I think he has been good for the game, but it's been a very slow process. I'm a bit hesitant to speculate ever since I read John Staats' WoW Diary - in which he proclaims that player speculation about what's going on inside video game development is pretty much always wrong, no matter how well thought-out - but what it felt like from the outside above all else was like Keith had to completely clean house and revamp a lot of things, which took up a lot of dev time that could otherwise have been used to create new content.

After he took charge, we basically got a slow trickle of new content alternating with systems updates: the second Gods from the Machine encounter was released a full three months after the first, then a month later we got a new flashpoint with some story, then another three months passed until a big round of server merges, and so on.

It took almost a full year for all five bosses in Gods from the Machine to be put live, and the traitor story arc, consisting of three bits of story tied to an equal number of new flashpoints, took a full nine months from start to finish. It wasn't bad content, it was just coming out so, so... slowly.

The traitor story arc did also mark an interesting turning point from my point of view though. While the first chapter, Crisis on Umbara, continued in a similarly awkward vein to Iokath, part two was a marked improvement, and part three was all-around enjoyable again. It was also an interesting time to be playing and engaging with the community, as there was a lot of discussion about what to make of the traitor's actions, which was the kind of thing you only get to experience right at the release of such new story content.

After that we had to deal with another relative drought of content for several months, until Bioware revealed that a new, bigger piece of content was coming in December, which would eventually be followed by a whole expansion. It's kind of weird to think that this was a year ago now and said expansion is only launching now.

Three years is a long time for any MMO to go without an expansion, but it has been even more so in SWTOR's case, which was pumping them out mere months apart before that (even if they were smaller in scope than what many other MMOs call expansions). It kind of felt like Bioware just completely lost the plot for a little while after KotET's launch, with everything a bit of a mess and no clear plan in terms of how to proceed.

I don't have a citation at hand, but I even remember Keith saying at one point that he wasn't that keen on expansions and preferred smaller content updates himself, which may have contributed to no moves being made towards working on another big content drop for a long time. I'm glad that the cries for a new expansion eventually won out though, even if it took a while. I'm looking forward to playing it in a few days!

As for what comes after... who knows? I remain eternally optimistic that things are maybe back on track now and the next big update won't take three years, but I honestly don't know. It's a persistent rumour that the team working on SWTOR is much smaller than those working on comparable MMOs, which would obviously limit their resources if true. But I take heart from how passionate they seem to be and that - raw quantity of output aside - I've felt that they've been taking steps in the right direction for the past two years, both in terms of story and in terms of how they interact with the community. For me, Jedi Under Siege has easily been the most enjoyable addition to the game in years. Ultimately, those are things that matter more to me than the sheer frequency of new patches.

Dread Master Brontes Wins Again

Progression raiding in SWTOR is a weird thing these days, and not just because a lot of outsiders are likely to go "SWTOR has raids?!" when you bring up the subject.

In a game like WoW, new raid tiers come out all the time, and every time a new one is added, the old one becomes obsolete, which fuels a frantic race to get through the new content before it reaches the end of its shelf life.

In SWTOR, there's only a very small minority interested in seeing who'll be the first to get the kill of a new operations boss on a higher difficulty - plus as it stands, we've only had a single new operation in the last five years anyway, so it's not exactly as if there's been a lot to get excited about.

For most players, what matters is that ever since 4.0 Bioware has continually scaled all operations content upwards so that Eternity Vault from back in 2011 is still as relevant as endgame in 2019 as the more recently released Gods from the Machine.

This means that if you're not good enough to actually clear all the operations on all difficulties, you can basically keep progressing on them forever... which is exactly what my guild has been doing. The 5.x cycle has been particularly good for us because the boss's values remained stable for so long and we got access to some pretty overpowered gear pretty quickly. I got to tell quite a few tales of successful boss killing on this blog in the past year.

We still haven't killed everything though, and that's not even counting the most recent release, master mode Gods from the Machine. It's slightly awkward to think about, because if we're being honest with ourselves, it basically means that we're not very good. Some of these fights have been out for more than five years and we still haven't killed them? Come on!

A more charitable interpretation would be that we are very persistent and have taken our time getting better at the game. Most of us struggled with simple hard modes when they first came out, to the point that nightmare difficulty felt like something we'd be unlikely to ever reach in the future - yet here we are.

One boss I was really hoping to get down before 6.0 resets everything again was Dread Master Brontes on master mode, mostly because I have personal beef with her at this point. I vividly recall wiping to her in the run-up to 4.0, back when we were actually five levels higher than the boss and still found the fight too hard. I don't remember all the details, but I do recall thinking that I was sure that we were going to get her down before 4.0 hit because to me it felt like we were close. That didn't happen though.

August 2015

That was over four years ago now, and I really wanted to get her down this time. While we have to fight her at level now, we all got a lot better at the game in the meantime. And yet... this past Sunday was our last night attempting her as people voted to have a few weeks break before the expansion, something I can't exactly blame them for. I'm also not sure we would have been able to get her down even if we had tried for another three weeks, because unlike my fuzzy memories from 2015, it hasn't really felt to me like we've come even close to killing her this time around.

We are pretty good at making it to the last phase by now, but as soon as we're there it feels like everything falls apart in seconds, and the problem is that unlike with Revan for example, it's kind of hard to tell what exactly happened. There isn't a single mechanic that will kill you instantly, but there are a lot of things that can do a lot of damage, so it can be hard to tell what exactly killed any individual at a certain point, whether it was just too much unavoidable damage adding up and not enough healing, or whether someone or even multiple someones made a mistake that caused just too much extra damage at the wrong moment.

September 2019

There was a time when this sort of thing would have upset me a lot more than it does now (and I have the awkwardly ranty blog posts to prove it), but fortunately I have too many other things going on these days to get too hung up on a single boss kill. Plus we'll always get to try again after the expansion's release I guess.

From the way things look right now, there's even a chance that my prediction that things would become harder again in 6.0 might actually turn out to be wrong! I based this on the way things played out during the transition from 4.0 to 5.0, but as we know from the PTS now, Bioware is actually planning to scale us down to the old operations going forward, making Brontes (and us when we go to fight her) level 55 again instead of 75.

If scaling was perfect that probably wouldn't make much of a difference, but as it stands, downscaled high-level characters in SWTOR tend to be a bit on the overpowered side, and early PTS reports indicated that this effect applied in full force in the newly downscaled operations. So for all we know we might be able to waltz in there in 6.0 and one-shot her. It's unlikely, but... I'm happy to wait and see how things pan out.

To Skip or Not To Skip?

Several bloggers I'm following have been talking about Final Fantasy XIV recently, not least because it just got a new expansion. However, the game being what it is, several of those bloggers haven't actually been able to talk about the expansion yet, because they are still in the process of getting through all the prerequisite quests first, something that can only be bypassed with a cash shop purchase, and even that is a relatively recent addition from what I gather (previously there was just no way around it, period).

From this post on Time to Loot I learned that the community even has a name for the long chain of quests that players have to complete to even get access to the very first expansion: they call them "the Horrible Hundred". Bhagpuss then used this as a jumping-off point for a post of his own on when focusing on the journey instead of the destination might not be sound advice.

I've previously written about how I'm kind of glad that SWTOR is not as dogmatic when it comes to story progression, despite of the game's self-professed focus on narrative. That said, reading this whole discussion, especially Bhag's comment on Naithin's post - in which he asked whether the latter would actually be happy to skip all that content if it was a gameplay option - really made me think.

As much I've moaned in the past about KotFE and KotET in particular feeling like a bit of a drag (though actually, I already complained about Shadow of Revan and Ziost before that), I have not made use of the option to skip either so far.

I keep thinking about it, but the thing is that there are choices to be made in those expansions, and I don't like the idea of simply being saddled with one of the two default sets of options. It doesn't matter if those things never come up again afterwards; I would know! I've sometimes seen people clamour for a tool similar to Dragon Age Keep, which would allow you to lock in custom decisions even while skipping the content, but I doubt that Bioware would consider creating such a thing a good use of their time and money.

The thing is, even if we did have that option, I'm still not sure I'd want to use it. Even though replaying the exact same linear story over and over annoys me, there are moments when I find myself engaging with parts of it on a roleplayer's level, even when it's my umpteenth time through - usually because I hadn't thought about how that particular character would feel in that particular situation considering her background... which can then cause me to make somewhat different choices than I would have made if you'd simply asked me to fill out a scorecard beforehand.

On the other hand, there are the problems that make KotFE and KotET in particular - and to a lesser extent also the Iokath/traitor arc - such a nuisance to replay:

- It's not just the linearity and one-size-fits-all format of the story, but that it is so all-encompassing. Makeb and Rise of the Hutt Cartel are also linear stories, but they are independent from each other and you can do them out of order if you so wish. When you start KotFE though, the game demands that you must have finished all the "important" storylines before it, and if you haven't they will be auto-completed for you, with no option to ever go back.

- For all the complaining a certain section of the player base did about lack of content during KotFE, I've found it striking just how long each chapter is compared to the average quest line in the base game. A single planet's worth of class story is generally shorter than a chapter, with the latter clocking in at about 45-60 minutes each if you watch all the cut scenes, and still at least half of that if you were to space-bar your way through.

This is a problem in so far as chapters make it much more awkward to pause at a random point and come back later. Your overall progress will be saved, but if you exit the phase even briefly while not at a dedicated "check point", all the mobs after that will respawn. I've cleared Odessen of Zakuulan troops in "End Times" more often than I'm happy to admit, simply due to exiting the chapter at a bad time and then finding that I had to do huge chunks of combat all over again.

I'm not certain that solo flashpoints are any better either. I haven't tested it, but I would expect them to give a bit more leeway when it comes to not respawning all the trash if you leave for five minutes, but they probably won't save your overall story progress if you need to abandon it halfway through to come back another day. Either way, the end result is that both solo flashpoints and chapters make you feel like you always need to be willing to commit a larger chunk of time to playing in order to make any progress.

- Finally, all of this is made even worse by the fact that some chapters are very closely tied together and affect your gameplay outside of the main storyline. Mainly I'm thinking of how starting KotFE gets rid of all of your companions, and you don't get any new ones until chapter three, and nothing like a proper full roster until chapter nine. For that reason I never start KotFE unless I'm willing and able to burn through the first few chapters in a single session.

So for all these reasons KotFE and KotET are a bit of a nuisance in the narrative progression of one's character, and I know quite a few people who have used the option to skip this content quite liberally. For me however, the roleplaying considerations I mentioned earlier in this post weigh against that, and so far they've still won out every time.

I do think that there's a chance that my attitude might start to shift over time though, as Bioware keeps adding more and more "post-Knights" content, because the more of it there is, the more I'll feel the urge to actually get to all that content. In addition, the more the adventures of Arcann and Co. retreat into the distant past and become irrelevant, the less strongly I expect to feel about "having" to go through them for my character arc to feel complete.

KotFE & KotET Veteran & Master Mode Chapters Tips & Resources

I never thought I'd use that many ampersands in a post title...

While I was ultimately quite late to the party in terms of completing all the chapters on master mode, I noticed that the amount of resources on the subject of how to beat them still seems to be somewhat limited (even if things are a bit better now than they were two years ago), so I thought I might as well compile everything I learned along the way into a single post in order to help others who are still looking for help with getting these done.

First, some general notes:

Achievement vs. achievement: If you only want to complete the veteran/master mode chapters for the achievement badge, you can simply bring a friend to help you. They won't get credit for story progress or chapter completion (only the phase owner does), however they are able to trivialise the fights by helping out and you'll still get the achievement. For me it was more about the sense of achievement you get from overcoming a difficult challenge though, which is what the rest of this post focuses on.

Class matters: Your class will make a big difference to how easy or hard you're going to find certain chapters. Abilities that are useful are (in order of impact, based on my own impressions): strong damage reduction cooldowns, having a long-duration crowd control, having a short interrupt cooldown, having the ability to self-heal, stealth. The best class to complete these challenges on would therefore be Commando/Mercenary, while the weakest one is probably Vanguard/Powertech, with everything else being somewhere in-between. If you have a stable of alts to choose from that are all eligible for chapters, this is something you might want to keep in mind before choosing which character to use. Personally I completed veteran KotFE with a Sorcerer, veteran KotET with a Guardian, master KotFE with a Sage and master KotET with a Scoundrel.

Level: You don't have to be max-level to do chapters on a higher difficulty, and there's some theorising that due to the way the scaling works, they are in fact a bit easier if you do them below max level. I did some experimenting with this myself but didn't find any conclusive evidence either way. The only thing that felt reasonably clear was that going in as a fresh level 70 with not the greatest gear makes things much more difficult.

Gear: Going in with the best gear you can get helps a lot. Master mode chapters were originally tuned around the endgame gear available at the time of their release (item level 242), which is not to say that they are completely impossible with less if you're good at the game and chose to go in on a class with good cooldowns. However every little helps, and the fact that at the time of writing this anyone can get up to gear level 258 means that you can give yourself an extra edge that way. Don't forget to also add augments to all your gear slots.

Companions: Similar to gear, the intended companion influence rank for master mode chapters is 50. Again, most fights are actually doable with less, but if you find that you're struggling to survive or do enough dps, boosting your companion's influence level with some gifts is an obvious avenue for improvement.

Spec/role: Don't be afraid to experiment with different specialisations, utilities and roles. Some fights might benefit from increased AoE damage reduction while others really reward every bit of extra mobility. In terms of roles, some bosses that hit extremely hard actually have relatively little health, so the way to go in such cases might well be to have both you and your companion on dps to quickly nuke your opponent down before they have a chance to hurt you too much. If you're wiping anyway, you have little to lose from trying a couple of different approaches.

Other tools: Don't forget that you can use stims, medpacks and legacy abilities, such as your heroic moment and Unity. Basically, you'll find that on the tougher fights, players usually succeed by making sure that they use absolutely every ability in their toolbox to their advantage.

Specific chapter information:

Note that the following are not explicit guides, but blog posts documenting my experiences with various chapters. I did however make a point of describing any and all difficulties that I ran into as well as explaining how I eventually overcame them, while often including video footage of particularly tough encounters as well. I also linked to any outside resources, such as other people's videos, that I found helpful at the time. Sometimes others also added extra information in the comment section. Feel free to add your own if you think it could help someone else!

Knights of the Fallen Empire

Veteran mode impressions
Chapters 1, 2 & 3 master mode
Chapters 4, 5 & 6 master mode
Chapters 7, 8 & 9 master mode
Chapters 10 & 11 master mode
Chapters 12, 13 & 14 master mode
Chapter 15 master mode
Chapter 16 master mode

Knights of the Eternal Throne

Veteran mode first impressions
Veteran mode second impressions
Chapter 1 master mode
Chapter 2 master mode
Chapters 3, 4 & 5 master mode
Chapter 6 master mode
Chapter 7 master mode
Chapter 8 master mode
Chapter 9 master mode

Looking Back At Past Expansion Announcements

As someone who likes to look back as much as forward (if not more so), all the recent excitement about the Onslaught expansion made me try to recall how I felt whenever new SWTOR expansions had just been announced in the past. I don't think I was that excited? That's one of the great things about having a blog though: I actually have a written record of those times that I can check.

As it turns out, I remembered correctly that I wasn't as excited about previous expansions... but it's almost comical how un-excited I was about some of them when they were first announced.

Rise of the Hutt Cartel's announcement was received with a lackadaisical "Expansion Time, Then?" as I was actually kind of grumpy about having to pay for content that Bioware had advertised as free to all subscribers at E3 only a few months earlier. I wasn't convinced that raising the level cap after only a little more than a year was a good thing, and getting "only" one new planet didn't seem like much of an expansion to me. (How spoiled I was!) To top things off, this was also around the time when a memory leak caused my game to crash several times a night. I wasn't really having the best of times.

Galactic Starfighter's announcement was similarly unexciting to me. Once again I used "expansion" only in quotation marks and declared that I felt decidedly "meh" about the concept of space combat, despite of seemingly everyone else being super excited about it. Admittedly it turned out that my attitude was actually pretty in line with that of the majority of the player base on this one, but still...

Galactic Strongholds had been rumoured for a while when it was finally announced officially. I was kind of ambivalent because I was never really into housing but it seemed at least vaguely interesting. In hindsight it's weird to see myself talk about how much I used to enjoy hanging out on the fleet, because ever since the introduction of strongholds that has changed. I blame the legacy cargo hold... if I could access that from the fleet too, I would probably prefer to hang out there still, but I guess limiting them to strongholds was Bioware's incentive to make people use their new houses (and it worked).

It's also funny to see how I guessed some things correctly, such as that the system would be more about arranging furniture than about building things from the ground up, or that a lot of the best stuff would come from the Cartel Market. On the other hand it's interesting to see some of the things I was theorising about at the time that ended up being completely off-base, such as that we might be getting a new furniture-making crew skill, or that companions might come visit us in our strongholds and wander around instead of being static decorations.

The Shadow of Revan announcement mostly had me whinging about its trailer being lacklustre, Lana and Theron featuring too prominently in the loading screen art (boy, did I have no idea what was to come), not liking the experience boost that was being given out as a pre-order "perk" and feeling wary of  the upcoming changes to the talent system. But hey, at least I acknowledged with this one that two new planets, two new operations and two new flashpoints was a good chunk of new content.

Fallen Empire was shrouded in a lot of mystery and hype due to its fancy trailer and departure from what had come before. I was trying to keep things grounded in my initial analysis, and was actually spot-on with almost everything! Particularly prescient points in hindsight were "personally, I would find Star Wars without a Republic/Empire conflict very un-Star-Warsy" and, in the follow-up post, "re-acquiring your old companions [...] worries me a little because adding sensible reasons for players to hunt down forty old companions doesn't sound like a thing Bioware would do in a post-class-story world". Note that while Bioware has been trying to achieve this, we still haven't got all our companions back nearly four years later, so that was clearly a bit of a Pandora's box. Or how about this one: "An MMO can't live off story alone." Still, I'm pointing all those things out with the benefit of hindsight - at the time I was cautiously optimistic about the expansion despite of my concerns.

We knew very little about Knights of the Eternal Throne when it was first teased, so my comment section was mostly conspiracy theory talk about how the people in the teaser image were probably not Senya and Vaylin (something that's quite amusing to look back on). After that we spent almost three months without getting any more information, until we finally got the official announcement... at which point we still barely knew anything, so that most of my first impressions post was about analysing the trailer.

So yeah, I used to be pretty spoiled when it came to expansions, not really valuing them all that much because they came out frequently. Someone on Twitter pointed out that Onslaught is actually going to be SWTOR's seventh expansion, which is pretty crazy when you think about it, but it's also worth noting that the first four came out within the game's first three years... and that the last one came out two and a half years ago by now. As they say: absence makes the heart grow fonder - after so much time without a chunky piece of new content, I'm definitely more excited about this one than ever!

The Rise and Fall of Knights of the Fallen Empire

I usually don't like to speculate too much about what's going on behind the scenes of any given MMO in terms of finances and player numbers, since we just don't have any useful information most of the time and it feels a bit pointless to simply make random guesses. I have been doing some thinking about the success/failure of the two Knights expansions lately though. With the release of Ossus it feels like we've finally left them behind for good and it's interesting to look at their influence in retrospective.

Also relevant: It was only recently that I stumbled across this post on popular blog Ask a Game Developer from a year ago in which the writer states that based on inside information they have, SWTOR has really managed to turn things around in the past couple of years and is now considered a financial success. Now, that information by itself appears to be a few years old already, but I still found it interesting that they explicitly state that SWTOR exceeded its projected targets for 2014 by 20 million dollars. What happened in 2014?

Most notably this was the year before Knights of the Fallen Empire, and it featured three large content updates: Galactic Starfighter, Galactic Strongholds, and Shadow of Revan. We also know from a later statement in EA's financial reports that after KotFE's launch, subscriber numbers were higher than they had been in nearly three years, so subscriptions in 2014 can't have been particularly high. Where did all that money come from then?

I think we know enough about GSF's general lack of popularity to discard that one as having been a big money maker. Strongholds on the other hand I could see having been very beneficial for the Cartel Market in particular - from what I've seen in other games, housing enthusiasts are easy targets for microtransactions: just give them more houses and new furniture to buy and you're golden! I don't see why that wouldn't have worked out well for SWTOR as well. (If so, it also shines a new light on Bioware suddenly adding three new strongholds to the game in the past two years after a long drought in that regard.)

I also fully expect that Shadow of Revan drew in a lot of players - even if I think that people overrate it in hindsight, I have no doubt that Revan's name alone must have generated a good amount of interest. SoR was also the last expansion (to date) which required a separate purchase to play, which I'm sure was another thing that added nicely to Bioware's coffers.

Now, this big success in 2014 certainly adds an interesting perspective to the release of Knights of the Fallen Empire. I always wondered how Bioware got EA to back that expansion with a big Blur trailer, as that's not how you treat a property that's supposedly been nothing but a failure. Clearly the game's performance just pre-KotFE inspired an unexpected increase in confidence.

And then came the launch of Knights of the Fallen Empire itself. It doesn't seem to have accumulated enough proper reviews to earn a metacritic score, but I know I wasn't the only one who loved it. Its overall reception was definitely positive. While trying to find more reviews, I even came across one from a gold-selling website (which I'm obviously not going to link), which happily declared the expansion a big success simply based on the amount of people who were suddenly looking to buy credits for the game. Sure, there were grumblings about the lack of new group content from the beginning, but at that point it had only been a year since Shadow of Revan, so there was plenty of time for Bioware to still add some, right? And as mentioned above, EA themselves were pleased with the bump in subscription numbers.

But what happened then? The monthly story chapters were... interesting, but not enough to get the flood of more casual players that had jumped back in for KotFE's launch to stick around. More and more long-time players became disgruntled with the lack of new group content to keep them busy. The story direction itself was also received less and less warmly over time: After my own initial enthusiasm for the launch chapters, I soon found myself saddened by the direction Bioware was taking my character and confused/annoyed by the lack of logic when it came to some of the plot's core tenets. Mid-2016, after the last few KotFE chapters were released, EA explicitly called SWTOR out in its quarterly financial report for causing a noticeable decrease in subscription revenue for the company.

In June 2017, Creative Director Charles Boyd actually took to the forums and explained that all the negative feedback they received about KotFE caused them to drastically shorten and condense KotET - originally, the "Knights of" story had been meant to form a whole trilogy, with each "season" similar to KotFE in length. However, he then quickly back-pedalled somewhat by saying that it was all just an issue of pacing and that overall, the stories of KotFE and KotET were well received and had made them their "most successful expansions by a very significant margin".

Now, I obviously wouldn't accuse Charles of lying, but especially that second comment feels a lot like we aren't getting the whole story. I understand that the whole point of the conversation in that forum thread was to show that Bioware cares about player feedback, but the claim that they basically abandoned the KotFE/KotET model just because of some forum posts despite of it being super successful rings... hollow. Presumably it was successful in some way, such as number of people who subscribed just to play through the story, but you don't just change a winning team. With that in mind and looking at just how quickly Bioware course-corrected with Knights of the Eternal Throne, it's hard to believe that the new direction wasn't having a negative effect on their bottom line somehow.

As for what's been happening since then... this is where we're back in true "nobody knows" territory. Story aside, the original introduction of Galactic Command was probably the single most harmful change ever made to the game and cost them a lot of veteran subscribers. Since then, EA has abstained from mentioning SWTOR in its financial reports or at E3 in a positive or negative way, though as previously mentioned on this blog, the last two years have felt somewhat light on new content releases.

I think the next expansion announcement will give us a better indication of where are are right now. For example, will EA back it with any sort of marketing (trailer)? I'm not fussed about these either way, but it would give an indication of how much money the company is still willing to put behind the game at this point. And of course there's the question of the scope of 6.0 - will it be big and make everyone feel like the long wait with reduced content updates will have been worth it? Most people seem to expect the big reveal to come at Star Wars Celebration in April, so we should find out soon enough.

Day 8: Memorable Moments: #IntPiPoMo

My 10 themed days of SWTOR screenshots in celebration of International Picture Posting Month continue. If you want to see a list of all the themes I'm using, you can find it here.

Just like last year, one of the most memorable moments that I screenshotted was a really bad PvP match! It's funny because I do enjoy PvP, but for some reason the most memorable matches are always the bad ones... what I preserved for posterity here was a Voidstar which I mentally filed away under "Imps are quitters". Yes, it was a loss, but this certainly wasn't helped by my side having literally several quitters a minute. You can't actually see the full list in the screenshot, but I noted in the file name that by the end of the match a total of 28 different characters had been part of the team (actual team size: 8). This is what you get when your game doesn't penalise people for deserting.

Whenever my guild runs Explosive Conflict, one of the tanks will call shotgun on the tower, a tradition that was instituted by our original guild leader, who liked that the role of standing in the tower on the third boss fight allowed him to be fairly lazy for several minutes. I think the earliest we've had someone call dibs on the role during a run was before we'd even entered the instance... for all that I'd never actually experienced myself what you do up there until this year, when I got to have a go on my Vanguard (pictured) and later on my Shadow. It's funny because it's really not very hard at all, but if you don't know what you're doing you can still wipe the group in several different ways. I still remember that pug I had a few years ago where we had a dps go up in the end because literally nobody else knew what to do.

This is just a cut scene at the end of KotET chapter two, and the reason it's memorable to me is not because of the story, but because on master mode this is probably the hardest fight in any of the chapters in the entire game, and I felt incredibly accomplished after beating it. At the same time I feel kind of scarred for life though, because the other day I replayed this chapter on story mode on an alt and I still got slightly twitchy the moment I saw these guys, just from the deeply ingrained memories of what a pain they are on the harder difficulties. It's certainly worked to make me remember the GenoHaradan as more fearsome opponents than any Emperor.

And finally, a Conquest moment: Twin Suns Squadron actually conquered a few planets this year and it was always exciting, but what I found noteworthy here was the brief period of time during which we were actually the conquerors of two planets, one on our main guild and one on our Imperial alt guild. For a guild that isn't actually a dedicated Conquest guild and has fewer than 100 active members I think that's pretty damn good.

IntPiPoMo count: 52 - target achieved! (though the series continues until the end of the month)

Day 4: Missions & Conversations #IntPiPoMo

My 10 themed days of SWTOR screenshots in celebration of International Picture Posting Month continue. If you want to see a list of all the themes I'm using, you can find it here.

Cal just made a post the other day about the impact that fast travel has had on how we play the game. I've been thinking about this a bit myself, as the way we can just kind of "teleport" from planet to planet feels kind of weird to me, and I'm actually a little startled when for one reason or another I actually end up in a cut scene showing my ship flying somewhere, like you can see the bounty hunter ship doing here in the intro to Oricon mission. At the same time though, I don't really like traversing spaceports and dealing with the loading screens to enter and exit the ship. I don't really have any ideas on how this could be made to feel better.

I posted this one on Twitter before, but I feel that doesn't count. I'm not sure I care much for the little cut scenes before each boss in Gods from the Machine, but I love the one before Nahut just because of the "WTF is this" face our characters make while they look around. Unfortunately it's only really there for a moment, so screenshotting it can be a bit tricky.

In general I feel that the upgrade they gave facial expressions in 5.0 (?) tends to give them a bit of  a comical edge. This one is a particularly good example because my Sage making a 0_0 face as Valkorion sneaks up on her from behind can be deliberately misinterpreted in all kinds of ways.

Some of the "action" sequences are pretty cool looking, such as this one of the Outlander and Theron throwing themselves into the beast pit during Vaylin's party.

This one on the other hand always makes me cringe a little. Surely this isn't actually based on a motion capture? Who would land like that after a jump? That's just asking for pain in your legs (and elsewhere if you're a guy I guess).

This one I just like because I managed to capture my Scoundrel's hand movement at just the right moment to make it look like she's about to make a grab for Theron's crotch.

Okay, so a lot of these were on the slightly silly side, which is a theme for another day, but nobody said that there can't be a bit of overlap between themes.

IntPiPoMo count: 23

Waiting for 6.0

I've said before that even though I like to dedicate most of my play time to a single MMO, I don't think it's fair to expect a single game to entertain you 100% of the time. There are times when you'll get bored, and it's okay to do other things - I would recommend also doing other things in fact, because if you force yourself to stick to something you're bored with, that just breeds resentment after a while. Better to take a break and give yourself the chance to actually miss all the things you love about the game.

That's kind of where I feel I'm with SWTOR once again right now. Not that I'm really taking a break - after all I'm still showing up for guild activities several times a week - but in between those scheduled events I've been feeling a bit aimless lately. It's not so much that I have nothing to do as that it's all stuff that I've done before, and more importantly stuff that I feel I've done quite recently. Meanwhile Neverwinter's being all alluring with the release of a new module... it's easy to see why my attention would wander.

Aside from the general ups and downs that everyone has, it does strike me though that we've been at level 70 and inside the 5.x patch cycle for a really long time now. Just for fun, I counted the duration between previous expansions and came up with the following:

Launch - 2.0: 476 days
2.0 - 3.0: 602 days
3.0 - 4.0: 322 days
4.0 - 5.0: 406 days
5.0 - today: 579 days

You can already tell that this is going to be the longest expansion cycle ever, because while the time between 2.0 and 3.0 was still longer if you compare them today, we're not far from catching up with it at this point, and we don't even have a release date for 6.0 yet, only vague hopes that it will hit before the end of the year. So whenever it comes out, 5.x will likely be closer to having lasted 700-800 days at least.

On top of that, the perceived closeness between the length of this current expansion and that of 2.x is deceptive, because the 2.x cycle also included the launch of Galactic Starfighter and Galactic Strongholds, which were big enough to be considered their own expansions at the time; they just didn't reset the patch counter so to speak. If we do include them as major milestones that broke up the flow of the game, expac duration actually breaks down like this:

2.0 - GSF: 301 days
GSF - GSH: 196 days
GSH - 3.0: 105 days

There wasn't a lot of time to get bored back then...

Mind you, I don't get bored that easily anyway. It's an interesting difference between me and my pet tank actually, which rears its head every time we try to play something new together. He gets super excited about new stuff and wants to binge on it 24/7, but then also gets bored more quickly. Meanwhile I also get excited about new things of course, but usually I don't want to stop doing everything else just because of that and will want to take short breaks pretty early on. This then also results in me staying interested much longer, long after my pet tank has already lost interest.

Anyway, that said... even I feel that 5.x has had its time in the sun and that the game could do with a bit of a shake-up by now. It's funny to me now to think back to how worried we were about Galactic Command taking forever to level up and how easy it became after a few patches. It actually served me well as something to keep busy, but after getting more than a dozen characters to Command rank 300 I'm really not that bothered anymore. The new conquest system had me engaged for a little while, and I do still participate in conquest every week, but I don't really want to engage in too many activities purely for the sake of grinding conquest points.

I do still have my Pugging videos to work on, and I've also been playing around with a new idea to spice up my alt play a little bit, but it is getting harder to come up with new things to do with Knights of the Eternal Throne rapidly approaching the two year mark. How is your engagement holding up?