A Week on Oricon

One of last week's weekly seasons objectives was "Seat of the Hutts Daily Sweeps", which requires you to either do the Oricon weekly twice or the Ossus weekly once. I've always thought this was a strange equivalence because since 7.0 the Ossus weekly takes less than ten minutes to complete (depending on your choice of dailies you don't even have to fight any mobs for it), while a single run of Oricon can require slogging through a full 100 mobs or so if you don't have stealth or someone else happened to come through just before you to clear things out already. And then you're asking me to do the one that's already longer twice?

I guess the one thing that Oricon has going for it is that it's more accessible since you unlock access to the area earlier in the story. On my secondary legacies on the other servers I didn't used to have access to Ossus, so I did some Oricon runs for seasons there in the past - though less so recently, precisely because of how tedious the whole affair tended to be. Since the release of the Bessi venture made daily access fully account-wide (meaning it applies cross-server), I could've just gone to Ossus to make my life easier, but I still feel a bit bad about "skipping ahead", even if it's just to do dailies.

This week I happened to have a few days off around Easter, so I thought why not take a few alts through Oricon since I have a bit of time? Only a couple of them had done the story before, so by the end of the week I had taken four new characters through the storyline, two on Republic side and two of my Imperials. I didn't do this all at once but staggered progress over the course of several days, and it occurred to me that I probably hadn't spent this many hours on Oricon since it first came out and I was farming reputation on all my original (then) max-level alts.

I did feel like the craziness was rubbing off on me a bit after a few days, but overall it wasn't a bad experience. Lord Hargrev's voice acting still holds up as top notch over a decade later, and I always love the bit where he goes: "Knives! They can't even resist carving one another like roasts!" Though it's distracting nowadays how much his assistant sounds exactly like Lana, not just because it's the same voice actress but also because she uses the exact same kind of voice/tone that would later become Lana's.

Being able to combine the storyline with the dailies and weekly these days is a peculiar experience that I already talked about about one and a half years ago, when I first went through Oricon that way on my Shae Vizla main. Back then I did find it a bit frustrating how all the missions tended to bug out one way or another since they had clearly never been designed to be done at the same time - this wasn't something that was impossible to overcome, but it still required me to backtrack and redo things several times.

Since I already knew what to expect this time, I was able to take some notes on the best way to circumvent the bugs tied to each mission, and I thought I might share my learnings here as well, even if it's an extremely niche topic.

[DAILY] Fallen Forces

For this one, the objectives for the story and daily quest are exactly the same and there are no issues, both progress at the same time. 

[DAILY] False Paradise

For this one, unfortunately there seems to be no way to avoid doing the phased bit twice. The story mission requires you to loot ten bioenergy enhancers while the daily requires only five. The problem is that interacting with the quest items will only progress one mission while still locking you out of progressing the other one if they were both at the same step. So the best way I found of doing this was to loot five items for the daily, use them, and then go ahead and do the phased bit for the daily mission. After exiting, any spare bioenergy enhancers you may have already collected towards the other quest will have been deleted from your inventory so you'll need to collect a full ten again, but at least you'll be able to do so straight away without resetting anything.

[DAILY] Dread Engines

Funnily enough, this quest is the exact opposite of the above. You need to destroy three/five terraforming devices, but if you enter the phased bit while one mission is done with that step and the other one isn't, both of them will bug out. Bad! Instead you have to make sure to destroy the full five terraforming devices for the story mission before entering the cave. You should then be able to progress both the daily and the story at the same time inside. 

[DAILY] The Tower’s Core

This one is probably the trickiest one to get right. The first thing to note is that when you enter the control room at the top of the tower, only the daily mission will update to the next step, so you'll want to instantly head back out of the phase and walk back in a second time, which will then cause the story mission to update as well. Inside you can disable the defences and fight Commander Zaoron for both missions at the same time with no issues. When finishing up, it's important to click the cube for the daily mission first, then interact with the panel for the story mission. If you click the panel first, you won't be able to pick up the holocron for the daily afterwards and a reset will be required.

Another thing that's worth mentioning here is that both missions require you to pick up the same unique quest item at the end, which the game doesn't allow, so what will happen once you complete the story conversation is that you'll get a pop-up saying that your inventory was full and that you got an item in the mail. Exit the phase to complete the daily (which will remove the associated item from your inventory), then pick the holocron out of the mailbox back at base before handing in the story mission. Important: You won't be able to hand in the story mission without it! In one of my earlier attempts I made the mistake of just deleting the item in the mail, thinking it was a glitch that I had been mailed a second copy. However, if you don't have this in your mission inventory, you won't be able to start the follow-up story conversation! When this happened to me, I had to reset the story mission and redo the whole tower part a second time. Don't be me. 

[HEROIC 2+] Preemptive Strike 

This is another mission that simply progresses for both story and daily mission at the same time. Phew. 

Adventures on Oricon

I don't really have anything too deep or meaningful to say this week, but just wanted to ramble a bit about doing dailies on Oricon. The change the devs made to daily areas with the Bessi patch still kind of fascinates me. It was very much a footnote to the actual venture, but dailies used to be one of the few endgame activities that were still largely gated behind a character's story progression, so seeing them get opened up account-wide with so little fuss just surprised me.

And it does seem a bit like... things weren't exactly optimised for this change in some ways, as I found out while questing on Oricon this past week. One of the weekly seasons objectives was to do exploration or repeatable missions in Empire space, and Oricon was one of the eligible planets.

I hadn't unlocked it at all on Shae Vizla yet, so I took my Sith warrior there to start the story. As I arrived in the base, I saw the daily mission terminal all lit up with quests and a little light went on in my head as well.

For those who don't know, the Oricon story requires you to do four simple missions as part of a storyline that eventually cumulates in you being sent into the Dread Fortress operation, and the dailies didn't used to unlock until you'd done the first three of those story missions. These dailies would then also be similar to the original one-time story quests, for example requiring you to destroy three terraforming devices when the storyline originally asked you to destroy five.

So I thought to myself: Wait, if I can pick up the dailies from the start, do I get a two-for-one? I picked up the first story mission to rescue Republic soldiers from escape pods, grabbed the daily mission with the same objective and indeed: every pod I opened gave me credit towards both! I love it when I get to make use of synergies like that.

Unfortunately, the smooth experience didn't last. I first started to run into problems when I got to the quest that requires you to locate a dark energy source by collecting "bioenergy enhancers" from the local mobs (ten for the one-time mission, five for the daily). I collected a whole bunch and then clicked on them to do the locating. One of the quests updated, but the other one didn't. I tried to use the item again, but it wouldn't let me because it kept saying that I'd already done that bit.

Somewhat annoyed, I proceeded into the phase for the quest and completed the one that was on the correct step. When I looked into my bags afterwards to try and use the bioenergy enhancers again for the second quest, they had disappeared, clearly "cleaned up" automatically due to me completing one of the missions. So I had to farm up another set, locate the dark energy source again, and repeat the encounter in the phase. Alright.

Things got worse in the watchtower. I defeated the various droids inside the control room, clicked on the final panel that's supposed to spawn Commander Zaoron and... nothing happened. This was when I noticed that only one of the two missions had updated correctly while the other one wasn't even on the right step. So I exited the phase again, reset the one that had progressed ahead of the other one and went through the whole rigmarole a second time. This time both missions updated successfully.

I watched the cut scene for the one-time mission and then... couldn't click on the holocron to complete the quest. I sighed and went back out once again, but at least one of the missions completed as I did so. I just reset the phase this time (instead of the whole mission) and went back in yet again, hoping that the game would be less confused now with only one quest left, and indeed, the holocron finally became clickable.

All in all, it wasn't the worst thing in the world, and I did get a lot of quests done in one run, but there was also a lot of trial and error with various resets involved. This is unfortunately the kind of thing that makes the game feel somewhat unpolished at times but at the same time isn't likely to get fixed because it's not a hard blocker and you can eventually push through with enough persistence.

Have you had any interesting experiences with the new daily zone unlocks for characters that haven't actually done that planet's story yet?

My 7 Favourite Post-Launch Story Updates

Over the years, a lot has been said and written about the merits of each of the different class stories, but there's been comparatively little discourse about the expansion stories from what I've seen - which I think is a shame, because in my opinion there's some pretty good stuff in there. Obviously, no single storyline can live up to the eight original class stories in terms of sheer breadth of unique content, but that aside, I disagree with the general sentiment I often see expressed that those stories were the peak of the game's storytelling and that it's all just been downhill from there. The more cinematic cut scenes post Knights of the Fallen Empire have been so much more exciting to watch than anything in the original class stories, and many of the non-player characters that were introduced in later years are much more interesting than the vast majority of NPCs we interacted with in the base game.

With all that said, I wanted to write a bit of a love letter to some of my favourite expansion stories. Back in 2019 I wrote a post called "Good Quest, Bad Quest" in which I laid out what I think makes an MMO quest good or bad, and those are the main items that influenced my ranking of these stories as well: presentation, writing, plot, characters, gameplay and world building.

Honestly, the most difficult thing was to decide what actually counts as a separate story. In the past it was pretty clear-cut for the most part, but ever since Ossus the game's ongoing storyline has been a bit of a never-ending soap opera in which different plot beats get picked up and dropped again without necessarily coming to a proper conclusion. You could argue that it's basically all been "the Malgus saga" since then, but I don't entirely agree with that as everything around Onslaught (and somewhat randomly, the Manaan part of Legacy of the Sith) has felt more like a classic and mostly self-contained Republic vs. Empire story to me, while I tend to think of Echoes of Oblivion as a stand-alone adventure that referenced a lot of older content. Spirit of Vengeance involved the Mandalorians for the first time, but then the focus kept ping-ponging between them and Malgus again.

Anyway, I obviously decided to make some choices in regards to the above; this is just to add some context.

1. Jedi Under Siege (2018)

Also known as Ossus or the prelude to Onslaught, released with patch 5.10. There was never going to be any doubt in my mind that this was going to take the top spot on my list, because I loved this update so frikkin' much. Seriously, if you go back to the blog archives from December 2018, every other post is just me gushing about some aspect of this update or another that I loved.

I'd yearned for a return to Republic vs. Empire after Knights of the Eternal Throne, and while Iokath had paid lip-service to this, it had also been done in an extremely lacklustre way, just to then immediately steer away from the subject again to pivot into what would later become known as "the traitor arc". Comparatively, Jedi Under Siege felt like a return to form, the likes of which we hadn't seen since the base game. Ossus was a beautiful planet that made it a joy to explore again, something that hadn't really been the case with the very limited environments of the "Knights of" expansions and Iokath's confusing architecture.

We were introduced to several new and interesting characters in the form of Tau Idair, General Daeruun and Major Anri, and several companion returns that people had been anticipating for many years were skilfully worked into the story in an organic way (Doc, Nadia, Khem Val). On top of that other minor characters made surprise re-appearances, such as Jonas Balkar from the trooper story, NR-02 from the Black Talon, or Darth Malora from Korriban.

Not to mention that Malgus came back! You may be tired of him now after watching him sit around and mope for the last two years, but back then I thought this was a genius move and a fun surprise. And of course, the storylines for Republic and Empire side were different and well-written. I just had a blast all around with this content and am always happy to revisit it on alts. The fact that it takes place on an open world planet instead of constantly shunting you through instanced corridors feels very liberating, and I enjoy seeing the little variations in dialogue depending on what class you play and whether you had any pre-existing relationship with any of the returning NPCs.

2. Onslaught (2019)

In this context I'm talking about the story content that came with the immediate 6.0 expansion launch, meaning the story on Onderon and Mek-Sha plus the finale in the Objective Meridian flashpoint.

Onslaught honestly repeated a lot of what Jedi Under Siege did, only with some minor flaws. We quested our way through two new planets again, met some interesting new and returning characters (Arn, Darth Savik, Jakarro and D4, to name but a few) and once again saw things from different perspectives depending on our faction and to some degree our class (getting the option to reclaim your Dark Council seat as a Sith inquisitor was fire). It just wasn't... quite as good. For example the Republic story on Onderon suffers a bit from your senator liaison being a bit boring, and on Mek-Sha too much of the content for both factions overlaps, but it's still a storyline that I love to replay.

3. Makeb (2013)

This the storyline from which the Rise of the Hutt Cartel expansion got its name, except the Hutts don't really get to rise very much at all before you slap them down again. They came in 2.0 and went within the same patch. This is a piece of content on which my opinion has changed a lot over time. Initially I liked it well enough, but the mobs on Makeb were quite numerous and tough at launch, and replays quickly started to feel like a slog. Not to mention that it was being sold to us as chapter four of our class stories for a while when it very obviously wasn't that.

However, considering how much smaller expansions got in the years afterwards, I've really grown fond of our adventures on Makeb in retrospect. We get to explore a large, picturesque planet over the course of a pretty meaty storyline, and it's totally different for Republic and Empire side as well. The Imperial storyline is admittedly a lot stronger, since the Republic one feels a bit odd with the whole "the planet is about to blow up" threat never seeming entirely convincing, but it's not terrible either. It's where we first meet Doctor Oggurobb after all.

4. Shadow of Revan (2014)

I'm mainly thinking of the actual 3.0 expansion launch story here, though I wouldn't blame anyone for wanting to include the Forged Alliances story arc that formed the prelude to the expansion; I'd just personally treat that as its own thing. I'm also not really including the Rise of the Emperor patch here, since that had nothing to do with Revan anymore really. 

Many people cite this as their favourite expansion, but as I've stated many times before, I think it's somewhat overrated. That doesn't mean that I think it's bad however, not at all! Again, we got to quest our way through two beautiful new planets, Rishi and Yavin IV, and the tale of battling the Revanites and their new-old leader was compelling enough. There were some bits that fell a little flat for me, but I did enjoy the story overall.

It's also the expansion that had us start our adventures with Theron and Lana in earnest (including the option for some romance), which I guess is a big plus for some, though it's been more of a mixed blessing to me personally. I know many people love Lana, but if you think Malgus is worn out as a character, imagine how those of us feel who aren't crazy about Lana and yet have had to listen to her tell us what to do for over a decade now...

5. Echoes of Oblivion (2020)

I hesitated a bit to put this one here because I actually don't necessarily think that this is a great piece of content to replay on multiple characters, which is something that is quite important to me. The final boss fight is (in my opinion) one of the worst in the game and the whole thing is pretty linear without any meaningful variations based on your faction or class. However! In terms of world building, this storyline did so much to tie up several years worth of annoying loose ends that I can't not list it here as a piece of content that was very meaningful to me when it came out. It just felt like a love letter to the game's lore in a big way, trying hard to improve on all kinds of tidbits that had felt a bit unsatisfying in the past. Plus hanging out with Kira and Scourge was fun. I wrote a longer review about it back then, which you can find here.

6. Legacy of the Sith or Whatever It Is We're Doing Right Now (2020-?)

As mentioned in the intro, it's very hard to pin down a clear start and end point for this one, but personally I see what I'm talking about here as starting with the introduction of the Mando plot in Spirit of Vengeance in patch 6.2 and then pretty much everything that comes afterwards, except maybe the storyline on Manaan since that doesn't really tie into anything to do with the Mandalorians or Malgus. I'm also treating this placement as tentative since I'm not sure whether 7.5 will turn out to be a real cut-off - I suspect not, so future updates might change my opinion on this storyline. It's honestly been a bit of a ride, and I know many players have understandably been put off by the sheer amount of real time that has passed while all of this has been going on. But I still like the storyline because it has given us both new flashpoints and multiple new planetary areas in terms of gameplay, plus it's had a lot of what I think is great character writing. I'm really interested in seeing where things go with 7.6!

7. Oricon (2013)

Technically part of the Rise of the Hutt Cartel expansion and only a short side story, I liked patch 2.4's "The Dread War" for giving us a cool daily area and bringing the story of the Dread Masters to a satisfying conclusion. The plot and writing are pretty basic - here are some really scary bad guys, we need to beat them - but it showed us how something that isn't technically part of the main storyline about our character could still result in a really interesting and enjoyable story update.

I'm going to stop here because after this point, I think I'd start to be a bit more grouchy about the storylines that remain, and this is meant to be a positive post! You might be surprised by some of the things I haven't listed - I know the "Knights of" expansions have their fans for example, but I'm not one of them to be honest. You can read more about why here if you want.

If you've played through all the expansion content to date, how much do you agree/disagree with my rankings? Is there a post-launch storyline that I didn't mention here and that you feel is really underrated perhaps? Feel free to chime in in the comments.

Daily Tour: Oricon

I spent an unusually large amount of time doing dailies this past week. I've said before that I'm not really a "daily person" - I tend to binge on them a bit when they're new to max out any associated reputations, but after that I pretty much stop doing them unless an alt is making it to the area for the first time or it's worth doing them for Conquest. This past week was an occasion of the latter.

It got me thinking about what I do like about dailies whenever I do them, and it's a mix of trying to come up with an efficient route and then enjoying the familiar routine of following it. Since dailies are usually a solo endeavour, we all tend to come up with our own routes and don't necessarily exchange information about them... but it's something I find quite interesting, so I thought it would be fun to share some of my own daily routes.

I'd like to start with Oricon, and I made a little graphic to visualise what I'm talking about:

Roughly speaking, my route through Oricon could be described as a clockwise swirl that starts in the base (the image illustrates a Republic character's journey, but an Imperial's wouldn't be very different; it would just start further south) and ends in the central tower.

I think the somewhat circular motion is pretty natural, but while drawing this up I did find myself wondering why I'm going clockwise instead of counter-clockwise. I think the reason for that is that the initial storyline makes you run through all the missions that become dailies later in a specific order, and it sends you north before it sends you south, so I guess I just incorporated that initial direction into my routine without thinking about it. Or maybe it's because I'm Republic and the northern quest is closer than the southern one.

Anyway, starting in the Republic camp I begin with freeing the soliders from the crashed escape pods immediately outside the base, though I sometimes make a little detour right away as there are some strong mobs guarding a chest just to the left of the base exit sometimes (not shown on the graphic). Chests may never contain anything valuable nowadays, but I still like opening them.

Then I turn north and start hunting for the mobs dropping the quest items that allow you to enter the northern phase. If I'm on a character that has their seeker droid unlocked, I might meander a bit to also do the bonus mission to dig up roots.

After the phased bit, I turn south-east towards the heroic area, crossing over a giant root thing... I always dread that part because there's a mob standing on it that will yank you if you try to just ride past and dismounts me pretty much every time. I'm always relieved when someone else has just been through before me and killed it.

The heroic area is always the most time-consuming part since it's actually somewhat challenging still (just today I managed to get myself killed in there by accidentally aggroing a large group and a champion mob together, oops) - I have a bit of a love-hate relationship with that. I find it best to start at the north-western entrance since the bonus mission that becomes accessible if you have macrobinoculars also starts there.

If I'm not going to do the bonus I'll just try to climb shuttles and kill champions without aggroing too many other mobs before legging it back out, but if I also want to do the bonus I have to make my way south to get in range of the two southernmost things I need to scan and then double back up to complete the mission at the same terminal where it started. I vaguely recall someone mentioning to me once that there's supposed to be a spot where you can scan all four things at once but at this point I'm wondering whether I didn't just imagine that... as it is, the doubling back is quite annoying since everything takes a while to kill, but stuff's usually already respawned by the time I make my way back.

Then I ride south between the tower and the heroic area, destroy the terraforming devices and do the phased bit in the southernmost end of the zone. Afterwards it's back up towards the tower, which I always enter via the southern ramp. This is interesting in so far as I didn't find out until a couple of years ago that the mob that can drop the "bat hat" spawns at the start of the northern ramp because I simply never go there. Was quite a surprise when I found out!

Then I do the tower before quick travelling back to base. Here it's important to remember to exit the phase before using quick travel, because the mission has a step that says "exit the chamber" or something like that, and quick travelling straight out doesn't count. On at least one occasion I returned to base from inside the chamber, just to realise that my mission was stuck on asking me to exit the phase, so then I had to fight my way all the way back up the tower and inside the room just so that I could leave it "properly"... /facepalm

Anyway, I'd be curious to hear how this resonates with some of my readers. Does this route look similar to your own or do you prefer completing your dailies in a different order?

Shintar's Galactic Seasons Diary, Week 9

Day 1

This was the closest I've actually come to missing a day, and to explain why, I need to share a bit of personal information. Basically what happened was that I came down with a horrendous toothache out of nowhere in the late afternoon, so that I spent all evening desperately trying to get some sort of emergency dental treatment, though I did not succeed at this. In the end I could only take a lot of painkillers and go to sleep, meaning that I was in no state to play at any point.

The next morning I felt a bit better and managed to get a dentist appointment, at which point I finally remembered to log into SWTOR to check on my Seasons objectives. My weeklies were GSF and flashpoints, but I re-rolled the latter and happily, it turned into warzones. My daily objectives were Oricon and Yavin dailies - both activities I didn't mind, and in fact Yavin had never come up for me as an objective before so I appreciated the novelty, but I was a bit disappointed by the complete lack of synergy. Looking at the time, I had about an hour left until I had to leave for the dentist, and I knew I wouldn't be back before the daily reset. Could I try to squeeze both sets of dailies in before then? Should I even try? Wasn't the very fact that I was having an urgent dental issue reminding me that there are more important things in life than video games? I decided to give it a go anyway just to see if I could... and I did manage to complete both sets of dailies just in the nick of time.

(Just in case you're wondering, the dentist identified the issue and I'm receiving medication now, plus further treatment has been arranged. I'm still in some pain but at least it's being worked on.)

Day 2

I logged on late in the evening to find that my daily objectives were to kill insectoids across the galaxy and 75 opponents across "Seat of the Empire" planets. I paused for a moment to think whether these could overlap somehow, but I don't think there are any kind of bugs on Oricon, Taris, Yavin or Dantooine, so I ended up re-rolling the insectoids once again and the associated daily turned into the warzone objective.

For the latter I played a late-night Huttball on my Sage, which was one of the rare matches that really frustrated me, not because it was a 1-5 loss but because it felt like it was due to a single player on the enemy team: This one Shadow scored most of their goals and repeatedly pushed or pulled our ball carrier into fire traps when we were close to scoring. (He finished the match with more than twice the objective score of the next person down the list.) I mean, on the one hand... respect! But on the other... damn it, a single guy shouldn't be able to run circles around an entire team like that.

For the mob killing I consulted my quest spreadsheet and decided to continue my DvL Commando's class story on Taris. Only when I logged in, I realised that the step in the story she was on was literally the last bit of talking on Taris before leaving the planet. I mean, I did do that while I was there, but it didn't help me with my mob kill counter. I moved on to my Scoundrel that I once created for lowbie PvP. To be honest, what she had left of her class story on Taris didn't require that much mob killing either, even more so with a stealther, but I just made sure to aggro and kill every single pack of rakghouls and scavengers I encountered on the way, so that completing my objective and finishing the planetary class story ended up aligning quite nicely.

Day 3

Like on day one, I ended up with two non-overlapping PvE objectives, Yavin dailies and heroics on Taris. For Yavin I ended up completing the weekly on my Marauder, who had done her first four quests there for Tuesday's daily objective (and I also found out - very much to my surprise - that based on the codex entries she received while doing them, I'd apparently never done the Yavin weekly on her before), and for the Taris heroics I returned to my DvL Shadow, whom I recalled having a pretty chill time stealthing through them last time. It worked out well.

Day 4

More Yavin dailies and insectoids across the galaxy. I re-rolled the latter and it turned into Ziost. I gritted my teeth a bit, as three out of four days up to that point being dailies was not exactly my favourite combo, but it was alright. I did half the Yavin weekly on my Sniper, fully expecting to have to do the other half later in the week, and a round of Ziost on my Operative healer - after all, it's not like there's anything that requires killing on there.

Day 5

Finally a GSF daily, which brought my weekly counter to one out of four, even if it was another somewhat depressing domination loss. (You know it's bad when you're fighting at satellite B, and when you get the message that the enemy has captured A and C, your team is only on a single point... then someone on the enemy team self-destructed and we went to two.)

The other objective was Taris heroics again... I decided to risk a re-roll to insectoids since I really needed more warzones for my weekly, but it landed on Oricon dailies again. Sigh, more dailies. I decided to start the Oricon storyline on my dps Juggernaut since I knew that the one-time story quests also counted as "dailies" for Conquest - but apparently Seasons are programmed differently, since I soon noticed that my objective tracker was not moving as I was progressing through the story. So I abandoned that angle and logged onto my dps Powertech to do the dailies the "normal" way instead.

Day 6

Since my daily objectives were to do more Yavin dailies (as expected... sigh) and to play a warzone, I started off by playing two rounds of GSF. No, really, that made sense! With my weekly still sitting at one out of four and the week being on its sixth day, the opportunities for synergetic dailies had mostly passed. I played both matches on my Powertech tank: The first one was a loss during which I still had a good time since I had the highest score on my team (not that this was any sign of me actually being good at GSF, mind you), and the second one was a solid win in domination mode for once.

For the dailies I first took to Vandin Huttball on my Sorc healer, and it was one of those frustrating matches that started out feeling relatively even but then quickly devolved into a 0-6 beatdown. Also, my mind boggled when I saw at the end of the match that I had the lowest objective score on my team despite of constantly chasing the ball and feeling very much alone in that. I guess you don't get points for healing nearby team mates and vainly trying to stop the enemy ball carrier without succeeding.

Completing the Yavin weekly on my Sniper ticked off the other daily objective. She too, got codex entries that indicated that she'd apparently never done it before.

Day 7

On the last day of the week, the game presented me with generic mob killing and Ziost dailies as my daily objectives. I was fine with the mob killing as I had an Oricon weekly to finish off anyway, but I eyed the Ziost dailies thoughtfully. Checking back with the official post about Season one, I figured I'd have a one in three chance of re-rolling to something more synergetic with what remained of my weeklies, and a one in six chance of making things worse by getting the insectoids - everything else would be a wash. Those odds seemed good to me, so I decided to risk it... and got the bloody insects of course, prompting Mr Commando to ask why I was swearing so loudly (something that's not usually my wont).

I decided to start off with finishing the weeklies. The GSF match I got into on my Assassin tank was an easy ride for once, as I spent most of the game squatting on the middle satellite (owned by us) while the rest of the team laid waste to the opposition for a quick and easy win. When I played my regular PvP match on my healing Sage a bit later, things looked a lot less promising as I loaded into an arena with horrible lag (I've been having recurring connection issues in the evening lately). I figured it was bound to be a loss but somehow the rest of the team carried us to victory regardless of me only getting a heal off every three seconds or so.

This just left the two rounds of daily slaughter. For the generic mob killing on a Seat of the Empire planet I finished off my Oricon weekly on my main (she'd still had the heroic mission left after doing the regular dailies on day one), and for the insectoids I decided to go slaughter Geonosians in Jundland on Tatooine on my DvL Shadow. While running around the area I noticed that I'd never done the local side mission to kill Geonosians (the one that used to be an [Area] mission), so I picked that up too while I was there.

Week 9 thoughts:

What a week, with personal emergencies, connection issues and other mishaps! I can't say that was as fun as it could have been. And yet I persisted, bringing my Seasons level up to 83 (or in other words, 660 out of 800 points earned). I'm in the final stretch now, with only one full week and a bit left to go to max out.

I'm definitely feeling somewhat ambivalent about the whole system at this point. I can't deny that it's worked to somewhat revitalise my interest in the game and made me play more - I'm a sucker for a good fill-the-bar routine. On the other hand though, it's also been somewhat exhausting and with both raiding and completing Seasons objectives, I feel like I haven't really had any time left to just log on and do something random for fun, if you get what I mean. So I'm very much looking forward to being able to say that I'm done with this Season thing, at least for a while.

Shintar's Galactic Seasons Diary, Week 4

Day 1:

The first thing I did upon logging in was check whether I had two weeklies this week. Check! Flashpoints and warzones, represent! However, the flashpoint weekly showed as completed for some reason, even though the counter was (naturally) on 0/3. I checked and I hadn't accidentally been awarded points for it either. I had a look at the forums to see whether there was a bug report about this by somebody else, but there was nothing. Just as I was contemplating taking a screenshot and submitting it myself... it reverted back to (correctly) showing as incomplete. I really wish I had taken that screenshot earlier now, just to prove to you all that I'm not going insane.

Anyway, I dithered a bit about whether to keep the flashpoints, as I do like flashpoints in principle and the bug with not receiving credit for them was supposed to be fixed by now, but eventually I decided that I just don't like how limited this objective is. I'm fine with only certain flashpoints counting, but only on veteran mode and only through the group finder? Meh... I re-rolled and it turned into operations, which was just as well as I was signed up to do the two Oricon operations with some guildies later in the week. Mind you, some of them tried to do Dread Palace that evening already, and hey, it turns out it was bugged and didn't give credit for the objective even though it said it should! What a shocker!

My dailies were once again the welcome combo of GSF and playing a warzone. I returned to doing GSF on my Assassin tank and she got into a domination match that started really well, but then we somehow ended up losing all three satellites and it turned into a loss. My warzone of the day on my Sage healer wasn't much better - I guess it was a nice change to not get into Huttball yet again, but instead it was Hypergates, which is probably my least favourite warzone. The match was an annoyingly close loss, an experience that was not improved by one guy constantly whining in chat.

Day 2:

My daily POs were doing a warzone and heroics on Taris. The latter would have been alright I guess, but I didn't really fancy heroics that evening so I dared a re-roll anyway and got Ziost dailies instead. At least something different!

I did the warzone on my lowbie Merc and got into an Alderaan Civil War which ended with a close win for my team. What was surprising to me was that everyone was very communicative and friendly, rather unlike your average PvP match. I took my Gunslinger to do the rounds on Ziost and that was very nice and chill as well.

Day 3:

Same dailies as the day before, but this time I decided not to re-roll the heroics.

I once again did the warzone on my lowbie Merc and got into an arena, in which I was the lowest level by quite a margin (the next lowest level character was 19 levels above me). It felt like the system had made some sort of attempt at balance, as my team had the higher level characters aside from me, but I still got slaughtered within seconds and we lost. It felt vaguely bad, but once again I'm not quite sure I can really blame the level disparity as I've been in similarly lop-sided matches before this whole merging of brackets thing. At least this completed both the daily and weekly objective for me.

Fortunately the heroics on Taris went well for a change, as I did remember for once which ones to pick for quick completion with my DvL Shadow. I think it helped that Republic Taris was more freshly on my mind from when my pacifist character came through there and I was checking whether any of the heroics were doable with her specific limitations in mind.

Day 4:

As mentioned previously, a story mode run of the two Oricon operations was scheduled by the guild, and Dread Fortress completed my second weekly.

My dailies were completely PvP-free for once, asking me to do another round of Ziost and to kill 75 mobs of any kind on a "Seat of the Empire" planet (Taris, Oricon, Yavin or Dantooine). I was OK with this and did the Ziost weekly on my Guardian and started the Oricon story on my dps Sage, while only going as far as I needed to in order to get all my mob kills.

Day 5:

The 75 generic mob kills made a return, this time accompanied by 75 kills worth of insecticide. While bugs from all over the galaxy were eligible for the latter, making it less annoying than the objectives from previous weeks, I still re-rolled it and got the warzone one again.

My PvP match of the day was a Voidstar I played on my Sage healer, which was a really good match that we won. For the kills I returned to my dps Sage and continued her Oricon story until she'd achieved another 75 kills.

Day 6:

My favourite combo of warzone and GSF returned, so there was no need to re-roll anything. I got exceptionally lucky with both as well: The PvP match took my Assassin tank into Odessen Proving Grounds, a long-time favourite of mine which I hadn't actually got into in ages. It was a tight match that we ended up winning, not least because of yours truly topping the team's scoreboard for objective points.

When I queued my Powertech tank for GSF, I got into a death match in progress with my team already up by 40 points. I conveyed this to a couple of guildies on voice chat and one of them commented: "So basically, some poor bastard disconnected and you're reaping the benefits!" Indeed I did. I still managed to shoot a couple of things, but the whole thing must have been over within less than two minutes.

Day 7:

The last day of the SWTOR week presented me with Oricon dailies and Taris heroics as my objectives again. I didn't really mind either of those, but seeing how it was the last day of the week, I tried re-rolling the heroics anyway just to see if could get something more synergetic or that I hadn't done before and got warzones again.

For this PvP match I selected my Nautolan Shadow and she got into a Voidstar which was a close loss. Considering how close it was, I can't really complain, and my team did fight hard until the end, but at the same time it was one of those losses that felt like it would have been entirely avoidable if the two people guarding the left door hadn't decided to chase some random to the other side of the map...

For the dailies I returned to my dps Sage, who had handily just reached the point in the Oricon story when you unlock the dailies, so I did a round of the area to complete the weekly and to unlock the one-time story quest for the two Dread operations.

Week 4 thoughts:

Once again I was reasonably happy with my objectives for the week, though I also have to admit that four weeks into this Season, things are starting to feel a bit same-y. In Bioware's detailed article about Seasons on the website, there seemed to be more generic objectives every week than I've personally encountered - has anyone actually got the ones for the low-level planets? Or are those limited to players with only low-level characters on their account?

After doing every single objective for four consecutive weeks now, I've also completed 37 out of the 100 Seasons levels, meaning that if I can keep up this cadence, I've got less than two months to go. Alternatively, I guess I could afford to slack off and slow down a bit without missing out on any rewards. We'll see how I feel about it in two weeks time.

Back In My Day: Dailies

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

Launch - The Dailies That Weren't Really

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

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

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

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

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

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

1.2 - Into the Black Hole

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

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

1.5 - Experiments in Section X

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

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

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

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

1.7 - The Gree Revive Ilum

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

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

2.0 - Makeb and Galactic Solutions Industries

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

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

2.3 - CZ-198 & Bounty Contract Week

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

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

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

2.4 - Oricon

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

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

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

2.5.2a - Return of the Rakghouls

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

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

3.0 - Soloing on Rishi & Yavin IV

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

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

3.2 - Pointlessness on Ziost

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

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

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

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

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

5.2 - Icky Iokath

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

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

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

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

Looking Back And Looking Forward

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

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

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

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

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

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

O Oricon!

Do you ever fall down a rabbit hole while playing? Log on with a specific goal in mind, but then something goes wrong or you get distracted, and suddenly you end up doing something completely different and eventually can barely even remember how you got there? That is how I ended up doing Oricon on my Vanguard yesterday. And it reminded me of how much I love that moon.

This is actually a post that I already thought about writing the last time I took an alt through the quest chain there (which was already quite some time ago) so it's really about time that I actually do it. It simply continues to fascinate me just how well this particular daily area has stood the test of time. I did like it well enough back when it was released, mind you, but at the time I was actually a little worried that it might be a tad too depressing to have long-term appeal - heh! After thinking about it for a little while, here are my reasons why I think Oricon continues to be more fun to re-play than most daily areas or even many pieces of one-time content:

Awesome Atmosphere

This is another thing I already mentioned when it was first released, but Oricon is amazingly atmospheric. I could see why not everyone might like everything having an orange tint or the way the Dread Masters strongly lean towards the fantastical instead of the sci-fi part of Star Wars, but they are great villains and it rubs off on their environment. You might think that "evil and insane" is an overdone cliché when it comes to villains, but these guys were already evil before they went insane - the madness just added a whole new flavour of terror to their repertoire. In turn, you can definitely feel good about offing their crazed and corrupted minions - you're clearly doing the galaxy a favour here.

Strong Storyline

Oricon is actually the only daily area that I can think of that has a fully voiced and cut-scened storyline associated with all the dailies that you do, and it's slightly different for both factions as well. Sure, other daily areas have stories too, but they are mostly of the generic "there are bad guys here, kill them"-type. The one that comes closest to Oricon in terms of story integration is probably Yavin IV, but then that story was only loosely connected to the actual dailies - after all you can complete it without ever touching most of them if you go down the operation route for the final bit.

I've actually been somewhat critical of attempts to connect dailies and storylines in the past, as they can lead to some really dumb dailies if done badly. (WoW's Firelands dailies and their pretense of progress that reset every day come to mind.) However, Oricon manages to pull it off reasonably well - without going beyond the standard pointlessness of having to redo the same tasks every day anyway.

I also thought it was really clever that the weekly unlocks the moment you also unlock the final heroic quest and lets it count towards completion, even though that particular quest is a one-time event. Some might consider it too old-school that the story cumulates in a heroic mission followed by a prompt to do an operation, but I think it simply fits - plus the heroic mission offers at least some closure, so you don't have to feel like a complete dolt if you never end up doing the operation.

Tight Questing

All the missions are tightly packed together and can be completed very quickly if you know what to do, making Oricon one of the more efficient places in which to run dailies and preventing it from ever feeling like a drag. Other daily areas have done a pretty good job of this as well, but they are usually lacking in other aspects, such as the ones mentioned above. Personally I also like that Oricon includes a heroic area, one of the few places in the game where at least some challenge is still preserved for the solo player.

Small Touches

I'm not usually a big hunter of lore objects, but on every alt I take to Oricon I also make a point of hunting down the little holocrons that give lore about the Dread Masters. It just feels right to have lore work that way, instead of having a random glowy rock in the back - the way it is so often with lore objects. Before I got all the achievements, I also loved hunting down all the different named champion mobs in the heroic area. The bonus missions attached to some of the dailies that unlock if you have macrobinoculars or a seeker droid are a neat little touch as well.

When was the last time you did Oricon? Or do you have another favourite daily area?

Macrobinoculars and Seeker Droids - Where Should They Go?

First off, I have to say that Macrobinoculars and Seeker Droids are annoyingly long words with no real synonyms, so it's quite hard to come up with a good title for a post about them that is informative without sounding too clunky. I'm not sure I succeeded in this case.

Either way... while thinking about what I liked about Rise of the Hutt Cartel and which features that came with it I'd like to see return in the next story expansion, Macrobinoculars, Seeker Droids and everything associated with them gave me reason to pause. Basically, I previously rated them as pretty nice additions to the game, and I had a ridiculous amount of fun with the heroics that finish off the Shroud and Dread Seed quest lines, at least the first time I did them.

But looking at them now, I feel that they are in a kind of awkward place, and I'm not even sure what I'd want Bioware to do about it.

Basically, when 2.0 came out, both Macrobinoculars and Seeker Droids were pretty self-contained pieces of gameplay. You did the associated quest chains because you wanted to see the story and to unlock the GSI dailies, but if you didn't care about those particular pieces of content, you could take them or leave them. While I seem to recall some non-GSI dailies on Makeb using Macrobinocular-like mechanics, they didn't actually require you to have started the Shroud quest chain, as you were issued a mission item which basically did the same thing as the binocs just for the duration of the quest.

But with the release of CZ-198, something interesting happened. In Czerka Corporate Labs, during the first bit where you need to gather some key cards, you can whip out your binocs to immediately spot in which cubicle each card is hidden. I rarely see anyone bother with it since it barely saves you more than a couple of seconds compared to just checking each desk the "hard" way, but it was an interesting touch to add that. In the daily area, Bioware also hid a "secret" quest chain that required you to use your Macrobinoculars to even activate it and which rewards you with a pet if you complete it. On Oricon, this was taken a step further in that several of the dailies have bonus missions which can only be done if you've got Macrobinoculars and a Seeker Droid on that character.

Now, part of me thinks that's very cool. It shows that Bioware didn't introduce these things as new features with Rise of the Hutt Cartel just to immediately forget about them again - something that is sadly pretty common in MMOs - and that they are trying to integrate them more closely into "regular" gameplay.

The only problem I have in this case... is that I'm not sure I want these things to be part of my regular gameplay. You only really need to do the introductory quests for both the Shroud and the Dread Seed story to unlock the binocs and Seeker Droids for use in other areas, but then you've got two unfinished quest chains sitting in your log. I don't know about you, but personally I hate that. I don't have to do everything on every character, but if I'm going to skip something, then I'm going to skip it entirely. I hate starting something and then abandoning it halfway through. So once I've picked up the Macrobinocular and Seeker Droid quest chains, I'll want to finish them... but they are really long! And at least one of them has a "must have exactly four people for this" heroic at the end, which is a royal pain to get a group for! Basically, they are the types of quests that are great to do once or twice but get incredibly tedious if you repeat them on several characters. Yet the more random content Bioware adds which requires you to have picked up these chains, the more the pressure increases for you to indeed pick them up on all your alts, even if they are annoying to do. It's a bit of a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" situation in my eyes.

The sad thing is, I really have no idea what could be done to improve this situation. Just not adding any more content for these features, ever, would be a bit sad. Yet at the same time I feel that they have a pretty annoying "attunement" for something that you might be expected to have on all of your alts, especially since you can't get started until what, level fifty? Fifty-three? In some ways I can't help but think that these chains would actually make for pretty good levelling content, what with all the travel across levelling planets, but unfortunately the fact that there are pretty explicit references to Makeb and the Dread Masters in the story means that Bioware can't just lower the required level for the quests without muddling up the timeline.

I suppose part of what it comes down to is how fun you consider using your Macrobinoculars and Seeker Droid. If they offer compelling gameplay, then of course there should be more of it, and having to do a lengthy quest chain to fully unlock both features should be no trouble at all. Personally I'm afraid I don't really enjoy them that much though. I stand by what I said about them being neat little mini-games, but... well. I loved using the binocs during the story quest line, to explore my environment and find solutions to overcome the obstacles in my way, but that kind of exploration only really works once. Scanning the same stuff over and over again for the dailies hasn't felt very compelling to me personally.

And Seeker Droids? I'm a little ashamed to say that to this day, I don't really "get" them. I mean, I get the principle behind how they work, but I remain ignorant of the details. For example, when the little circle pops up to show me which direction I should go to dig more, is that from where my character is standing or from where I put down the droid? I often feel like I'm "following" the trail correctly but somehow I just end up going in circles without finding anything, or I suddenly find myself in an area where the guiding circle just goes red (even though a moment ago it told me to go just this way, I swear). I don't really know many people that bother with the random dig sites, though my dear friend Mogle baffled me the other day by casually mentioning that, while using his Seeker Droid to dig up the full Dread Seed armour set, he had accumulated something like 24 bracers and 37 belts. My mind boggles at the mere idea of how much time he must have spent digging, but clearly there is a part of the player base that does enjoy this kind of thing.

What's your attitude towards these features, nearly a year later?