Drop In: Mek-Sha

Every Galactic Season so far has had a repeatable objective that only existed during that season and related to its companion or theme. Season 1 asked us to kill insectoid mobs because Altuur is a Kubaz and they like eating insects. Season 2 had us dressing up as members of the Syndicate and killing Black Sun on Coruscant or Nar Shaddaa to please Fen Zeil. Season 3 required us to catch cheating gamblers with PH4-LNX by our side, Season 4 had the meditating with Amity, and Season 5 the mouse droid mini game in cantinas.

This week was the first time we got to check out Season's 6 unique objective, and I've got to say it's extremely clever. It's not a new activity, but it fits the seasonal theme to a T and encourages players to use an in-game feature that doesn't see a lot of use and that many probably don't even know about: all you need to do is visit another player's stronghold. In GS6 week 2, it has to be a Mek-Sha stronghold in specific.

I completed this objective on all servers on day one and really enjoyed it. I'm not really a huge housing enthusiast, but once you've gone through that loading screen to travel to another player's stronghold, you might as well have a look around, right? So I took screenshots of some of the things I saw.

On Darth Malgus, I simply travelled to the first stronghold on the top of the list, which was called "Zalashia's Hideout" and also the only one showing 100% completion at the time. Considering that the Mek-Sha stronghold is pretty compact, I was curious what filling it to its maximum capacity would actually look like.

The answer is... it's a lot. It does kind of fit the general aesthetic of Mek-Sha to have a really cluttered hideout in there, but the number of small lights on the walls was still a bit overwhelming in my opinion. 

I made a note to myself to go for strongholds with a lower completion percentage next time to see how people were using the space when not filling up every possible hook with something or other.

On Leviathan, I therefore ended up choosing to visit a 68% complete Mek-Sha stronghold called "Perial Khill's Stronghold". This one was probably my favourite among all the strongholds I visited that night, as the main area looked like a really great place to party, with a stage, musicians, dancers, seats and tables for spectators and a big pool in the middle, plus some Talz bouncers (?) watching from the sidelines. It just seemed cool.

On Tulak Hord I visited "Yvische's Syndicate Never Center" at 80% complete. This was competently done but nothing really stood out to me personally in the main area. My personal favourite bit about this stronghold was actually the two guys brawling next to a trash fire on the landing pad, which is the first thing you see upon zoning in and which definitely sets the mood.

On Star Forge, I ended up visiting "Lazarillo's Smuggler's Haven" at 50% completion. This was a more utilitarian and more sparsely decorated place with a row of vendors and some fairly basic decorations, but what threw me for a loop in this one was that when I went up to the balcony to overlook the main area from above, I found my way blocked by some of those walled window decorations. I was rather confused the first time I saw one of them because I wasn't quite sure how to use them, but turning that balcony into a walled-off room was an interesting use case.

On Satele Shan, I stopped by "Rhroadhouse's Dark Alleyway" at 79% completion, which I thought had an interesting concept as it turned the side room into a cantina-like area, while the main space was taken up by what looked like a fighting ring or something? Interesting idea.

Finally I logged onto Shae Vizla, where I only saw three public listings on Mek-Sha, which is when I was reminded that you can only visit the strongholds of players that are currently online. I guess it wasn't doing this at a good time for the APAC region. The open listings all had really low completion rates as well, with 15% being the highest available, so I went to that one, called "Butch Cassidty's Stronghold". This was kind of what I'd expect from someone who isn't really into strongholds big time and/or doesn't have a lot of decorations to work with, as it was very spartan with just some utilities like vendors and a few crew skill decorations. However, I appreciated that it was open for me to visit, and it was still an interesting contrast to all the other strongholds I'd seen that evening.

Have you come across anything you found interesting during your visits of other people's strongholds?

Mysteries of Mek-Sha

I've been thinking about Mek-Sha recently. I had a good amount of fun at the Interpreter's Retreat, and people pointing out similarities to Mek-Sha made me want to reconsider my stance on that planet. I liked the story there back when it came out, but as I noted after three months of Onslaught, the repeatable content seemed half-baked and disappointing.

The other week Mek-Sha was one of the planets featured on the weekly seasons objective to do repeatable or side missions, and I thought I would use that as an opportunity to give it another look. I did so on my Shadow on Star Forge, and sadly I ended up being disappointed all over again, as most of the missions I completed didn't even count towards the objective. After I repeated one of the heroics for the third time without my mission counter advancing, I eventually gave up and finished the objective on another planet.

The "We're Wanted Men" heroic isn't even marked as one (which is why I guess it didn't count for the seasons objective) - though it did advance my "do heroics on Mek-Sha" achievement. It's also a bit "plain" compared to its predecessor "Turf War", as it just has you fight off waves and waves of mobs. I hadn't fully processed this previously, but they completely replaced the Turf War heroic with this "new" one back in 2020. Xam Xam still has the guide for the old version up, and I remember it being quite tough and having a sort of puzzle aspect to it. You'd get one of four different opponents that had a unique buff, and you'd have to interact with the environment to counter it (so for example you'd splash the guy with the "drunken rage" buff with a glass of water). I mean, there was a reason Mr Commando and I stopped bothering with it after a few tries, but that had more to do with bugged credit than the mission itself.

The two regular heroics are also quite a bit longer than most regular heroics, requiring you to move between phases in different areas, which makes them feel like a lot of effort for little reward.

Finally, I was reminded of how Mek-Sha has all these hidden achievements, but I couldn't be bothered to look them up online. I think the Interpreter's Retreat was much better at luring you in and getting you interested in what else there was to discover. Achievements that stay hidden until you complete them are not very intriguing, because unless you look up a guide in advance, you won't even know that you're already working towards something. I much prefer the approach of letting you discover the achievement as soon as you do something that progresses it.

I'm glad that the devs seem to have learned from those issues, considering how much better the Interpreter's Retreat worked, but part of me still kind of wishes that they'd go back and clean up Mek-Sha a bit too. Make sure heroics are labelled and counted as such, make sure exploration missions are labelled and counted as such, and allow hidden achievements to be found once you do something that triggers them, so you know you're actually making progress and have an incentive to keep going. Just one of those little things.

Republic Saboteur, Part 2

My Republic saboteur's journey continues. 

Since I learned that Imperial saboteurs have a special alternate ending for one of the Onderon dailies, I was curious to see whether there was a similar Easter egg for Republic saboteurs. There was, though it's somewhat less cool than the Imperial version (in my opinion), since it's only a bonus.

The daily mission to destroy Imperial listening devices has a bonus to find and take out the Imperial surveillance commander. As a saboteur you tell this person to hold their fire instead and that you secretly work for the Empire. They point out that you're not being very helpful by destroying their stuff, and offer you the option to do something useful for them by planting some listening devices inside the city. If you take it, you get a follow-up task to do just that, which feels kind of ironic considering that the main mission's objective was to do the literal opposite.

On Mek-Sha, I was kind of surprised that there wasn't even a mention of committing sabotage by influencing the vote so that the fuel sale would be blocked. (After all, if you play Imperial side, that's what Veek and Indigo expect you to do.) I guess you could argue that directly sabotaging the sale would've been kind of obvious, but it's not like you couldn't have come up with some way to shift the blame.

Instead everything proceeds just the same way as it does for a loyalist, until you get to the Imperial attack on the docks at the very end, where you arrive just in time to see Narlock confronting Major Anri - and the saboteur option is to just shoot him, which I did. Anri is confused by the unexpected assist for a moment but knows better than to ask too many questions when you prompt her to get a move on. So once again, the Republic's plans fail because you were too late to stop the Imperials. Oops?

At the debrief afterwards, Narlock is replaced by a Nautolan with an eye patch and a Scottish accent called Captain Prenton, and Arn wonders how the Empire could do this to "us" twice in a row... gee, I wonder.

I have to admit I felt kind of bad about this particular act of sabotage, because it was so cold and personal. It's one thing to (not) press a button that triggers something bad, but quite another to directly shoot someone in the back who thought you were their ally. You also get to hear about how Narlock had a daughter and Junker Jott agonises about having to tell her about her father's death. She later writes you a letter asking whether you saw what happened. Junker also writes you a letter, saying he reviewed some security footage (gulp) that showed Major Anri so it was probably her who killed Narlock (phew).

You continue on to Objective Meridian, which is pretty unremarkable from a saboteur point of view as a Republic player. For all the devastating losses you inflict on the Republic fleet on Onderon and Mek-Sha, it doesn't look any smaller during the attack on Corellia and I didn't notice any differences to the loyalist outcome during the battle. The only thing I'll say is that like on Imp side, the ending with you leaving your buddies behind after the Malgus fight without a care in the world feels so much more natural as a saboteur than as a loyalist. I briefly considered not committing sabotage on this last step since I still felt bad about Narlock and handing the facility over to the Empire seemed like kind of a big deal, but it turned out to be just another opportunity to be just a second too late to press the button that was meant to prevent the shields from going down... it was simply too easy to do.

At the post-battle conversation on the fleet, things got a bit buggy as an angry Theron yelled at my smuggler for not using the fleet to protect the civilians the Empire was bombarding and then ran off... just to then proceed to contribute jokey comments to the rest of the conversation while invisible.

In the debrief on Nar Shaddaa, NR-02 introduced me to Darth Xarion. Unlike on my agent, I didn't even have my smuggler ask about being allowed to join the Empire properly; I think she quite enjoys being a chaotic force not strictly beholden to anyone. I just chose to have her complain about Malgus trying to kill her on Corellia, which of course just got her the response that he didn't know about her real loyalties since they're a closely kept secret.

All in all, the things that really stood out to me about the Onslaught arc for Republic saboteurs was that coming from a defensive perspective, with the Republic always caught on the back foot and scrambling to deal with Imperial attacks, it felt so much easier to justify the sabotage as failure and much less suspicious than the way the Imperial saboteur always makes it all the way to the objective of an offensive strike just to then mysteriously fail at the finish line.

Also, the Republic is incredibly chill about failure compared to the Empire. The Sith were always angry and seeking to place blame, but the Republic attitude can pretty much be summed up as "too bad, so sad". It's almost comical how they're only mildly disappointed by mission failures causing hundreds and thousands of deaths, and it's never anyone's fault, just a tragedy. All they do is talk about how they need to find ways to soldier on anyway.

If you asked me whether I preferred the Imperial or the Republic saboteur path up to this point, I'd honestly struggle to choose. The Republic version seems much more believable, but on the other hand the consequences of sabotage on Imperial side feel a lot spicier (what with angry Sith blaming and trying to murder each other), which is more entertaining in a way, even if the way you keep getting away with it is much less convincing.

The Interpreter's Retreat

I've written in great detail about 7.3's new story as well as the new flashpoint, but I also wanted to take a moment to talk about the new area on Voss more generally. As I said after the 7.3 livestream, I think that adding new areas to existing planets is a marvellous idea, even if Voss isn't a particular favourite of mine. From a production point of view it's presumably very efficient, since existing planetary assets can be re-used, while still giving players something new to play around with.

My initial expectation of the Interpreter's Retreat was that it was going to be roughly Black Hole-sized (since that was the first "secondary planetary area" that was ever added to the game) and it... kind of is? I do have the feeling that it's probably a bit smaller, but it's not like I counted myself doing laps around the two zones to compare.

Compared to the rest of Voss, it's a lot less open, with a lot of relatively narrow paths and much denser mob placement, but after spending the last few months on Ruhnuk, it still felt almost liberating to quest there. You can't really dodge most mob groups very well, but at least they are easy to kill (unlike many opponents on Ruhnuk) and the area is at least open enough that you can keep running and shake some of them off before running into a dead end.

One thing that wasn't quite clear to me after the initial livestream was whether the Interpreter's Retreat was going to be a daily area or not. They didn't call it that, and if it was they probably would've said so, but it still sounded like there were things to do there other than the main story. Based on the PTR, commenter Iris informed me that the structure of the repeatable quests was a bit like Mek-Sha, and after having seen how it works for myself, I think that's a fair comparison, though I think the Interpreter's Retreat does things somewhat better.

With Mek-Sha, my general feeling was that the repeatable/side content was just not very interesting or rewarding. Why do things like the heroics or the trade house missions more than once just to see what they're about? There's the one heroic with the gangs that has an achievement attached to it if you repeat it forty times, but all in all, the experience always felt very "meh" to me.

The Interpreter's Retreat is better at luring you in with a plethora of decoration and pet rewards, and I found all of it to be pretty "discoverable". For example I never looked up a guide for the picnic achievement, I just found the leftover food naturally while doing the daily in the Gormak kitchen, and then spotted the spare drink while walking around town on another character. Then the description of the combined item makes it clear what you need to do with it. Considering the area isn't huge, it didn't take too long for me to find the right spot to use it as well. My discoveries of the contemplation achievement and the pet played out similarly. There were some things I looked up eventually, but in general I was positively surprised by how many items of interest I managed to encounter organically and how they drew me into spending more time in the area without having to look anything up.

I also thought it was interesting how a couple of achievements unlocked decorations on the vendor in town when completed, which isn't something SWTOR's ever done before I think. A guildie commented that he's seen something similar in Elder Scrolls Online though. No matter its origins, I think it's a neat idea, as it provides a bit of extra incentive to work on those achievements even if you're perhaps not much of an achievement hunter normally, though it's not very clearly communicated. The achievement description does point out that there are decos involved, but surely I'm not the only one who doesn't usually read achievement descriptions... I just think it could've been made a bit clearer, perhaps with the vendor having a quick chat option where they tell you that they'll show you some special goods if you help out enough or something like that.

All in all, I think the Interpreter's Retreat is a nice little addition to the game. I don't think it will have a lot of staying power for people, as even going after the achievements is not something that's going to keep you grinding for months and months, but I think that's okay. The mobs are supposed to drop decos randomly (though it's been acknowledged that the drop rates are currently bugged), which could be something to keep people interested in grinding them once fixed. Now if only the devs also added a Conquest objective or two for the area and we'd be golden.

Enjoying the View

A year ago, in the run-up to the game's ten-year anniversary and the Legacy of the Sith expansion, Bioware held the "Best View in SWTOR" contest. It wasn't anything fancy, just a basic screenshot contest inviting players to capture nice views of their virtual environment, but I liked the idea. After all, I like taking screenshots!

In the end I only submitted screenies for three of the ten eligible planets though (the ones used to illustrate this post) - I honestly don't remember why I didn't go for more. I only remember running around Zakuul for a while trying to take a shot that satisfied me but that I was ultimately not happy with any of the results.

I didn't win anything, but I can't really complain about that. In the news post that announced the winners, they stated that they received "thousands" of entries, and their chosen winners were all highly deserving. I still don't know where the winning Yavin IV screenshot was taken, but it looks amazing. (Feel free to enlighten me in the comments.)

Either way, I figured this contest was just a one-time thing for the anniversary, so I was very pleasantly surprised when the team announced a few days ago that we were all invited for another round this autumn, just with a different selection of planets.

I'd already liked the contest last year, but this time around it very much felt like the right thing at the right time for me. The other night I spent a whole evening just travelling to different planets and taking screenshots of the sights - it was quite refreshing to not think about gear or Conquest points for a change. As a result I've already submitted shots for nine out of the ten eligible planets this time around. I'm not sure I'll still come up with something for Odessen... in my opinion there just aren't a lot of good opportunities for nice views outside cut scenes there.

Again I'm not really expecting to win anything... but it just felt like a nice feel-good exercise, you know? I suspect that the devs and artists also enjoy looking at all the pretty screenshots and take satisfaction in knowing that players really look at their work and appreciate it. If you're feeling inspired yourself, you still have until the 12th of October to send in one or more submissions of your own.

Imperial Saboteur, Part 2

Continued from part 1!

I completed the rest of the Onslaught base story on my saboteur agent and there were some interesting things to see. However, first I'd like to note that I also did a round of dailies on Onderon and was quite surprised when I realised that one of the daily missions has a cut scene with a different outcome if you're a saboteur! It's the one that tells you to hunt down a Republic assassin, and to be honest I always wondered why the end of that took place in a phase, considering that you just kill him (usually). However, if you're a saboteur, you get to talk instead of attacking straight away and you have the option to distract the guards to help him escape! How cool is that? Now if only the quest giver had remembered that King Petryph wasn't alive in my playthrough anymore...

As for Mek-sha and beyond: There are a couple of opportunities to randomly be nice to people aligned with the Republic, which generally didn't strike me as a wise thing to do in public, not to mention unlikely to actually achieve anything, so I didn't always choose those options, except to try out the concept on Tau, to whom my character said something like: "You have nothing to fear from me, Jedi". I think her reply was something along the lines of: "We'll see about that".

When you infiltrate Junker Jott's base to steal the schematics for the failsafe, you can intentionally leave evidence of what happened, which results in Anri's diversion at the end being less successful. At least I think that's how these two things were connected... it wasn't entirely clear to me what Anri's diversion being less successful actually meant in practice.

I didn't get to find out because I chose to commit maximum sabotage again by simply not triggering the failsafe and pretending that it just didn't work.

Darth Malgus doesn't go ballistic on Darth Shaar during the debrief at the end the way he did on Savik, so I chose to actively throw her under the bus by saying that her whole plan was bad when Malgus asked me about what I thought went wrong. It was fun to see Shaar get pretty mad about that, though Emperor Vowrawn downplays the whole thing when you talk to him later.

I already felt that my sabotage on Onderon was pretty suspicious, but having a second mission in a row fail in the exact same way - because I mysteriously couldn't press the right button when left in a room on my own - made things even worse, so I was pleased to see that at least Darth Malgus seemed to agree. He sent me a pretty angry letter afterwards in which he asks: "How is it that you, who have accomplished so much, display such incompetence?" Good question, Malgus; very good question.

In the run-up to the attack on Corellia, you can try to sabotage Krovos' proposal to bomb civilians on the other side of the planet by suggesting that she's hiding something, but it doesn't work. (Good on you, Krovos.)

During the actual attack on Corellia, you see the consequences of your sabotage on Onderon and Mek-sha, as the Imperial fleet struggles and several ships get blown up before your strike team can make it to the surface, which I thought was another neat difference compared to the very successful assault that loyalists get to experience.

The Objective Meridian flashpoint goes the same as always, with Malgus being back to talking nice to you. It struck me as kind of amusing that the ending with you escaping without displaying any concern for your fallen companion - something that always struck me as a bit weird - is something that actually makes sense for a saboteur. I mean, Malgus was obviously on to me, so good riddance to him!

At the end of the flashpoint you do actually get to choose again whether to do what the Empire wants or make the whole mission a failure. I did the latter, though this also made it the third time in a row that I mysteriously failed to press the right button when left to my own devices so I don't know how the Empire can continue to put any faith in me at this point.

Jonas Balkar actually gave my agent a holo call right in front of some Imperial guards just before I was about to meet the Dark Council and nobody batted an eyelid. You can chide him for calling you at a bad time and he responds that calling during the actual meeting would have been worse. That's a false choice, Jonas, and you know it!

Watching the Dark Council play blame games with each other about who was responsible for the mission failure was admittedly quite amusing, though it's once again surprising that the finger doesn't get pointed at your character more directly. One thing of note was that while Vowrawn talks about reinstating the Hand, he didn't ask me to return the Alliance to the Empire as a whole - though Lana kept making comments later as if he had.

In the chat on the fleet afterwards, Theron is actually very angry that so many civilians died on Corellia and questions the point of being a saboteur if we can't do more to prevent this kind of stuff. In the in-person debrief with Jonas later, you can also ask whether you can join the Republic properly now, and he's kind of evasive about it and says that you're more useful continuing to be an undercover agent - I can't say I'm entirely convinced by that argument. He does introduce you to Master Sal-Deron via holo, however.

I also had a note here saying ,"Why does Anri still admire me so much?" because she only met me on Ossus and I've done nothing but mess things up for the Empire since then. I guess she might still have been impressed by my character's prowess in combat.

All in all, Onslaught has some pretty interesting content variations for saboteurs - in fact, I found out while doing some reading up on the subject that there's an additional variant if you agree to become a saboteur at the beginning but then always choose not to sabotage at the crucial moments, making you a sort of triple agent... oh god, does that mean I need to take another character through this to see that dialogue?

I also have to say that your character's not really a very convincing saboteur here and I don't think it's great storytelling for the most part, as your repeat failures are just too obvious - you kind of have to tune out any concerns about realism at that point, and just agree to roll with it for the fun of seeing how much the game will let your character get away with while still praising you for how amazing you are. The question is whether that will actually end up going anywhere. Continued in part 3.

Day 6: Environments #IntPiPoMo

I'm taking part in IntPiPoMo, and this is the sixth of ten screenshot posts I'm making this month, each one themed around a certain topic. Today's topic is environments, which is honestly always the easiest one to find images for (though it can be hard to choose my favourites) as pretty environments are something I love taking screenshots of!

First off some more views from the original set of planets... I've said before that I don't tend to think of Taris as pretty, but look at it in the right light and from the right angle and it absolutely can be!

My Mercenary speeding across the dunes on Tatooine looking snazzy.

Another shot of a speeder ride, though this one is my Marauder on Ossus. Being one of the newer planets, it's perhaps somewhat less iconic, but I do like the increased graphical detail.

Alderaan is one of those classically beautiful places, but I hadn't really taken many screenshots of just the scenery until recently, when Swtorista asked for some submissions for a screenshot contest, which is when I took this (though it wasn't my submission).

Swtorista's contest was inspired by the official Best View in SWTOR screenshot contest, whose winners were announced today. Some amazing shots there! I did not win anything myself, but I did go around taking some pictures to submit at the time that made me appreciate the landscape in whole new ways, like the above two shots of Mek-Sha, a planet of which I don't traditionally think as good-looking. Loved those bizzare container building towers and the reflections on the tepid pool!

On the subject of strangely mesmerising environments, here we have the lair of the Mountain Queen on Ossus, a place not many people visit with any regularity or have seen at all I reckon, and yet the artists worked hard on nailing that alien feel of a giant insect hive.

Another indoor location, a simple Ilum crystal cave... but what's ever simple if you've got crystals that are glowing like lightbulbs spicing up the scenery?

IntPiPoMo count: 45

Onslaught in Review

As I said previously, we still don't have a launch date for Legacy of the Sith, but it can't be far off now, and I don't expect us to get another major content update before then, so I thought it would be interesting to look back on how Onslaught has gone as a whole. I wasn't sure what conclusion I'd come to when I first started writing this, but honestly, now that I've added it all up, this has been a pretty ace expansion.

Features

After Bioware tried (and failed) to reinvent the wheel for the last two expansions (with the single player focus in KotFE and Galactic Command in KotET), it was nice to see them refocus on simply adding features that players had actually been asking for in one form or another.

• Nautolans as a new playable species: They ended up looking a bit more... weird than most people expected I suppose, but I still think they were a good addition. Based on forum polls and the like, Nautolans were easily the most requested species that wasn't available yet - so much so that after this, I'm not actually sure what playable species they could add next. Sure, there are lots to choose from and you can find people suggesting pretty much all of them on the forums somewhere, but I haven't seen anything else have the same kind of consistent demand as Togruta and Nautolan had before they were added.
  

• Spoils of War: Gearing was a mess towards the end of KotET and needed a revamp desperately. I think the new Spoils of War system worked out well overall! It's not perfect, but what ever is? I'd say its biggest flaws are that a lot of set bonuses and Tacticals they introduced were pretty useless so that there ultimately weren't that many viable choices to make about what to get, and that drop rates for both types of items were pretty poop, meaning that most of the time, you were better off just saving fragments to buy from a vendor, even when all you were doing was gambling at Kai's. Still, overall the ease of gearing up in terms of item levels was amazing, and everything being bound to legacy so that you could gear all your alts in one fell sweep has been super neat.

• Material storage: I liked how they never even advertised this as a feature; it was just suddenly there and amazing, freeing up tons of space in cargo and legacy bays across the land. This is the kind of quality of life improvement we all love to see. Separate but related, they also added all those event currencies to the legacy currency tab.
  

Story

I didn't love the Onslaught base story quite as much as Jedi Under Siege, but it was still excellent overall, making use of the game's large pre-established cast and adding all kinds of great little touches to remind players of their class identity. Over the course of the expansion, we then got three more story installments:

• Echoes of Oblivion: This was a pure love letter to the game and its community, taking all kinds of loose ends that had been left dangling in an unsatisfying manner and tying them into a neat little bow.
  

• Spirit of Vengeance: Probably the least interesting of Onslaught's updates, it still introduced Rass Ordo as a likeable new character and laid the seeds for what's hopefully going to be an interesting arc about the Mandalorians facing off against an intriguing new villain.
  

• Secrets of the Enclave: The expansion's second piece of story that was actually different for both factions (after the Onslaught base story), this again featured a plethora of interesting character moments, even if it didn't advance the plot very much.

If I were to criticise anything, I guess you could point out that there is no clear theme to all of these to tie Onslaught together: a bit of Darth Malgus here, some Mandalorian stuff here. Then again, this is pretty in line with how things used to be in SWTOR's "good old days": After all, Rise of the Hutt Cartel was only really about Hutts for a very short time; all the content added after its launch centred on organisations like Czerka or the Dread Masters.

"MMO Stuff"

It seems to me that after the early years of most content additions being standard MMO content and the wild swing in the opposite direction with KotFE & KotET's story chapters at the expense of all else, Bioware has finally settled into a nice balance between continuously adding engaging story installments while also consistently churning out repeatable content to keep dedicated players busy in the gaps in-between.

• Two new planets: Onderon and Mek-Sha were both smaller than I would have hoped, but they were fully fleshed-out planets with datacrons and everything. The Onderon daily circuit is decent fun. Unfortunately Mek-Sha felt a bit half-baked with its somewhat random selection of side missions in different places, some content being quite buggy initially and none of it ever really becoming very rewarding.

• One new operation: Nature of Progress (or Dxun as most people call it) is a brilliant op in terms of story and undoubtedly the funniest piece of group content Bioware ever released. The fights are mostly good fun as well, except for the last boss, whom I find kind of tedious mechanically to be honest.

• Three new flashpoints: Objective Meridian, Spirit of Vengeance and Secrets of the Enclave. I stand by what I said about Objective Meridian seeming a bit dull at first blush but being interesting to replay. The last boss(es) can be infuriating but in a good way (to me anyway). Spirit of Vengeance was a bit meh - some neat little Easter egg achievements couldn't make up for the fact that it consists of too much boring trash and the environment isn't exactly thrilling to look at either. Secrets of the Enclave is probably my favourite of the three, meaning it's fairly fast-paced, features decent boss fights and includes some beautiful environments to feast your eyes on.
  

• Two new world events and more: We got the Ultimate Swoop Rally on Dantooine and the Feast of Prosperity as a seasonal event in autumn. I liked both of these as creative non-combat additions. I found that swooping gets quite boring quickly if you do it for too long but it is something different. I also enjoyed the little mini-games coming with the Feast and the way it livened up the world boss pugging scene - I'm quite looking forward to doing that again this year actually. Finally, we also got the Alderaan stronghold and Galactic Seasons for what it's worth.
  

Summary

I know people always complain about wanting more from Bioware - and it's not like I'd object to being given more! - but honestly, looking back at all this, it strikes me as a pretty decent tally for a two-year long expansion that came free with the subscription. Especially considering that for a lot of that time, Covid was interfering with the devs' working patterns as well.

I like that there's a clear effort to balance single player story content with MMO features and additions now, and most of it was really good quality as well, with just a couple of not-so-great items on the list but nothing completely awful or boring. If Legacy of the Sith can deliver in a similar way, I'll be one happy camper.

Datacron Hunt on Mek-Sha and Onderon

Ah, datacrons - I have such an interesting history with them. Originally I was pretty oblivious to them while levelling, to the point that I'm not sure I came across even a single one organically (the one simply lying on the ground on Coruscant perhaps...), but then other players started showing them to me and datacron hunting became both a fun social activity and something I liked doing on my alts. Then they were made account-wide with KotFE and that whole avenue of play kind of fell off a cliff... especially as Bioware didn't add any new ones either - until Ossus that is, and I wrote about my experience with those datacrons in this post.

Onderon and Mek-Sha were similar to Ossus in that guildies were offering summons to the new datacrons within days, but like on Ossus I refused because simply accepting a summon to an unknown location, clicking a cube and leaving again kind of seemed to defeat the purpose of the whole thing to me. I told myself that I'd go back to get them later, but to be completely honest I mostly forgot about them again after that. So I was delighted when my guild decided to host a guild datacron hunt for the first time in literal years and that Onderon and Mek-Sha were supposed to be the first destinations. 

We started with the endurance datacron on Mek-Sha, which follows in the footsteps of similar datacrons from the base game such as the mastery ones on Imperial Nar Shaddaa and Corellia, which both require you to jump on a small kiosk/carrier as it floats past and ride it (close) to the datacron location. I would rate the Mek-Sha one as slightly less fun than either of those though, as part of the path you ride along is a bit buggy, which is disorienting (the environment around you goes all crazy, the platform appears to disappear under your feet etc.), and after successfully jumping both on and off the floating "sign" you then still have to make another couple of (admittedly not very difficult) jumps before reaching the datacron.

My guildies and I spent some time chatting while repeatedly falling to our deaths here, but our guide for the evening made it to the finish line very quickly and was able to offer limited assistance for some classes with a Sage pull (we also found that with some skill and/or luck a Scoundrel could jump to them with Trick Move.). After a given time limit we simply used a guild flagship summon for anyone who was still struggling... but I refused to accept it, as - despite of my repeated failures - the whole thing felt very doable and I figured that I'd be able to do it the "proper" way if I just gave myself a bit more time.

Still, for the time being we moved on to the endurance datacron, which was a more straightforward jumping puzzle in a fairly small area. I actually did pretty okay with this one except for one really far jump near the end. Here we sort of moved along as a group, initially falling down and re-trying all the jumps on our own, but I wasn't the only one struggling with that one particular jump, so we eventually started to "pool" around that one and once a couple of people got across they helped others with pulls and such. I was not too ashamed to accept a little help there myself, as getting a bit of a leg up with one jump in a row of about a dozen jumps isn't on the same scale to me as simply getting a summon to the final destination. In the end we all managed to get this datacron without having to use the guild flagship summon at all.

After that we were off to Onderon, first to deal with the endurance datacron there. This was another jumping puzzle but with a deadly edge, as missing one of the first three jumps meant falling to your death. Fortunately a medical droid wasn't far away, but it was still quite silly how many times I fell to my death here. Otherwise it was a similar affair to Mek-Sha in that I eventually managed all the jumps by myself except the very last one, for which I accepted a pull since I was the only person who hadn't made it yet and people wanted to move on. We took a little group photo next to the datacron since the backdrop was quite nice up there.

Finally, there was the mastery datacron, which was introduced as "the Indiana Jones datacron" to the group and it sure lived up to its name. This one lives in a personal phase and requires you to leap across a bridge with invisible holes by following a certain pattern (in what is undoubtedly meant to be an Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade reference), followed by dodging a bunch of floor spikes in the dark that insta-kill you if you step on them. This is already tricky enough one way, but then you finally get to the datacron, a little cut scene plays and some sort of electric/force field gets unleashed, forcing you to make it back the same way with the additional pressure of a timer or you die. I must have died a hundred times to that thing and was once again one of the last people to get it (cheaty Sages and their Phase Walks...) but it didn't really feel impossible at any time... it was just a matter of mastering the sequence to the point that I was able to execute it both flawlessly and quickly enough.

At this point some of my guildies moved on to Ossus, but since I already had those 'crons, I instead opted to return to Mek-Sha and went back to practising riding the sign. It took me another half-dozen attempts or so and then I made it to that datacron as well.

I'm glad that I originally decided to save getting these datacrons for a more opportune time, as getting them with my guildies was much more fun than it would have been to simply get a summon or even to follow a guide on my own.

The Indiana Jones datacron was probably my favourite, despite of being sequestered in a personal phase and causing me to die a hundred times. It was just a very fun idea, and restarting after a death was extremely fast so the failures didn't feel too punishing. Though I guess the time pressure at the end could be considered a bit harsh for the rather casual player base that the game has cultivated over the years. Sure, casual players don't "need" the stats from it either, but I just think it's a pretty fun experience to have regardless, for all kinds of players.

The endurance datacron on Mek-Sha was the sort of mini adventure that I usually like with datacrons, but I was a bit let down by the bugginess of its implementation. Also, considering that there are follow-up jumps after the sign ride that you can fail, having to wait about two minutes for the sign to come around again after each try was a bit annoying.

The two jumping 'crons were both alright - they both featured at least one pretty fiendish jump, which always strikes me as a bit frustrating when it's part of a whole series of jumps that you have to restart if you fail, but at least the run back wasn't long in either case. The Onderon one also had what you could call "save points" in the sense that if you fell off at a later point, you only had to redo the last couple of jumps and didn't have to start over from the very beginning. That was good.

I wonder if there'll be datacrons on Manaan?

PS: It's the first of August, which once again heralds the return of Blaugust! Whether you enjoy discovering new blogs, would like to promote your own writing or are maybe only just thinking about starting your own blog, I can definitely recommend checking out this community event.

Three Months of Onslaught

I realised today that as of yesterday, a full three months have passed since Onslaught's launch. Time flies when you're having fun!

My initial excitement has of course tapered off a bit, but I'm still happily chugging along, as the game feels like it's in a pretty good place right now.

First off, the expansion has really managed to reinvigorate my interest in endgame of all kinds. Working on the new operation has been a blast, and my guild has been able to run two full progression teams to focus on it. The other team actually managed to kill the Apex Vanguard (the last boss) on veteran mode last week, but my own team isn't far off either - just yesterday we had a zero percent wipe (/cries).

While there'll still be things left to do after he falls, I really like the thought of soon being able to say that we cleared the new operation in both difficulties. It's not something I've ever been able to say so shortly after the release of a new raid.

The Conquest rebalancing also revived my interest in that part of the game, and my guild managed to conquer both Mek-Sha and Taris in the last month, which was fun and exciting.

My excitement about gear has tapered off a lot since I earned full 306, simply because the set bonus I want seems ridiculously hard to acquire - it's not available from the regular vendors and I don't think I've seen a single piece drop in the operation it's supposed to be dropping from after three months of running it nearly every week. So I just keep spending tech fragments on sets for alts whenever I get close to the cap and that works alright for me.

Despite of my initial criticisms I did the Onderon dailies for quite a while, even after I'd maxed out the reputation, mostly because running them was something that Mr Commando was happy to do too, so it gave us another in-game activity to do together. Once he lost interest I mostly did as well, though I've been back a couple of times mainly to combine doing them with a round of gathering. The way Bioware has balanced gathering skills this time around, hours of running missions don't yield nearly as much profit as simply picking flowers while doing a round of dailies on Onderon.

The repeatable content on Mek-Sha has been oddly disappointing though. I only found one of the heroics really fun to repeat, as the other one required an odd amount of running around that made the heroic quick travel option feel almost pointless. Then later they added a third one which seemed like it was supposed to give you some fun options to support different factions and unlock achievements, but it was buggy as all hell on launch and gave no real reward, which caused Mr Commando to dismiss it after one run and we haven't been back since then.

Bioware also added a terminal with supposedly rotating dailies in patch 6.0.2, but I also only visited that one once. It gave me a mission to pick some fruit on Dantooine but sent Mr Commando off to Nar Shaddaa. The fruit-picking was cute enough, but being sent off to different planets at random obviously didn't make it a good choice for something to do as a team. I should probably revisit it anyway though...

To get back to gathering for a second, crew skills in general launched in a pretty messed-up state (which is honestly why I didn't bother to look into them too much initially), mostly with even the simplest crafts being ridiculously expensive in terms of materials. A patch has improved the situation somewhat since then, but it's still incredibly slow. I only got the achievement for getting all crew skills to level 700 the other day, and am slowly chipping away at trying to research this or that schematic, without too much commitment.

All of that aside, there is of course always more story content to go through. I've "only" completed Onslaught on six characters and I have so many more alts parked at various points, from their class story to KotET. And I do enjoy logging into different ones to play a bit here and there, but as much as I want to see different outcomes on a cerebral level, when it comes to deciding how I'm going to spend my one hour of playtime in the evening - or however much I happen to have - I all too often end up doing something else instead. But it's okay, fortunately that content isn't going anywhere, so I'll just keep chilling and chipping away at it as time allows and depending on my mood.

Musings on Onslaught's Story, Part 2: Mek-Sha

So after Onderon's plot felt a bit mediocre to me, I wasn't sure how I was going to feel about Mek-Sha, presumably totally unique smuggler haven #247 and not the sort of setting I tend to immediately fall in love with. (Spoilers to follow. You've been warned.)

In this case, I was very wrong though! Your task on Mek-Sha primarily concerns diplomacy, as the Republic wants to buy fuel for its fleet and needs the five biggest gangs on the asteroid to vote in favour of going through with the deal. As an Imperial, you want to sabotage actually want this deal to succeed as well, which was very surprising to me as a player, to my character, and to everyone she mentioned it to - which was in turn somewhat amusing to me. It's all in order to set up a trap for the fleet though.

All five "factions" were immediately interesting to me:

There is Huttbreaker, who is the one who's in charge above all others and the first female Nikto I recall seeing in game!

Then there is Junker Jott, who is responsible for all the tech on the station and a gruff but lovable Republic war veteran. My jaw dropped when I found out that he was also voiced by Darin De Paul (who is the voice of Valkorion, General Daeruun and others) because I absolutely did not recognise him in this role, which just goes to show once again how absolutely awesome he is at his job.

On Imperial side we have the mysterious Brothers, slavers dressed like ninjas who pursue their trade with an almost religious zeal as they believe that making their slaves do work is productive and wholesome, which I thought was an unusual and interesting angle to take for an organisation like that.

Though you do get to talk to all of these, the two linchpins of the mission end up being a Rodian crime lord called Veek the Sneek, and Indigo, leader of a group of Mandalorian outcasts, as you'll need one of their votes to sway the outcome in your faction's favour. Indigo in particular is written with some interesting detail as he reacts differently if you bring one of your Mandalorian companions with you (Shae, Torian, and supposedly Akaavi too).

There isn't really a lot of variety in how you can handle these two (I was really hoping you'd be able to cook up a bit of intrigue by going back and forth between Veek and Indigo - mainly I wanted to rat Veek out to Indigo so that he could get him kicked off the station without resorting to outright murder, but alas, no such luck) but after the bland cast I had dealt with on Onderon just talking to all these characters with colourful personalities felt like such a breath of fresh air; I loved it.

I also really appreciated that Gault and Hylo showed up to give you an introduction to the place - just another one of those small touches that just made so much sense. With such practised and experienced scoundrels in your Alliance, why wouldn't you naturally seek out their advice on a mission like this?

I would say the one major downside of the plot on Mek-Sha is that due to the nature of events, there is a lot of overlap between both factions, which somewhat lowers replayability. How many times do you really want to listen to Huttbreaker's speech? Or get attacked by a mysterious Sith assailant (who we'll come back to in part three of this series)?

There is some variety between Republic and Imperial experiences though, which does once again come down the small character interactions. Republic characters get to reunite with Commander Vice Admiral Narlock from the Esseles for example, while Imperials deal with Darths Shaar and Vowrawn (I assume it's just Shaar if Vowrawn is Emperor in your timeline).

Republic characters also have a little episode where Arn calls for help after freaking out at the Brothers and killing a lot of them. I keep finding this one a little odd as everyone around you reacts very much along the lines of: "Aww, the poor traumatised Jedi!" Yes, the people he killed were slavers, but it's still generally not considered a good thing for Jedi to go into a rage like that. I don't know if you can actually get him in trouble if you choose the disapproving/reprimanding dialogue options all the time. (I'm clearly too much of a softie.)

Imperials meanwhile get to steal some blueprints from Junker Jott while Major Anri and her squad dress up as Nova Blades to distract him, which is mildly amusing.

In the end you either protect or disable/destroy the Republic fleet... which does bring me to something else though:

All of my playthroughs so far have been on loyalist characters as I don't have anyone with a personality that I'd consider suitable for sabotage caught up to the most current content. I think I've said a few times that I really need to get someone up there, but I haven't actually made much progress with this plan.

I didn't think that this was too much of a big deal as everybody kept saying that the saboteur path didn't make that much of a difference on Ossus, beyond the sabotaged faction's leadership grumbling about not achieving some bonus objectives. Things seem to be different in Onslaught though.

I've kind of avoided outright spoilers for what happens to saboteurs so far, but I've heard several comments that there are actually significant differences this time around. The thing that really tipped me off though was that I got a letter in the mail on Imperial side which I clearly wasn't meant to get (yay bugs) and which had Darth Vowrawn talking about mission failure, which makes it sound to me like saboteurs can actually go so far this time around as to prevent your old faction from actually achieving its objective, which sounds pretty intriguing and cool. I really do need to get around to levelling that saboteur now...

Anyway, by the end of Mek-Sha I was fully immersed, having dealt with all kinds of fascinating people throughout, and was ready for the grand finale on Corellia.

Early Onslaught Impressions (No Spoilers)

Whew, the first couple of days of the new expansion have been a bit of a whirlwind! So far I've played through the story once on Republic side (on my Commando) and once on Imperial side (on my Marauder), did the new Republic dailies once, killed the first few bosses of the new operation on story mode, and spent a couple of hours sifting through several hundred screenshots that I took during my story playthroughs.

To quickly sum up my first impressions of the story in a spoiler-free manner: It didn't grab me quite as much as Jedi Under Siege did, but I freaking loved Ossus, so that was an incredibly high bar to clear. That said, if you asked me to rate Onslaught in comparison to all the previous story expansions so far, I'd say it's the best one we've had to date.

I honestly felt a little lukewarm about the start on Onderon - the planet is smaller than I had hoped (definitely no Yavin or Ossus) and the story beats didn't quite resonate with me - but by Mek-Sha I was warming up to it. The hollowed-out asteroid was kind of the opposite of Onderon in terms of my expectations, as I thought it was going to be small and I've traditionally not been super fond of what you could call underworld environments. But then it ended up feeling much bigger than I anticipated (I can't tell you how it compares in terms of actual square mileage, but all the traversing between platforms and in three dimensions certainly made it feel bigger) and the story developments made me go: "Yeah! That's what I'm here for!"

The thing with having played a game like this for several years is that you can't quite appreciate some things the way a new player can, as you just can't feel the same sense of awe and wonder at the sight of new things (as everything new is usually at least similar to something you've seen before). However, being a veteran of many years does give you an eye for certain details and nuances that the uninitiated won't notice and that you can only recognise with years of experience.

With that said, I could tell that a lot of love has gone into the Onslaught story. (If anyone from Bioware is reading this: thanks, guys and gals!) There are so many little moments that make you smile, chuckle, or just go "o-ho!" as they reference past events, and the cast of characters - both new and returning - is huge.

I've always felt that SWTOR's two biggest strengths in terms of story are the personalised class story that makes the player feel invested in the game, and the huge cast of supporting characters - all with their own backgrounds, interests and influences - that can push the story into fascinating new directions at any moment. That is also what made KotFE and KotET fall flat for so many people: that our characters seemingly forgot about everything that had come before, including loved ones and spouses, and that we were supposed to care about nothing but Valkorion's family and the Eternal Empire now, just us vs. them. (Now that I think about it, the Alliance vs. Zakuul story was actually a more simplistic black and white version of the galaxy than Republic vs. Empire has ever been in SWTOR.)

Onslaught is chock-full of callbacks to our characters' pasts (where appropriate) and the amount of old non-player characters that have been pulled back into service (again, absolutely appropriately) is staggering. As a long-time player, that just feels so good. As a non-spoilery example, at one point my Marauder was asked to see the Dark Council and quipped in response (I'm paraphrasing from memory): "Are you sure they really want to see me? Last time I did that, I ended up killing one of them." That's no line for an Outlander or generic Commander, that's pure Sith warrior right there.

A couple of months ago I wrote a post about how MMOs are actually kind of similar to long-running book series: the audiences for both love to immerse themselves in a huge world that seems to go on forever, happily memorising countless numbers of different events, protagonists and their motivations. The Onslaught story fully caters to that invested long-term audience that will welcome every reference and in-joke enthusiastically. I don't think that necessarily makes it unenjoyable for more casual players, but let's just say that if you only play a single character for example you'll be missing a lot of Onslaught's more subtle context.

Anyway, my "quick" story summary turned into seven paragraphs - what else is there to say so far? Unfortunately in terms of questing as a group, Onslaught has been a bit of a step back from Ossus again, and I'm not sure why. On Ossus they had this weird system going that allowed you to go into the same phase, have the conversation parts be personal to you and then do any fighting as a team while progressing the story simultaneously. This time we're back to regular old personal phases everywhere, and for me and Mr Commando they even bugged out a couple of times, with one of us finding themselves forced into spectator mode in the other one's phase and being unable to create their own phase without first leaving the group. At this point I feel a bit like I'm the last person left on earth who cares about levelling and questing in SWTOR as a group, but I'll just keep banging that drum anyway.

In general there are a fair number of bugs again. No show-stoppers so far - as far as I'm aware - but what I'd call the usual array of minor annoyances, such as crafting nodes spawning in the ground, creatures and droids whose bodies should be salvageable not being flagged as such, the Mek-Sha world boss giving neither achievement credit nor any loot, and one of the daily quests on Republic side that requires you to pick up items from the ground being almost impossible to complete. There's a definitive pattern to these bugs, and from the way Bioware designs their weeklies and such it's almost as if they expect at least one quest to be broken at this point (since they never ask you to complete absolutely everything to get the main reward). I do wish it didn't have to be like that, but I also understand that bug fixes for anything that isn't a major feature get treated as low priority from a business point of view all too easily.

My dislike for the new item tooltips and item modification UI from the PTS has made it to live too. I also noticed that you don't need to hit "apply" when swapping mods around anymore as it commits them automatically! I'll have to be extra careful now, because I'm totally the kind of person who used to accidentally overwrite better mods with worse ones until I noticed just in time to avoid hitting apply...

I'm also hopelessly confused by the new colour codings for armour. Maybe one of my readers can enlighten me? Basically "orange" as a colour for moddable items seems to be gone, so now items of any colour can exist in moddable and unmoddable versions. I'm totally lost what decides the colour of the shell though, as my old oranges have sometimes turned blue and sometimes gold. Why? Who knows! Makes it much harder to not accidentally vendor stuff you want to keep in my opinion, as you now have to double-check even every bloody green...

The one thing I really like is the new legacy-wide materials tab, which freed up something like three of my legacy cargo bays (though I'm sure I'll find something else to fill them up with soon enough). Again, there are just some minor issues with it that I wish they'd fix, such as it not remembering whether you closed any of the sub-categories and simply defaulting to having all of them fully expanded whenever it refreshes.

I also really dislike not getting any feedback when I gather now: The way it used to be (and still is when you gather a slicing node for example) is that you'd get a small notification on screen and in your event log of what you just picked up. Stuff going straight into the materials tab doesn't make a peep though, so I had no idea what I was harvesting on Onderon all day until I sat down at the end of the evening and checked which of the biochem mats in my materials storage I only had in small numbers (and which were therefore bound to be the new ones).

Finally, let me finish with a couple of random, non-spoilery screenshots:

I suffered my first death of the expansion from sheer stupidity: coming to the edge of a waterfall on Onderon I went "whee" and leapt right off the edge... to my death of course. (The screenshot shows Mr Commando reviving me after the fact.) That's what I get for having got excited about diving underwater in WoW Classic in the past month - letting my subconscious forget that in SWTOR every body of water is but a knee-deep puddle.

One previously unannounced feature of Onslaught: exciting new ladder-climbing gameplay! Unfortunately the reception hasn't been too great so far: mostly I see confused Republic players complain about being unable to reach that one spot in their story mission where they're supposed to climb a ladder because they don't seem to realise that this is what they're supposed to be doing. On Imp side I found a ladder to climb a roof in the open world but I tried to use it three times and every time my character got to the top and the getting-off-the-ladder animation played, she fell straight down to the ground. Baby steps...

One of the more amusing bugs to me was that in my Marauder's version of the story, Theron Shan is dead, but this didn't prevent him from making an appearance as an invisible ghost to talk about... partying?