Kessan's Landing

I've settled into a kind of routine when it comes to writing about SWTOR's major patches: write a first impressions post, put together a detailed review of the new story content, sum up how I feel about the new planet/flashpoint/operation/whatever the main new gameplay feature of the patch is, followed by a couple of additional posts for any other business, such as UI updates or other minor changes.

As far as 7.4 goes, I covered most of that, but the one thing I was still missing was a rundown of the new planetary map on Ord Mantell, Kessan's Landing. To be honest, I think the main reason I've been putting off writing about it is that it's been... fine. Good, even! I have no major complaints. At the same time I didn't exactly feel blown away by its awesomeness, so... I've just kind of struggled to find a lot to say about it.

I suppose the one thing I'm not too fond of is that it's night time there. I guess the devs opted for that to strengthen the slightly oppressive mood that hangs over the town, plus to create additional visual distinction between Kessan's Landing and "old" Ord Mantell, as the two areas use a lot of the same general "building blocks" otherwise, such as sandy beaches, rocky cliffs and glowing lava flows. Night time is never great for taking screenshots of your character though.

Doesn't mean there aren't any nice vistas to look at.

I also thought it was interesting how much bigger Kessan's Landing is compared to many older in-game towns. All the villages on the starter planets tend to consist of like, five buildings, which is quite video-gamey and not very realistic. I liked that Kessan's Landing felt more like a real place where people could actually live.

The dailies were decent fun. As I've said many times before, I'm not a huge fan of dailies, but I do like doing them sometimes, and they are one of the better types of content for me and Mr Commando to do together nowadays, considering that the story is a purely solo affair. After the troubles we had with Ruhnuk, it was nice to return to a mode of running dailies that felt more relaxed and less punishing. The map is reasonably open for the most part, meaning you don't have to fight every single mob you encounter, except for the narrow tunnels leading up to and inside of Fort Ronning, but that's okay because it adds flavour by making that particular area feel more dangerous.

Mr Commando soon figured out a path that took us through a full round of both normal and heroic dailies in good time, and we faithfully did that every week until we maxed out the reputation track. I thought it was interesting that while most of the dailies come from the terminal in town, there are a couple that have to be "found" and picked up from NPCs around the area, something that reminded me of Yavin IV and Ziost. I was just a bit disappointed that the missions seemed to be exactly the same for Republic and Imperial players - with exactly one exception, oddly, in that Republic players have to save grazers while Imperials capture an asharl panther.

The heroics were decent fun to duo as well, and the [Heroic 4] is proper hard without feeling like a slog, as you basically just have to fight one mob with a lot of health that also has some hard-hitting mechanics. Ironically, the open world boss FR3-D0M felt relatively easy in comparison, though at least it has some bad stuff you actually need to step out of - as opposed to Kithrawl on Ruhnuk who's basically a big sack of potatoes that you just need to wear down.

Kessan's Landing also has a new datacron, which... honestly, maybe I should just make a whole post about the evolution of datacrons at some point. However, for this post it's enough to say that the most recent trend with them has been to force players to do the work themselves, ensuring that people can't just get summoned to the datacron location on day one and get their stat buff without even knowing what was involved in unlocking it.

The Ruhnuk datacron also required you to do a lengthy relic hunt quest chain first, which I didn't mind - my issue with that was more that it also felt like it was meant to benefit your daily-running, and completing it for that purpose on every alt felt tedious to me. In that regard I have to give the devs props for making the relic hunt equivalent for Kessan's Landing irrelevant to the dailies and only required for the datacron, so you only really need to do it once. As it was, I thought it was a fun little quest chain that sent you traipsing around the galaxy (and that featured another cute gonk droid). Fun fact: during the part on Quesh I got the codex entry for "lobel" on my main... only took me thirteen years. I might even repeat the quest chain on an alt at some point, but I'm happy knowing that I don't have to in order to be able to do the dailies efficiently on alts.

Completing the chain unlocks access to a secret cave where you then have to go through some puzzles to get to the datacron. I initially got a bit frustrated by the part inside the cave because it felt quite lengthy, yet any failure would send you back to the very start and force you start over from scratch. On my first visit I eventually gave up after dying to the hidden droids in the lava one too many times, but funnily enough, when I came back a couple weeks later I simply changed one utility to boost my speed and easily made it through that same lava bit on my first try. Gotta use that brain!

After that I was extremely paranoid though as I didn't want to get sent back to the start yet again, so I only progressed very slowly and with a guide on hand. I was in fact so slow that the door you're meant to unshield and blow up had re-shielded itself by the time I reached it. Fortunately I only had to backtrack a little bit to unshield it again. Ultimately it was far from the hardest datacron I've ever done, though I definitely would have appreciated a couple of check points along the way.

Most of all though, I'm really happy with the way the dev team has managed to deliver a new planetary zone three major patches in a row now, and with any luck we'll get another one in 7.5. This is something I love and definitely don't take for granted. And as I said previously, I'm more than happy to revisit existing planets, so I don't mind at all if it's not entirely new environments.

Meeting the Curator

Aside from the big Chains in the Dark story update, patch 7.4 also contained a smaller side story with KOTOR-style cut scenes, which continued the storyline that started with Lane Vizla on Ruhnuk in 7.2.

What's it about? Spoilers ahead:

Lane recalls you to Ruhnuk to tell you that she's been working on restoring the small Basilisk droid you left with her but she's made no real progress as she just doesn't know enough about their inner workings. She has however found out about a reclusive rich guy called the Curator who apparently collects rare droids, and she wonders whether he can help. As he shuns company, she wants you to infiltrate his home stealthily, while pretending to be a courier with his newest purchase.

For this, you have to fetch a bunch of stuff from around Ruhnuk, Mek-Sha and Dantooine. You then go to the Curator's house, which just happens to be on the outskirts of Kessan's Landing (convenient!). Your disguise gets you in, but it quickly becomes obvious that you're not delivering the real goods he expected (though I think it's funny that he instantly turns on the messenger instead of assuming the seller sold him a fake or something like that). His defenses consist of nothing but some antique astromechs though, which are disabled with as much as a kick and a slap.

When you demand to know more about Basilisk droids, he has to admit that they are so rare that even he doesn't own the schematics... however, he knows of an equally as rare/even rarer(?) HK-24 droid on Belsavis, a type of droid that was specifically used to hunt Basilisks and should therefore have lots of information about them. He suggests that you retrieve its memory core, and that in exchange for providing you with its location, he gets to keep the chassis for his collection.

You do go along with this plan and return the HK core to Lane. She puts it into an old astromech to access it and the astromech goes absolutely nuts, yelling about how it's malfunctioning and wanting to self-destruct, followed by an attempt to destroy the powered off Basilisk droid. 

Lane asks you to return the astromech to the Curator to see if he can fix it up to not go crazy. He's not too pleased to see you again but offers to put together a bespoke restraining bolt. While you fetch some parts for him, he puts the HK-24 core back into its chassis and of course something goes wrong, causing it to turn on and attack him. You come back in time to take it out again and protect him, after which the memory core goes back into the astromech with a restraining bolt applied.

When you turn it back on on Ruhnuk, it still gets somewhat agitated, seemingly arguing with itself, but in a somewhat more restrained manner. Lane also says that the Curator has contacted her and wants to sponsor the restoration of the Basilisk droid.

This story was about what I expected in terms of length and depth. I was a bit surprised by just how silly it was, considering that the previous installment of this storyline was quite serious. Not that there's anything wrong with silly, but we did just have the goofiness of the Galactic Season 5 story as well...

There were only a couple of small things I didn't like. For example I was thrown off by the fact that during the first conversation with Lane, her pronunciation of the "G0-T0 eye" (the thing you're supposed to pretend to deliver to the Curator) changes between "go-to" and "gee zero tee zero", which is quite a big difference.

Also, the whole premise of pretending to be a delivery person was a bit... eh. It wasn't quite sweeping the floor of the Gormak cantina, but it felt close. Not exactly a job for an Alliance Commander or Sith Lord in my opinion. The whole thing was a bit weird from a mechanical point of view as well, as they literally make you put a whole gear set on, which in the age of the Outfit Designer doesn't change your appearance anyway (unless you go and select "show gear as outfit", which I did for my own immersion, but it did feel a bit clunky). I would've expected to just get a quest item that you click and poof, you're disguised. But I don't know, maybe someone out there was really happy to get this cosmetic gear set for future pizza delivery roleplay (since you do actually get to keep it)?

Finally, the last thing that got me was that when you're on Belsavis and some guards stop you, you have to kill them even as a Republic trooper! That just felt wrong; there should have been a non-violent solution available.

Aside from those things, I quite enjoyed the story. I had a good chuckle at all the droid shenanigans, from the ridiculous defense droids to the maddened HK to digging for parts outside the Curator's house. I did laugh out loud at the bit when you first leave his house and there's this glowy chest next to the door... I was like "Is this a lore object?" and clicked, just to be greeted by an "intrusive thoughts" cast bar, which finished with my character swatting the relic off its pedestal, to an audible expression of dismay from the Curator.

I believe there's been an indication that part three of this storyline, when it arrives, will bring it to its conclusion, presumably with us actually getting a Basilisk... companion? Then again, I'll be very surprised if this is the last we've heard of the Curator, and I wouldn't put it beyond him to mess things up somehow...

Ruhnuk - Six Months Later

When Ruhnuk was added as a new planet almost six months ago now, I quickly went from excited to confused. It had looked beautiful in the previews, and the story update set there featured some amazing cinematic cut scenes, but my feelings about the story as a whole were... complicated, and my first experience with Ruhnuk as a daily area was a bit of a nightmare. However, I did wonder even at the time whether it would grow on me over time, the way Iokath did after not making a particularly stellar impression at first.

My feelings on Ruhnuk have indeed become more nuanced since then... though I'll say right away that I'm still not a fan of doing the dailies.

The Planetary Story

I realised that in my original posts about Ruhnuk, I never said much about the optional planetary storyline that unlocks after the main story, which seems like quite a big thing to leave out, especially considering that it's actually quite good. After the endless alien gibberish on Manaan, I definitely appreciated all the characters speaking Basic this time around, and it was just an enjoyable storyline in general (with one "bug"/flaw I ran into early on, where Lane chastises you for supposedly making a certain choice at a point where you're not actually given any choices). I especially liked how when you find the little Basilisk droid at the end, it's implied that it could join you as a companion or pet later on... we'll see whether Bioware ever follows up on that.

Relic Hunts

There's also this other "side quest" to unlock three minor buffs to help you with your questing. I have mixed feelings about this one. As an optional side mission, by itself, it works okay, even if the last part goes on a bit and features several bait-and-switch scenarios where it seems like you should be done after the next step but then yet another obstacle appears. However, in terms of how helpful these buffs actually are for everyday play, I'm not entirely convinced.

I liked the way this was done on Manaan, where you organically earned three temporary abilities as part of the optional storyline, and they were really useful ones as well, such as stealth for non-stealth characters or a reflective shield. With the Ruhnuk Relic Hunts, the abilities are both less powerful and require waaay more running around to acquire, to the point where if you don't strictly focus on completing the long mission chain as a priority, you might well max out your planetary reputation before you've actually earned the tools that were supposed to help you with making questing easier. That felt a bit misjudged to me in terms of effort vs. reward.

Datacron & World Boss(es)

First off, I generally really appreciate that Bioware took the time to add these things to Ruhnuk to make the planet feel more "worldly" and to ensure that there are some things to do beyond just doing dailies. I didn't actually bother with getting the datacron until today, but I liked that it felt interesting to get without being too challenging. I've kind of had enough of the fiendishly hard jumping puzzles to be honest...

The summonable wraid boss is a nice idea but somewhat hampered by not having any purpose beyond a one-time achievement and the fact that one of the drops required to summon him seems to have a stupidly low drop rate. The "regular" world boss, Kithrawl, was kind of disappointing to me in that his mechanics are extremely basic yet he has a ridiculous number of hitpoints, meaning that he's both quite boring to fight but also takes a long time to die unless you bring an absolutely massive group - not the best combination in my opinion.

Navigation & Obstacles

All that said, the main reason that I still don't like Ruhnuk all that much remains that it's just a chore to get anywhere. After six months and visiting the place on several alts, I kinda know my way around by now, but it remains easy to get lost by taking a wrong turn inside a tunnel. Still, there are other planets that are hard to navigate, and that alone hasn't been a reason for me to dislike them, so what's the problem?

I realised that what makes Ruhnuk such a pain to traverse is that a lot of the map consists of narrow ravines and tunnels stuffed with mobs, which means that assuming you don't have stealth, getting anywhere requires fighting every single step of the way (which makes it feel all the more punishing if you accidentally end up taking a wrong turn and then have to backtrack). I didn't like the endless tunnels of skytroopers in the KotFE chapters, and there's definitely a bit of that vibe here.

Even worse though, for some reason there are way too many silver and gold mobs sprinkled throughout the area, which makes everything take even longer. More specifically, the areas for the heroic missions are not clearly delineated but instead kind of "bleed into" the regular questing areas, which means that you might just be following an arrow towards a story quest objective when you turn a corner and suddenly find yourself in combat with a large group of golds and silvers.

I had one particularly memorable encounter of this kind which was exacerbated even more by the fact that two groups of mobs appeared to be linked in some way that didn't make sense, so I'd not just get one group, but another heroic-level group of mobs would instantly come sprinting around the corner the moment I pulled, which caused me to get overwhelmed and defeated in the same spot about three times before I could proceed to my quest objective. I like heroics as optional, more challenging content, but the way Ruhnuk has these unavoidable heroic-level mob groups blocking your path everywhere is just tedious.

I hope that Bioware will continue adding new areas like this; I'd just prefer them to be more open, to not have so many unavoidable mobs, and for side content to either be more rewarding or less tedious. Ruhnuk's planetary storyline and the datacron both hit a pretty sweet spot in my opinion; there's just too much other stuff that detracts from the experience for me to want to spend much time hanging around.

Showdown on Ruhnuk - Uneasy Story Thoughts

In my first impressions post about the 7.2 story update, I noted that it featured a lot of very well-done cut scenes that reminded me a bit of Knights of the Fallen Empire, and not in a bad way. Since then I've been thinking about how to best describe my thoughts about the 7.2 story more comprehensively, and it's been surprisingly difficult.

Let's start with a brief summary of the plot - this will obviously contain spoilers. Despite its length, Ruhnuk is actually easier to summarise than the previous update, because despite being longer, it's a fairly straightforward story which mainly gains its run time from cut scenes and companion chatter that isn't necessarily crucial to the plot.

Basically, as per Shae's call at the end of Digging Deeper, you travel to Ruhnuk with her, Rass Ordo and Akaavi (plus Torian if he's alive in your playthrough). The unique nature of the planet makes communications difficult, which is good for being sneaky but also makes it harder to call in support. You sneak around Heta's base of operations and run into Sa'har of all people. Your character recognises her, but a trigger-happy Shae spooks her and she runs off before you can have a meaningful conversation.

As you continue to sneak around the base, you briefly get separated, at which point Heta and crew show up and subdue you by pointing a bunch of sonic weapons at you that basically look like giant spotlights. Shae finds you again and challenges Heta to a duel, who accepts. Meanwhile you get knocked out and dragged away as a captive.

Rass shows up to rescue you just in time for you to witness the duel between Shae and Heta in a big arena. You also notice Bask Sunn on the edges, pointing one of those sonic weapons from earlier at Shae to weaken her and ensure Heta's victory. You can disrupt him or allow him to keep going.

Either way, Rass has managed to get a call for support out at last, which means that Shae's Mandalorians descend upon the scene and a big brawl between them and Heta's followers ensues. Shae's also been injured during the duel and needs rescuing. In the melee, you end up fighting Sa'har's brother Ri'kan, who it turns out has a history with Rass. In the end, Heta and her forces retreat.

In the epilogue, Shae recovers from her injuries and shares her thoughts on everything that happened - mainly she's quite annoyed that Heta got away again. You learn that Rass and Jekaiah's sister died during a mission in which she clashed with Ri'kan but his forces were beaten, and that Ri'kan blames the Ordos for the mission's failure. We also get a view of Heta's situation - she, too, is somewhat frustrated because she lost her secret base and her fleet suffered losses. Ri'kan tries to cheer her up by spoiling that Sa'har has knowledge of a powerful weapon that they could use to their advantage, somewhat to Sa'har's dismay. Heta is intrigued and immediately wants to learn more from Sa'har, with Ri'kan once again getting left behind.

So, there is a lot to love about this update. I already said that the cut scenes are great. There are some interesting minor choices to make, plus of course the major one of how to react to the discovery of Bask Sunn manipulating the duel in Heta's favour. The characters are interesting and I liked learning more about them.

The thing is... I really enjoyed my first playthrough of this story, but the second one already felt a lot less fun, and by character number three things were actually starting to drag a bit - and that gave me KotFE vibes in a bad way. Mind you, I've struggled with the replayability (or lack thereof) of newer story updates since Shadow of Revan. However, it's not always been equally bad. For example, the Jedi Under Siege story was very fun to replay because it was different for Republic and Empire, and there were a number of nice little touches that included different lines of dialogue for different origin stories.

In general, breadth is more fun to replay than length - which is not to say that you can't have both, but realistically it seems that Bioware investing in one always leads to cuts in the other area. In line with this, Showdown on Ruhnuk is a reasonably long story update, but it doesn't have a lot of breadth. It's the same for both factions and all classes, and personally I haven't run into any lines that were different based on your origin story (maybe if you're a smuggler and talking to Akaavi or something).

However, I realised that there was something else that was bothering me, and it's got to do with the non-player characters. There is some good stuff there: I quite like Rass Ordo and appreciated the addition of some flirt options with him, though you can also be very curt in your conversations if you don't like him. Similarly, the dialogue encourages you to think about your relationship with Shae, and just how far you want to go in your support of her feud against Heta. Seeing Akaavi and Torian again was also neat.

Heta, Sa'har and Ri'kan though... they are still relatively new characters all things considered, and I do find their stories and relationships interesting... but they are fairly independent of the player character. We keep seeing cut scenes of what they're up to elsewhere; we see the ways in which the relationship between Sa'har and Ri'kan is strained - and again, to some degree I'm here for that, but it's not very fun to replay because it's just like watching a mini-movie that's always the same and doesn't involve your character at all.

Again I couldn't help but be reminded of Fallen Empire and the relationships between Arcann, Vaylin and Senya. These were also kind of interesting to uncover... at first, but ultimately they largely played out without your input. Vaylin hates Senya because of her childhood, and you can't do anything about it other than tag along while Vaylin snarks and Senya cries about it. Arcann's big change of heart comes about when he sees his sister attack his mother, again something for which your character is not present for. There's all this investment in backstories that ultimately have no impact on your playthrough, and that's the kind of thing that tends to start to bother me after a while, because it feels like the whole budget is being spent on telling other characters' stories instead of yours. Sa'har and Ri'kan are far too new to annoy me in that way, but I'm a bit worried whether we'll ever get to interact with them in a meaningful manner, or whether we'll just get to watch their sibling conflict play out in "meanwhile, somewhere else" cut scenes, until one day we'll get the option to kill one or both of them and move on.

I guess it's just important to me that my character can have some sort of relationship with the NPCs that are central to the story. I didn't mind playing second fiddle to Shae on Ruhnuk, because we've fought her and worked with her, and (depending on your choices) there might be some tensions there that make you feel like your choices have meaning. It's the same reason I like Darth Malgus as a character. Sure, from a Republic point of view he's just another evil Sith, but on Empire side he gives you all those missions while levelling, then you work with him on Ilum until he betrays you. On Ossus, you work with him again, and again he turns against you and the Empire. That's some history, man, and that stuff is at the back of my mind whenever I get to interact with him. Even if the dialogue wheel doesn't give me explicit options to express all those thoughts, they're still kind of there in the background. I just can't get invested in the same way when it comes to characters we barely get to interact with.

In summary, I really enjoyed the Ruhnuk story the first time, but on replaying it I'm awkwardly reminded of some things I disliked about KotFE, and I can't help but worry whether we're heading in a similar direction again. I'm not saying it's exactly the same - we don't have the awkward chapter format to deal with, and the setup for this story has been much more organic than the weird KotFE timeskip and change of focus ever was. However, I'm definitely feeling a bit uneasy is what I'm saying.

Oh, and on a more humorous note, there's of course the part where your character gets knocked out... something else that happened a few times during KotFE but hasn't happened in a while. Please tell me I wasn't the only one who sighed when that happened and went: "Yep, here we go again"?

Anyway, that's just me - I'd love to hear other people's thoughts on this. If you've replayed the Ruhnuk update on alts, how did you feel about it? And how invested are you in what happens to Sa'har and Ri'kan at this point? Let me know in the comments.

Dailies on Ruhnuk: Confusion Central

I really liked Ruhnuk's general visuals from the first preview we got of 7.2. The story impressed with intricate cinematics. We also knew from the 7.2 preview that the daily area on Ruhnuk would come with its own planetary story arc again, something that I quite liked on Manaan, and this time the NPCs were going to be voiced too instead of everything being alien gibberish (which had been my main criticism of Manaan).

What could possibly go wrong?

A lot, as it turns out.

You see, I'd initially held off on tackling the dailies since Mr Commando didn't have time to play for a few days, and a new daily zone is one of the few pieces of new content that we can still meaningfully play together, so I wanted to "save" my first experience for a shared play session. But boy, did that turn out to be a shitshow.

We started on Saturday at 3pm, with the caveat that Mr Commando would have something else to do for a bit at 4pm. "It's just dailies! This isn't going to take an hour, don't worry," I mocked. 4pm rolled around and we were nowhere near done, so we took a half-hour break while he did his other thing. Then we logged back in and continued... for another two hours. In total it took us no less than three hours to do the new storyline and a single round of the new dailies.

Now, to be fair, what with it being our first time and both of us going in blind, we were always going to be inefficient in ways that can be avoided once you know everything the new quests entail and where they take place. However, the amount of running back and forth we had to do was utterly comical, and it was made significantly worse by the fact that Ruhnuk's geography is terribly confusing to navigate. Mr Commando soon compared it to Iokath, at which point I felt the need to defend the latter, as I actually quite like Iokath nowadays and I don't think it's ever been nearly as confusing as Ruhnuk has been for us.

The problem is that Ruhnuk consists of a large number of little sub-zones, which are mostly either narrow outdoor canyons or indoor tunnels/corridors, none of which are reflected very well on the large planetary map (which the game helpfully shuffled out of the way onto a new keybind in this update as well), meaning it's really hard to get a grip on how they are all connected and which of the half a dozen exits from any given sub-zone is going to lead where.

Anyone who's played the game for any length of time knows that the helpful little map highlights that are supposed to show you where to go for a quest can also get a bit confused when it comes to things like taxi points or elevation changes, which only amplified our issues. (When I looked up some info about the daily area online afterwards, I found out that Vulkk's guide actually included multiple custom-made maps, which are awesome and contain so much additional information that's hard to impossible to discern in game.)

At first we just snarked about all this a little bit, saying things along the lines of how Bioware clearly took the feedback about 7.0 being quite short to heart by making these dailies take forever to complete. By the second hour we descended into hysterical laughter when we found that a quest marker made us fight our way through the same damn tunnel for the fourth time, but by the third hour we were honestly just kind of sick of it and wanted it to be over.

In hindsight I think we probably could have saved some time by making smarter use of quick travel points, but this is where the issue with the maps comes in again since it was impossible to see where on the planet we were supposed to go in order to plan ahead, meaning we couldn't do anything but follow the confused arrows back and forth through the same tunnels and ravines over and over. Other people seemed to be in a similar predicament, based on the number of characters we encountered that would just barrel through with a massive mob train in tow, trying to get from A to B at a decent pace without having to fight a dozen mob pulls... and often those mobs would then end up aggroing on us, forcing us to fight even more and making our own trip take even longer.

Despite of Mr Commando's initial passionate declaration that he was never going to come back to this horrible planet, we did give it another try today to see how we would do with a bit more knowledge of the lay of the land and with just the dailies and no more story missions left to do. This time it "only" took us a little over an hour, which is much more reasonable I'll admit... though still quite long considering we were playing as a duo in nearly best-in-slot gear and with maxed-out companions. I dread to think what kind of slog some of these mob pulls must be as a solo character with lesser gear (and without stealth).

I just don't quite know what to think. In general this patch has been shaping up to be a pretty good one, and I really like a lot of things about Ruhnuk... but I can't deny that in terms of gameplay, this has been the worst first impression I've had of a daily area in years, if not ever. I'd like to think that with time, it might grow on me the way Iokath has, but at the moment it's hard to imagine myself spending much time there beyond one visit per character and to max out the reputation, because endlessly wading back and forth through tunnels of mobs is just not my idea of fun.

Ruhnuk Is Very Cinematic

I was sceptical until the very end, but Bioware actually managed to release 7.2 before Christmas. I'll need a few more days and additional playthroughs on alts to fully sort out my thoughts on the new story update, but one thing I can already say about it is that it contains the largest amount of in-game cut scenes that we've seen in a long time, and they are marvellously done as well.

The big action sequences actually reminded me a bit of KotFE - and yes, I know I've said many times that I don't look back on that expansion with a great deal of fondness, but its cut scene quality was not something I ever had issues with, rather the opposite. The duel between Shae Vizla and Heta Kol in specific kind of reminded me of the showdown between Senya and Vaylin in KotFE chapter eight - as in: it was a prime opportunity to wear out your screenshot key while trying to get good action shots. You can see just a handful of them below.

7.2 Livestream Thoughts and Impressions

I'm writing this shortly after having watched the official livestream about 7.2, because I'm actually excited by what I saw! I honestly went into this one with no real expectations, probably because both 7.0 and 7.1 have turned out to be somewhat disappointing to me, and I couldn't even think of anything to look forward to beyond the next story update (which is something that usually only gets touched on lightly in these streams to avoid spoilers). However, it turned out that based on what we were shown, 7.2 looks like it's actually going to be quite a meaty patch.

Story-wise, we'll be going to the planet Ruhnuk (pronounced "Roo-nik") to go after Heta Kol as hinted at the end of the previous story update, and that's all I'm going to say about that, even though there was some more talk about the characters we're going to meet there. Seek out additional information about that at your own discretion.

The first big surprise was that Ruhnuk is not just going to be a story location, but a proper open-world planet, with dailies, a new faction to earn reputation with, a world boss and even a new datacron! I've got to admit that this one completely blind-sided me, I guess because my thinking was that after they had to delay the release of the Manaan daily area, I wouldn't have thought that they'd already be working on another daily area at the same time, and one with more real estate than we got during what was supposed to be the main expansion patch 7.0.

I'm 100% here for a new planet though, even if I don't expect it to be very large. They showed a little flyby video which kind of gave me Athiss vibes.

Next they talked about changes coming to PvP, which started with Musco telling us that they're planning to abolish the ranked queue and that it's all just going to be the same thing now. My first thought was "Are we all going to be ranked all the time then?" but no, it seems they are simply getting rid of the whole concept of publicly ranking players and rewarding prizes based on ranking altogether. I mean, I can't claim to personally be sad about that, considering that I never really cared about ranked, but presumably there are people who do? Wonder how they're feeling about this...

Instead Bioware will introduce a PvP season track similar to the way Galactic Seasons work, where you "level up" through PvP and earn rewards within a limited time frame. I'm not really sure how I feel about that. Galactic Seasons have quickly grown on me, but I'm also quite content with having breaks between them. I'm not sure I really want another bar to fill for rewards running at the same time? I guess we'll see how compelling this turns out to be.

Other PvP changes included with the update will mean no more PvP restrictions for non-subscribers, and separate queues for 8v8 warzones and 4v4 arenas. Now, while I consider this a welcome change, it also cracks me up in a way because when arenas were first introduced nine years ago, I was quite unhappy with the fact that they were mixed in with the "regular" 8v8 warzones and not a separate queue, but then I quickly came to the conclusion that I didn't really mind them too much. I mean, if given the choice I'll probably only queue for 8v8 from now on, unless I know it's quiet and arenas give me a better chance of getting a pop, in which case I'd be fine with queueing for both. It's just not a huge deal for me at this point.

Finally, they'll also retune PvP medals a bit because they consider some of them too easy to get at the moment, and they'll add a new arena located on Onderon that looks like it should provide a lot of opportunities to play hide and seek.

There was a short note about gearing changes, in that both the minium item level dropped from all sources as well as the maximum item level attainable from all sources (except R-4) will increase by four to six levels. I guess this is the belated opportunity for people to gear up for R-4 veteran mode without actually having to kill anything in R-4 veteran mode first, but I'm not sure how much of a difference it's going to make at this point.

The final major item was that they're continuing to make updates to the user interface. The most exciting thing they mentioned in this context was that they'll finally be adding a colour-blind mode! As Mr Commando is red-green colour-blind and has often complained about the challenges of seeing certain kinds of circle mechanics, that's great news.

They are also changing the map so that no part of a planet is ever fully hidden anymore even if you haven't explored it yet, but instead you can see all the terrain from the beginning and it's just kind of greyed out. I guess my tips for how to get the Galactic Explorer achievement will become a bit outdated whenever that goes live. You'll also be able to have a semi-transparent map up on screen all the time, which is fine but didn't seem that big a deal to me considering the current map already goes semi-transparent if you have it open and want to move. I remember that was hailed as a very useful feature at launch, since you could keep it open while moving around. But I guess the functionality is becoming more granular/customisable.

The deconstruct window is going to gain a delete section, which sounds just like an accident waiting to happen in my opinion. (Oh no, I just deleted all those things I meant to deconstruct!) However, apparently mass-delete is something people wanted? I can't say I've run into many situations where I had to delete a whole bunch of stuff at once. In fact the only one I can think of off the top of my head is when I opened a bunch of Alliance crates and got a lot of duplicate legacy armour pieces that I wanted to get rid of. Still, wouldn't it be better to come up with a workaround so we don't have to delete quite so much stuff instead of making it easier to delete a lot of things at once, e.g. by allowing more of them to be vendored for one credit? Just my own two centscredits on that one.

Finally on the UI front, they're unsticking a bunch of buttons from the mini map and instead letting you add them in a custom order to the top left or bottom right of your UI. I've got to admit that after just checking out the UI revamp in the latest World of Warcraft patch the other week the parallels to that game's pared-down mini map and tiny icons in the bottom right of the screen were striking. At least you should be able to increase the size of the things in SWTOR.

Last and (in my opinion) least, there are going to be some new rewards for Life Day and new Cartel Market items. Which is fine I guess, just not something I personally care about a great deal. I was just amazed that they featured someone with the job title of "Art Monetisation Director" on the stream as I figure that brandishing the word monetisation in front of players is a bit like waving a red flag in front of a bull. I hope he doesn't get any mean comments.

Anyway, it was a good stream overall, and they said that the PTS should go up soon, but I figure it's going to be a little while until we can actually play this update in the live game. While they proudly advertised it as "coming this winter" as if that's really soon, they don't have a good track record with releasing things in the run-up to Christmas (see the delay of Legacy of the Sith last year), so I personally wouldn't expect to see 7.2 until next year, either in late January or early February, even if that would mean that they'll have to split out the Life Day rewards to actually release them in time for the event.

P.S.: If you're reading this before November 16th, you can claim a free Colonel Gallo poster decoration for your stronghold by redeeming the code LotSGallore.