When Will We Get 8.0? Will We Ever?

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

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

Now for the long answer.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Looking Back At Past Expansion Announcements

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hype and Hope

When I reviewed my 2018 predictions for SWTOR back in December, I said that I wasn't going to make any for 2019, but lately I've been doing a lot of thinking about SWTOR's near future again. This year's Star Wars Celebration takes place in Chicago and is only about a month away at this point, and Bioware has made it clear that this will be when we'll finally find out about what's in store for SWTOR for the rest of the year. I think even though it hasn't been made official, everyone pretty much expects this to be the long-awaited 6.0 expansion announcement.

Someone asked me in a comment section somewhere what this expansion would have to entail to make me happy, and this gave me pause because I actually didn't immediately know what to answer. I've heard a few other fan content creators do their own speculating, and in my opinion some of their expectations are pretty high. I guess this is somewhat understandable, what with Casey Hudson's claim that this was going to be SWTOR's "most exciting year yet", but I've long been wary of superlatives like that. And what exactly does "exciting" mean in this context anyway? Exciting things aren't always good...

Anyway, as for what I personally would like to see, in a nutshell: a "classic" expansion following the basic model of Rise of the Hutt Cartel and Shadow of Revan. That would mean one large or two medium-sized planets with new quests and story, a level cap increase, one or two new operations, one or two new flashpoints.

I guess to someone who's made their home in a different MMO it might seem strange that the inclusion of such basic features might even be in question, but SWTOR's just never really developed a consistent model when it comes to adding new content. In the early years it briefly seemed like they were settling on having two smaller expansions per year, one focused on story and one focused on a new feature, such as space combat or housing (which was a cadence that I quite enjoyed by the way), but then Knights of the Fallen Empire came out and threw everything into disarray. Mind you, they still had a plan at that point, to continue telling that story over several "seasons", but then that didn't work out either (for whatever reasons), and since then we've just kind of gone from one patch to the next for more than two years.

From the sounds of it, 6.0 has been in development for over a year, which makes you think that it should be big, considering Bioware's previous output in past years (before the current big lull that is), but everyone always claims that the SWTOR team is much smaller now, so I don't want to get my hopes up too much. Also, people have pretty much always complained about SWTOR's expansions not being meaty enough. I do remember feeling similarly back when Rise of the Hutt Cartel came out actually, simply because my only real reference point back then was World of Warcraft, and WoW's expansions had always been huge. I knew to adjust my expectations after that, but I've still seen other people complain about the lack of content in pretty much every expansion after that.

Beyond this hope related to the basic scope of 6.0, I have little in the way of expectations. The way gearing works will need a revamp because the number of currencies, vendors and tokens is a proper nightmare right now, to the point that it confuses even pretty hardcore players, but I don't have a specific solution in mind myself. I guess it would be nice if there was some new feature that turned out to be a pleasant surprise, but the last big new feature they decided to surprise us with (Galactic Command) created nothing but unhappiness, so... if I had to choose, I'd rather not have something dramatic and new than end up with another dud.

Only somewhat tangentially related, but one also has to wonder whether there will be a big cinematic trailer again. None of the aforementioned expansions that I'm hoping 6.0 will mimic had them, but after KotFE and KotET had one each it would feel like a bit of a vote of no confidence on EA's part if they decided not to promote this new expansion in a similar way. And Star Wars Celebration would certainly be as good a place as any to try and make a splash with a shiny new cinematic. Bioware's presentation is also going to be a big enough deal that it actually got a mention on the official Star Wars site, which is rare enough.

Ultimately, I find myself going back and forth on this subject a lot, even within the time it took me to write this post. Hype is bad and leads to nothing but disappointment in my opinion. There are plenty of reasons to try to not get too excited about what's coming up next. But then there are those small glimpses that make you hopeful again - and story-wise, I absolutely adored Ossus and can't wait to see how those events will be followed up. I guess I remain cautiously optimistic that reality won't be too far off from what I'm hoping for.

Story Gating

Telwyn has been playing a bit of Final Fantasy XIV recently, making use of a promotion that granted him some free game time, and summed up his experiences of both the good and the bad in two recent posts. One of the negative points he mentioned was that too many of the game's features are gated behind having to complete its main storyline (for his liking anyway), in this particular case expansion content that you're not allowed to access until you've done a certain amount of "the old stuff", though I also remember seeing people complain about much earlier gates like this before, such as not being able to buy a mount until a certain point in the story.

I've never played a Final Fantasy game myself, and from what I've read about it it doesn't really sound like my cup of tea either, but as a SWTOR player I still find its approach to story very fascinating, as there seems to be a certain amount of common ground between the two MMOs when it comes to the importance given to story within the context of the game. I don't know whether being this strict in terms of questing requirements is necessarily the "right" approach, but I can't help but feel a certain amount of respect for the game's creators for sticking to their vision, even in the face of criticism (as Telwyn is far from the first person to bring this up as a problem).

What's also interesting to me is that despite of SWTOR's love for story as a "fourth pillar", it has never been this strict in terms of its story gating. Yes, the class story is very linear and does tie into the story of the galaxy as a whole, but in terms of game mechanics, the only things that were strictly gated behind story at launch were:

1. More of the same class story - you couldn't just drop it at the end of Tatooine and then pick it up again on Belsavis. If you dropped it at any point and decided to focus on levelling through other means, you had to go back and do all the quests you missed to be able to see the rest of that particular storyline.

2. Access to your companions. (This has become kind of moot with the amount of story-less companions that you are now able to pick up from promotions and the Cartel Market.)

3. Access to your personal starship.

I also seem to remember some sort of early restriction to being able to leave the starter planet if you hadn't wrapped up the story there, but I'm not sure now whether I didn't just dream that...

Either way, for all our love of SWTOR's story, dedicated players have also enjoyed pushing against its limitations for a long time. Who could forget the podcaster who levelled from 1 to cap by doing nothing but queuing for starfighter matches? Being lazy about the class story is also an ongoing joke among players who maintain raiding alts from my experience, especially when it turns out that this or that character hasn't even bothered to earn their personal starship and now has trouble actually getting around despite of already being near or at the level cap.

The initial batch of post-launch content was remarkably indifferent about continuity as well, usually not requiring any specific prerequisites before you could access it. It was just assumed that you'd done your class story and that you would be happy for the NPCs to treat you accordingly. This could actually be annoying when it would lead to unintentional spoilers via characters addressing you by the rank you hold by the end of your class story before you had actually earned it (mostly a problem for Sith characters). I remember this being particularly egregious with Makeb, before the mission terminal on the ship had been introduced and you could suddenly end up with the Rise of the Hutt Cartel intro playing out of nowhere while you were still trying to wrap up your class story.

Shadow of Revan made a valiant attempt at making sure that it made sense to all players regardless of where they were at in the story. The "miniature class story" on Rishi is inserted in such a way that it can be cut out if you start the story arc without actually having completed your class story beforehand, and there are even separate intros for characters that have or haven't done the precursory Forged Alliances missions. I was reminded of this the other day when Vulkk expressed wonder at the optional cut scenes introducing Lana and Theron on Rishi if you never met them before. (Personally I knew that this option existed, but had never played through it myself either.) I wonder how much work went into these content variations that a huge chunk of the player base never even saw?

Looking back at that now, I can't really blame Bioware for developing the desire to start fresh and with a clean slate with 4.0. Forget having all those different story variations - when a player looks at starting Knights of the Fallen Empire, the game outright tells you to better finish up any pending business beforehand as it will be a whole new world after that.

Of course that brought other issues with it. Since the "Knights of..." expansions weren't shy about branding themselves as your new personal story, it seemed to make sense to have one chapter lead into the next and so on - like the class missions, with no jumping around. The problem is that there was nothing else to do. It's one thing to have a linear storyline taking place within a huge world, where you can wander off the beaten path at any time and then backtrack later, and another to have a linear storyline when that's all there is.

Even so, Bioware once again didn't want players to feel held back for too long. Couldn't get yourself to finish all of the KotFE chapters? No worries, just jump right into KotET anyway and we'll count those last few KotFE chapters as "auto-completed"! Then again, that can cause issues yet again, as characters might suddenly find themselves saddled with a backstory that runs counter to everything they've done before.

Yes, I feel a certain amount of admiration for Final Fantasy XIV's developers and their devotion to the game's story. On the other hand, I can totally see how this rigid system can be a drag for players - and in some ways, it offers the writers and developers an easy way out, because they'll always know what exactly each player has seen and done by the time they reach any particular point in the story.

SWTOR on the other hand is constantly torn between wanting to tell a coherent story and giving players the freedom to do things in a different order if they want to. Despite of the game's strong narrative focus, it never manages to stick to requiring this or that to unlock the next piece of the story for very long. As a long-time player with many alts I appreciate that, but at the same time I often see new players get confused about what order they are supposed to do things in and whether it's sensible to skip this or that storyline. There's no winning here: If you lock events into a linear path, players will feel restricted, but if you give them the freedom to choose, others will be confused about where to go.

The more I think about it, the more sense it would make for 6.0 to wipe the slate clean once again (more or less at least), by getting us to a point where it doesn't matter much anymore what we did as the Alliance Commander and it becomes more important to look towards the future.

Shadow of Revan is Overrated

Clickbait title? Thanks to Pfannenstiel for the post idea in any case.

There is a new SWTOR podcast in town which I have yet to add to my sidebar, called The Council, and last week a Twitter poll of theirs made the rounds asking people about their favourite SWTOR expansion. I added my own vote and looked at the results, unsurprised that I wasn't part of the relative majority, and moved on without giving it any more thought.

However, this morning I found that Pfanne had written a whole post about it, detailing why he agreed strongly with the most popular choice and still considers Shadow of Revan the best expansion to date. This in turn made me want to write a post about why I strongly disagree and actually consider Shadow of Revan the worst expansion to date. Hurrah for blogger cross-fertilisation!

Now, saying that I think Shadow of Revan was SWTOR's worst expansion so far probably sounds worse than it is, because while I love to criticise and pick apart absolutely everything, I personally don't think that the game has had any truly poor expansions. I just think that all the others were better, even if Rishi is a gorgeous planet and I enjoyed the little class story epilogues that SoR gave us.

Post-launch support matters

First off, a good expansion - to me - is about more than a checklist of its launch day features. What is being done to keep things interesting afterwards? Is there ongoing support in the form of large patches and new content releases?

My own pick for best expansion, Rise of the Hutt Cartel, was an absolute star in this regard, but because it didn't tie everything together into a single coherent narrative, people like to forget that all those patches were actually still part of the RotHC content cycle. Someone in the Twitter conversation even wanted to call Oricon an expansion due to its sheer size, and that was just one of those 2.x patches. Others included CZ-198 and the three Forged Alliances flashpoints - another piece of content that people wrongly associate with another expansion (SoR), even though it was actually released months beforehand and only had the "Prelude to Shadow of Revan" label attached to it afterwards. I even joked back then that the patches were coming out faster than I could keep track of them, which is a problem I haven't had in a long time.

In comparison, Shadow of Revan's post-release scene was an absolute wasteland. I even went back to check the patch notes on the official website to make sure I wasn't forgetting anything, but it was actually the opposite: the patch notes only underlined how little there was going on during that time. For example the patch notes for 3.1, 3.2 and 3.3 all made "Bounty Contract Week Returns!" one of the "highlights" because they just had nothing else to talk about. There was Ziost, and that was pretty much it. Three numbered patches for ten months of expansion time, and only one of those actually added a significant amount of new content. And to think that people accused KotFE with its near-monthly cadence of chapter and Alliance alert releases of having no content.

Hurting group play for poor solo features

At launch I only marked it as an "odd choice" that Shadow of Revan forced you into solo instances over and over again, but I actually became quite peeved once I realised that this was now the new normal. In hindsight I can see why they did it - because they wanted you to be able to smooch Theron or Lana in peace, but I still think that this was a piss-poor excuse to ruin the fun of people who were trying to level with their friends. I didn't actually mind the forced solo nature of KotFE and KotET as much because at least those expansions gave me the feeling that my character was driving the story to some extent and making choices that made a difference. If you've ever felt that KotFE and KotET's choices "didn't really matter", go back to Shadow of Revan and Ziost and tell me what great decisions your character got to make in that content. I'll wait. Makeb didn't have very exciting choices either, but at least you could play through the whole thing seamlessly with a group. SoR just combined the worst of both worlds.

It also introduced solo modes to flashpoints with that stupid GSI droid. I don't much mind giving people the ability to solo the content, but the all-powerful droid was a poor band-aid that made for incredibly boring gameplay. Crisis on Umbara is a good example of how you can make a good solo mode in my opinion.

Lack of quality control

Every patch has its bugs, but for some reason SoR sticks out in my memory as buggier than most. Maybe it wasn't - I don't have a handy list to consult for this as I have with the patch notes - but did any other expansion launch with the final part of its main story hopelessly bugged out? I seem to remember that the solo Revan fight was totally impossible to complete solo for something like a week? And of course, once it had been fixed, it was still a terribly scripted and annoying encounter that we were supposed to repeat weekly. I also remember Rishi and Yavin IV being lag hell for weeks, to the point that people said they were quitting because the game was as good as unplayable anyway.

People also like to cite that SoR launched with no less than two operations and two flashpoints, but the problem is that they really weren't that great! Blood Hunt was OK I guess, making a splash by featuring Shae Vizla in game for the first time, but Battle of Rishi was very bland and loveless. The operations were also full of bugs (there was that Coratanni exploit, the main SoR quest line not advancing after ToS completion, the infamous Underlurker remaining totally unpredictable for months) and poorly tuned. I remember Temple of Sacrifice was the first ever operation where I walked out after our first clear and instead of thinking "Wow, that was fun!" I just felt tired and worn out. I had in fact planned to record a video of our first run-through, expecting it to be a laugh, but ended up deleting all the footage because people just ended up getting tired and grumpy. It left such a bad first impression on me that I'd probably rank Ravagers and ToS as my least favourite operations to this day.

Things I Like

I'd personally rank Rise of the Hutt Cartel as my favourite expansion because I liked the game as it was at launch, and without claiming that it was perfect, the 2.x content cycle expanded the base game in a lot of ways that stayed true to the aspects I liked, even if more class and companion stories weren't in the cards at the time.

Knights of the Fallen Empire had issues with the lack of new group content and made levelling a tad too easy for my liking, but I loved the introduction of level sync as a general concept and got hours of fun out of the re-tuned group content. I dare say that my guild actually did better for itself during that time than it did in SoR. KotFE also introduced my favourite warzone of all time - no, I'm not being sarcastic. And I did enjoy getting a new story update every month, not going to lie, which means that KotFE firmly wins out over SoR in the raw fun department for me.

As for KotET - well, I'd say the jury is still out on that one! I think it was off to a strong start with the chapters, uprisings and the promise of a new operation, but Iokath was a bit of a mixed bag and it feels like updates have slowed down quite a bit over the past few months. Still, as I said above, I try to judge an expansion in its entirety, and KotET still has plenty of time left to throw out some more interesting patches.

Too Many Alts or Not Enough Variety?

I've always loved rolling alts. Back in World of Warcraft, I had created a whole bunch of alts before my first character even hit the level cap... and over time, my stable only grew. I like to roll different classes and species to view the (virtual) world through different eyes. It's a way of playing that offers variety both in terms of gameplay as well as in terms of immersion. ("What does it mean to be a fighter in this world as opposed to be a healer? Or to belong to one faction instead of another?")

With its promise of eight unique class stories, SWTOR was always going to be an altoholic's dream. On the whole, I feel that it has indeed lived up to that promise. It took me nearly two years to complete all the game's class stories, and each of them offered a unique piece to the puzzle that is The Old Republic as a whole. You may even find it questionable how much content is hidden away in some class stories - for example the role and whereabouts of the Sith emperor are quite opaque until you've played a Jedi knight and a Sith warrior. Or how about the fact that the Supreme Chancellor of the Republic just changes from one person to another one day - for which the only explanation is found in the bounty hunter story? I've levelled a multitude of alts to explore all these different aspects of the in-game universe and have loved every minute of it.

Lately though... I've been feeling a bit burnt out on my alts, and I've been wondering why that is.

It started with a joking throwaway comment in my post about making an alt on the Progenitor, how I would feel guilty if I just made another character on the Red Eclipse that I then wouldn't find the time to play anyway. But it's definitely been remarkable how refreshing and freeing it feels to play on the Progenitor. When I log in there, Agent Shintar is all I have to worry about. It's limiting in some ways to not have a huge legacy of characters that can provide assistance in the form of resources, but it also makes life a lot simpler and carefree. But why should alts feel like a burden?

I remembered an old post of Syl's (or two), in which she talked about why she personally dislikes alts and why they are not for her. She makes some interesting points about how alts can negatively affect gameplay, but the most interesting thing to me was actually my own comment to that post back in 2011. I always think it's a bit conceited and possibly absurd to quote yourself, but just this once I'll bite the bullet. I was still playing WoW back then and this is what I had to say about it:

"I’ve definitely noticed a certain “alt burnout” in myself that started in WOTLK, due to the accessibility changes. In BC all my alts eventually hit some sort of progression ceiling, and that was good because it kept them alts. While my main was raiding Black Temple, my alts became Champions of the Naaru and I could be proud of it. But in WOTLK, it all became kind of samey. Every time the badges got updated, all my alts could upgrade their entire gear. They could all raid Trial of the Crusader. It actually felt kind of tiring, and I’m still struggling a bit with where to draw the line in Cataclysm."

The thing that made me tire of alts a bit back then was that they were all doing the same content at the same time. There was no distinction anymore between the main that you were always trying to keep on the cutting edge and say, the alt that was only ever doing the lower tier content but had a reason to actually keep doing it. And if I look at it, I think this is kind of the problem that I currently have in SWTOR as well. In fact, in some ways it's surprising that I haven't noticed it being an issue any earlier, even if gear gating is less of a "thing" in SWTOR than it is in WoW. The story matters a lot though.

If eight different class stories were an altoholic's dream, then the revelation that the class stories weren't going to be continued after launch should have shattered that dream long ago. But I suppose it didn't really matter at first, because it was always going to take me some time to actually see all the content that the game launched with. With Makeb, I guess the first cracks started to show, but at the same time, it wasn't too bad. I completed that planetary quest chain on some characters but not on others, and while I felt vaguely guilty about it since the loading screen summaries kept reminding me that it was supposed to be chapter four of my class story, it wasn't too big a deal. It was just one more story. There was little reason to go to Makeb outside of it because its dailies sucked anyway, and Toborro's Courtyard wasn't an operation you wanted to keep running on a regular basis. Completing Makeb wasn't a requirement to move on to CZ-198 or Oricon.

This sounds pretty terrible in some way, doesn't it? "I didn't mind that all my characters were prompted to go to Makeb because I didn't have to and didn't miss much if I didn't." But there is value in not feeling too tied down. Currently, any of my alts that are level 55 or higher feel very tied down. (The lower level ones are fine, honestly. It's not like I've done all the class stories multiple times, and stuff like "jumping into lowbie PvP" provides alternate gameplay that I can't experience on my main.)

But for those alts near the level cap, it feels like the path to progression that's open to them is all the same, and it's only getting same-ier. Shadow of Revan has brought with it an increased amount of linearity. Do the four Forged Alliances flashpoints in the correct order. Do Rishi. Do Yavin 4. Do Ziost. It's all got to be done in that order or not at all. I actually enjoyed repeating the main Shadow of Revan story arc multiple times because it was well done, not to mention the massive carrot that awaited on Rishi in the form of the new class missions. But then we got the next part of the story and... you can't even do it unless you completed what came before. It makes complete sense from a narrative point of view, but it also feels so limiting. I can't take my Scoundrel or my Marauder to Ziost just for fun (not without a guild ship summon anyway) because neither of them has completed the SoR storyline.

Ziost itself, while a great piece of content in some way, feels like it has limited replayability as well. It feels like it was mainly added to drive the story forward and doesn't have much purpose beyond that. I have to confess that as much as I've gushed about it, I've only actually completed the Ziost storyline on Shintar and one of my Imperial alts - that's it. I keep thinking that I probably "should" go and move more characters forward through it (because I do like their play style and their back stories), but the thought that all of them will just be going through the exact same motions as my first two characters is honestly quite a downer.

I thought I'd accepted the class stories ending on Corellia. I figured if Bioware kept adding more planets like Makeb or Oricon, they would eventually build a levelling path with enough content that you could mix things up on alts. But with Shadow of Revan it looks increasingly like we're all going to be playing the same linear story on all of our alts, and that chafes. I suppose that whatever ends up happening with the Emperor will only be playable after you've completed Ziost or it won't make any sense, but I hope that after this, Bioware will reconsider this highly limited and linear approach to storytelling. I'm actually okay with linear stories in MMOs... as long as you can either choose out of a selection of several different stories, or the game still gives you enough options on the side to mix it up and make alt play interesting. Right now, it seems that those options are rapidly diminishing as all our characters are being funnelled into a single storyline, leaving them with nowhere else to go (unless you want to do nothing but PvP I guess).

Adventures in Old Content

After the release of 3.0, when it turned out that Bioware had forgotten to adjust the commendation drops for certain types of content to the new level cap (meaning that old flashpoints and operations actually gave better rewards initially than the new ones), people asked me repeatedly if I wanted to join for some classic ops runs to min-max my commendation rewards, but I pretty much always said no at first. After more than a year of having nothing to work on but Dread Fortress and Palace, the last thing I wanted to do as soon as we got some new content was go back there! And how long have Terror from Beyond and Scum and Villainy been in the game now? No, thanks.

Of course, two months later the shine of the new operations is starting to wear off and I feel ready to mix things up with a run of classic content again every now and then. It's been interesting.

One of my main concerns in regards to the 3.0 combat changes had been how they would affect ops encounters that relied on interrupts and dispels to have very specific (shorter) cooldowns. As it turns out, Bioware applied a simple if not very elegant band-aid to at least some fights (I only noticed it in Dread Fortress and Palace, though that doesn't necessarily mean that it wasn't present elsewhere). What happens is that as soon as you start the encounter, you'll receive a buff called "Classic Encounter" which resets your dispel cooldown to what it used to be for the duration of the fight.

It works well enough and was probably a lot easier to implement than going back and adjusting the fights to the new cooldowns, but it's a bit clunky as the buff doesn't appear until you pull - so you may very well be scratching your head just before the fight (like I did), wondering how you're supposed to deal with the required dispels. Also, as far as we could tell it doesn't affect interrupt cooldowns, even though the shorter cooldown on those also used to be pretty crucial to some fights.

On the Raptus fight in Dread Palace we also ran into a bug that was supposed to have been fixed in a recent patch, namely that the healing challenge is acting wonky and the NPC you're supposed to heal pretty much dies in the blink of an eye, making the challenge impossible to pass. You can still complete the encounter afterwards (at least on hardmode, which is what we did), but it sure felt odd to encounter new bugs in old content.

The thing that I found the most striking though was that all the hardmodes we did for the various classic ops weeklies were still pretty hard, even at level sixty. As seasoned veterans of the fights we generally made it through them without too much trouble, but it someone messed up too badly it still resulted in a wipe.

I couldn't help but think that this doesn't make for a great environment for casual players interested in operations at the moment. Several fights in the new story modes are hard enough to be pug killers, yet it seems that people can't even go back and steamroll the old content for a couple of easy comms. This is quite a contrast to 2.0, when both TFB and Scum were pretty accessible on story mode, and by which point Eternity Vault and Karagga's Palace could easily be pugged even on the highest difficulties. (Explosive Conflict not so much, but that wasn't as much of an issue simply because there were other options.) I'll admit that it's been a while since I last pugged an operation myself, but at least from the outside the pug scene for operations looks pretty dire at the moment.

A Curious Levelling Experience

Yesterday morning I "finally" hit 60. 55 to 60 was a rather curious levelling experience.

 

Before Rise of the Hutt Cartel came out, it had already been talked about that limiting yourself only to the quests on Makeb wasn't going to be enough to make it all the way to 55, so I had been prepared: I "saved up" a whole bunch of completed dailies and did a level 50 flashpoint or two while levelling. In the end I hit 55 with no issues, I believe while doing the weekly mission that follows Makeb's main storyline.

With Shadow of Revan, we had a lot less information about the nitty gritty of how things were going to work in the expansion content, but with two whole new planets I was optimistic that the new quests would take me all the way to 60 - probably foolishly optimistic.

After talking to some guildies who hadn't completed the Forged Alliances arc before 3.0, it seems that the levelling curve is balanced around you doing all those flashpoints in solo mode first and gaining a good one a half levels before you even start on Rishi. Since I had already done all of that however, I ended up hitting a wall at 58, even with full restedness and while having an XP boost active for the entire time.

On Rishi it had seemed like the XP was flowing freely, but the story on Yavin 4 was a lot shorter than I had expected. Bioware had promised beforehand that they were implementing a new system that would allow you to see the culmination of the Revan storyline solo as well as in a group. Story-wise they set this up quite nicely: Once you're ready to assault Revan's forces, you basically get to choose between leading a small strike team yourself (aka do the operation) or "encourage" the troops by doing dailies for them.

Being a happy raider myself, I picked the operation option. Except... I was still level 58 and now seemingly out of quests. I don't know if it's technically possible to enter the new operations at 58, but even if it is, that was hardly going to be ideal. My pet tank encouraged me to reset the quest and switch to the solo option - and low and behold, a whole new bunch of dailies appeared, which allowed me to gain another level. It seems kind of odd to me to initially lock these behind having to make the choice to solo, especially as they do unlock for everyone anyway once you've completed the story.

We also ran one of the new tactical flashpoints as a random, but sadly the XP in there wasn't great. And going back to the 55 hardmodes seemed terribly unappealing, especially as Bioware completely removed all quests from them. I hope that this is just an oversight (as they seem to have converted the old 55 HM weekly into a new 60 HM weekly, without considering that this would leave the 55s with no missions associated with them whatsoever).

After the troops on Yavin 4 have been sufficiently "motivated", you're given a solo mission to face off against Revan himself, aided by the all friendly NPCs that have been at your side throughout the course of story. In an extreme twist of irony, this SOLO mission was launched bugged, and one of the possible workarounds is to form a full group of four (even though only one of you will get credit for the quest) and power through it as a team, which is what me and some of my guildies eventually opted for. To make sure that everyone got credit, we had to repeat the whole thing four times. Oh joy.

Basically the problem is that Revan as a hostile NPC is an absolute beast that spams stuns and knockbacks like nobody's business, so that you rely heavily on the friendly NPCs being alive and taking some of the pressure off you. Satele's constant AoE heal in particular is invaluable when you're actually attempting the fight on your own. If the fight works as intended, that's fine... but all too often it bugs out.

The issue is that there are two points in the fight where Revan is supposed to pull everyone in and then traps all the NPCs while standing in the middle of the area himself, immune to damage and emitting a light AoE damage pulse but not doing anything else, while little power orbs of sorts float about which you can use to free your allies and resume the fight.

 

The thing is, more often than not this mechanic bugs out. If you're lucky, he'll pull everyone in, but not trap anyone and just continue fighting right on. If you're unlucky, he'll trap the NPCs but then continue whacking you, and as you're unable to free the NPCs you die quickly without their assistance.

People have suggested various workarounds on the forums, from taunting at the right time to "doing nothing" for most of the fight, to simply forming a group as we did. I've seen someone theorise that the bug is triggered by dots ticking on Revan right as he's supposed to become immune to damage, so that he immediately goes back to normal fighting.

I'm sure that this bug will be fixed soon, but I can understand why people are pissed off that such a blatant issue that stops the story dead in its tracks made it onto the live servers. For me, it meant that I spent my evening fighting Revan over and over again to get everyone in my group the quest credit without actually making any progress levelling. Fortunately completing the mission unlocked the daily hub in full, so that I could go out and get the last little bit of XP I was missing from more dailies. But it sure was an odd experience.

Last Minute Pre-Expansion Thoughts

Shadow of Revan launches today and I'm finally excited, even though it feels like I've been too busy in the past couple of weeks to have much time for happy anticipation.

I don't know how long exploring the new content will keep us busy (if Rise of the Hutt Cartel is any indication, two weeks or so seems like a good guess for me), but just getting to experience an expansion launch again is exciting.

I can't wait to see the new planets and play around with the discipline system and... and what?

The more I think about it, the more it seems to me that we actually know remarkably little about this expansion. Before Rise of the Hutt Cartel came out, Makeb was limited to closed testing as well, but pretty much everything else was available on the public test server. People could insta-level to 55 to play around with the updated talent trees. I ran a level 55 hardmode flashpoint with my guildies. Some of them even tried Scum and Villainy before it went live.

When you compare that to this time around, it feels like we know very little beyond which feature boxes will be ticked in the expansion. In the past week, questions started to pop up in my guild: What kind of gear will you be able to buy with Basic commendations? Will there still be repeatable missions for the level 50 operations, considering that they will go "grey" at 60? Which gear will disappear from vendors? We have no idea.

Even some pretty significant gameplay changes have only been discussed in the vaguest of terms. Dread Palace nightmare was rumoured to offer alternate progression to the new level 60 operations - will it or won't it? Is the new ability to solo certain flashpoints going to be a complete paradigm-changer? What about this supposed new way of being able to experience the end of the Revan story solo as an alternative to doing the operation? I don't know, maybe something has been datamined (that's one source of news that I've somewhat stayed away from for fear of spoilers), but on the whole it feels like we know remarkably little about the details of what's to come.

This could be a good thing - it offers us a chance to experience an increased sense of wonder as we find out about things for the first time - or it could hide some unpleasant surprises. We'll find out very soon.

New Facts and Figures from Bioware

Some interesting news about SWTOR came out in the past week.

First off, there was the press event that was held in California two weeks ago and about which the people who attended weren't allowed to talk until the start of this week. Heather from Pretty Little Sith posted a great, in-depth report about it on her site.

Can I just say how pleasant it was to read a Q&A where people actually asked sensible questions? No offense to the Community Cantinas, but all too often the people attending there ask terrible questions during the Q&A sessions, usually things along the lines of "When will we (ever) see [insert feature here]?", to which the answer is always something vague about how it sounds like a cool idea and they'd quite like to do it but probably not any time soon. So it was really refreshing to see a Q&A where the people asking the questions were actually in touch with the community and had clearly given their questions some thought.

It was also nice to see the devs "come out of their shells" a bit so to speak and be able to elaborate on certain issues, such as their stance on datamining. I was happy to hear that they are planning to double-down on Bioware cinematics next year, which will hopefully mean more PvE content at a faster pace than we've seen recently. I think GSF and GSH added value to the game, but I agree with their stance that they shouldn't try to add more feature expansions just for the sake of adding new features when nothing really jumps out at them as making a good addition.

I'm also a sucker for stats and statistics and found it interesting that they revealed that fewer than two percent of all free players hit their weekly warzone cap, which goes very much against the commonly touted assumption that letting free players queue more often and/or for ranked play would fix any queueing issues once and for all.

Apparently the number of guilds who participate in Conquest is going up, something that definitely matches my experience. I noted that during the last Total Galactic War, the event ended with ten empty spots on the leaderboard on The Red Eclipse. This week it's already been completely filled up. (And my guild has been beaten by a Polish guild I'd never even heard of before.)

A lesson they apparently learned for Shadow of Revan is that they need to make the questing content "worthwhile" because apparently "many" people levelled to 55 without even going to Makeb. Again, this is something I can attest to... I did complete Makeb several times, but most of my alts haven't actually done it, because once you'd seen the story, the planet wasn't really very rewarding in terms of gameplay.

On Wednesday Bioware also released a new infographic about SWTOR on the official website. I was quite excited about this as I feel that they've become very coy about numbers of any kind ever since the free-to-play conversion (which is kind of understandable considering that things like decreasing sub numbers made for terrible PR, but still). It wasn't quite as interesting as I would have hoped (for example I felt that all the emphasis on the length of the cinematic story content wasn't all that relevant or interesting) but there were still some fascinating tidbits of information in it.

For example the class distribution shows Empire and Republic on nearly even ground, with the two Jedi classes being the most popular - which is kind of what you'd expect in a Star Wars game, but this wasn't true at launch! When Bioware first released information about class distribution back at the guild summit in 2012, the Sith inquisitor was by far the most popular class for some reason, making up 19% of the player population. Now they are down to roughly 14%. Meanwhile the total population of Jedi (knights and consulars put together) has risen from making up roughly 17% of the playerbase to over 30%. Also, the Empire in general was a lot more popular than the Republic at launch, but the population seems to have evened out since then, with Imperial characters outnumbering the Republic only by a few hundred thousand. (Though something is slightly off with these numbers, as they talk about 57 million characters created at the top of the graphic, but the numbers listed in the class distribution bit actually add up to nearly 60 million, which I find a bit confusing. If it was the other way round, you could argue that 3 million characters were created and then deleted, but you can't have more characters exist than were ever created...)

The number of player ships listed is also interesting, as acquiring your ship requires you to actually complete your class storyline on Coruscant or Dromund Kaas, so this implies that only about 11% of all characters even complete the prologue. Now, while there are probably some odd exceptions like people who level purely by GSF and ignore their class story or characters that exist purely as name placeholders, this certainly reminds me of the old WoW statistic that revealed that only 30% of new players made it to level 10, and how even that was actually amazingly good by MMO standards.

As somewhat of a counterpoint, the 635 million hours invested in the game make for an average of 11 hours per character... now if you consider that 90% of the people who try the game stop playing relatively early, that leaves a lot of hours for the people who actually do stick with the game.

Shoraan on the forums also pointed out that it's kind of surprising just how close the number of mob kills and PvP kills listed on the infographic are, which implies that about one PvP kill happens for every 2.5 PvE kills. Considering the hundreds and thousands of mobs you mow down while levelling and doing dailies, that's actually a lot of PvP happening in a game that isn't really focused on it.

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?

What would you like to see in the next story expansion?

I don't know about you, but the thing that excited me the most about the 2014 Producer's Road Map was the mention of another digital expansion "closely resembling Rise of the Hutt Cartel". While story content doesn't provide me with entertainment for as many hours as say, a new operation, it's still very near and dear to my heart. It's what makes SWTOR stand out from other MMOs, and while I'm glad that other activities exist in game, they are not the main feature.

This got me thinking about what I would like to see in another story expansion, even if it's most likely still quite far off at this point. Which aspects of Rise of the Hutt Cartel would I like to see copied in future releases and which ones would I prefer to see changed?

I'm undecided about another level cap increase. I do think there is a case to be made for continually increasing the level cap as more story content is added, especially in a story-heavy game like SWTOR. Accumulating too much content at the level cap leads to bad story flow in the long run. I've been dabbling in World of Warcraft a bit lately and it's very apparent in that game, considering that it's had four level cap increases under its belt now, always with two-year breaks in-between. The result is that every time you hit one of the old level caps while levelling - previously a point where content accumulated for two years - you suddenly end up abandoning the current storyline halfway through and skipping a huge chunk of content as you advance. The current level cap in WoW also has four patches worth of additions to play through already, and without doing any out-of-game research it's not necessarily apparent what order they are meant to be done in. In terms of story, it's a convoluted mess. Now, you could argue that the number of people that play WoW for the story are only a small minority and you'd probably be right. The Old Republic is a different beast however. So far at level 55, we've battled our way through a Czerka facility and fought the Dread Masters on Oricon. Add a new story planet, and that's a good amount of content to take a levelling player to a new level cap of sixty for example, without running out of things to do or outlevelling the content too quickly. I think from that point of view, adding another five levels would be a good idea.

On the other hand, Rise of the Hutt Cartel has shown us that a level cap increase also results in a considerable amount of upheaval. There are talent tree adjustments to think about, and you suddenly lose a lot of your endgame, risking that players will be bored at the new level cap. Do we really want to go through that again so soon? From this angle, I'm leaning towards no. Don't get me wrong, I actually think that Bioware did a bang-up job with the way they handled the increase from fifty to 55. Classes gained new abilities and talents were changed, but it wasn't a matter of completely relearning how to play. They struck a good balance between making things feel fresh and preserving the familiar. And while the available content at 55 did feel a little thin for the first few months after 2.0, this was alleviated by the fact that the old level fifty flashpoints and operations continued to offer worthwhile rewards for some time and that Bioware embraced that fact instead of forcing the content into complete obsolescence, by supporting it with measures such as handing out Ultimate commendations for doing the classic ops weekly.

So as far as a level cap increase goes, I could see it going either way without me being terribly upset or super excited, as I see both pros and cons.

What about the new story content itself? Should it be like Makeb?

Shortly after RotHC came out, I praised Makeb for being pretty and said that I was looking forward to it becoming a new endgame planet. I was also very happy with the story, even if it wasn't class-specific.

Fast-forward ten months and my opinions have changed a little. I still think that the story was nice, but I have to admit that replayability really suffered from how generic it was. I really believed the devs when they said that it would still feel tailored to different characters' roles and personalities, but... it didn't really. As a result only four of my currently nine level 55 characters have actually completed the Makeb story arc; I just couldn't get myself to repeat the exact same content in such quick succession when I levelled up all my alts. This wouldn't be an issue if the game didn't treat Makeb as chapter four of my class story, always taunting me with that incomplete class story message on the loading screen every time I log onto a character that hasn't done it. So for another RotHC-like expansion, I'd wish for them to treat the new story arc as what it is, a new overall story arc, not my personal character's story. I know it's a small thing, but it really bugged me about Makeb.

Also, my ideas about Makeb becoming a bustling centre of endgame activity turned out to be completely and utterly wrong. Once you had completed the planetary story, there were basically only two reasons to go back: dailies and Toborro's courtyard. I think I've done Makeb dailies all of two or three times, because they are ridiculously spread out. I don't really know of anyone else who does them regularly either. Who wants to constantly fly from one mesa to the next just to do a single daily on each? Pretty much any other daily hub is a better choice. And Toborro's Courtyard? Sadly, it contained one of Bioware's less engaging operations fights, which always felt like too much hassle for too little reward. I haven't been to Makeb in months. So much for the new endgame planet.

My wish for whatever planet they send us to in the next expansion would therefore be that they give us more reasons to go back there and enjoy the scenery even after we've done the planetary storyline. If there are dailies, don't spread them out to the point where they are not at all worth doing. If there's an operations boss, don't make the fight so tedious that it's not fun. Maybe even give us reason to roam the planet's surface on other occasions. They've done a great job keeping various lower-level planets relevant during events such as Bounty Contract Week and for max-level quest chains like the Seeker Droid one. Yet Makeb just kind of sits there and has little purpose after you've played through the main story. That's one thing I'd like to see them do differently in a new expansion.

What would you like to see them do in the next story expansion if you could have it your way? (And don't say "add new class stories", because that goes without saying and we all know that it's not going to happen.)

Happy 2nd Birthday, SWTOR!

Today it's been two years since the game's official launch, not counting the days of early access for players who pre-ordered.

Shintar the trooper over the course of two years

When I wrote a similar birthday post last year, I had a lot of excitement to look back on: from the game's over-hyped launch to the painful fall from grace when subscriptions dropped massively over the following months, followed by server merges and eventually the controversial free-to-play conversion. In comparison, 2013 has been a relatively quiet year. While Bioware released a whole two "expansions" for the game (sorry, I just can't use that term without the quotation marks, especially when it comes to Galactic Starfighter...), they weren't really major game changers.

I'll admit that I haven't made a special effort to keep on top of what is being said about SWTOR in EA's quarterly earnings reports, but the general gist I got from various news outlets is that the game has remained stable in terms of player numbers (which would certainly match my own observations in game) and is doing okay from a financial point of view. It's not the cash cow EA originally wanted it to be, but it's doing all right for itself. With the game garnering less public attention, the vitriol that people have been spewing about it has also diminished. There are other, newer games to be complained about on the big MMO websites.

In terms of updates, the game has been chugging along pretty steadily. For comparison, here's how I summed up 2012's additions:

"They implemented two new flashpoints, two new operations, two new warzones, two new world bosses, two new daily quest areas, two world events - hey, I never realised that so many things came in twos - a new companion for all classes, as well as a multitude of system changes (legacy, the group finder, the augment system, gear colour matching, fifty bajillion PvP tweaks and so on)."

This year, we once again got two new flashpoints, three (!) new operations - admittedly no new 8 vs 8 warzones, but we did get arenas instead - four (!) new world bosses, two new daily quest areas, two new repeating world events and another new companion for all classes (though with less story). There wasn't as much constant tinkering with PvP and class balance that I can remember (oh hey, smash monkeys are still owning everyone), but in terms of new systems and quality of life changes they introduced reputations, a new species to play as, character re-customisation, the dye system, server transfers, the collection system and probably some more features that I'm forgetting about right now. Rise of the Hutt Cartel also gave us a five point level cap increase, a whole new planet worth of story content, achievements, and the Macrobinocular and Seeker Droid "mini games". Galactic Starfighter gave us... galactic starfighting a.k.a. free flying but instanced space PvP.

It's also worth noting that this was the game's first whole year as a free-to-play title. Has this affected the experience for subscribers? Of course - note how many of the new systems I mentioned are tied straight to the Cartel Market in order to make you spend more money. How badly this actually affects each individual depends on where your priorities lie in-game... but I already talked about that in greater detail several months ago. It is worth noting that for all that focus on how to improve monetisation, the dev team doesn't seem to have slowed down in terms of actual content output, which is nice (though a case could be made that there's been a certain drop-off in regards to attention to detail).

Overall it seems to me that it's been a pretty good year for SWTOR. I wish I could be more excited about that, but I have to admit that I've been a bit disappointed by the fact that several of the recent major additions just haven't been to my personal taste at all, even if there are segments of the player base that had been clamouring for them for ages (arenas, space PvP). However, looking back at that list of features Bioware implemented over the course of the year, and assuming that they'll continue churning out updates at a similar pace, I can hope to see more content that's to my personal liking again soon enough. I'm definitely looking forward to seeing what major updates they have planned for next year.