Day 9: Silly #IntPiPoMo

Want to know what the hashtag is all about? Read all about International Picture Posting Month here. Want to see the full list of themes I'm following while posting screenshots throughout the month? You can find it here.

You know what the "silly" theme means, right? Time for some "interesting" character names and chat!

Not a bad likeness, though I'd see him as more of a Scoundrel than a Sith warrior...

Also: Full pun points for this guy.

Nothing to do with names, just an interesting thing to see on one of the rare occasions that I looked at general chat.

One time after rolling a new character I encountered two lowbie smugglers duelling right outside the cantina on Ord Mantell. Both had their Corso set to healing and were therefore unable to damage each other in any meaningful way. I just found that amusing.

This is me looking longingly after a dead mob that my pet tank knocked to its death inside a Star Fortress. Most of my guildies consider my obsession to not leave any shinies behind ridiculous, but at times like these, it's a hard life...

People who've run Eternity Vault many times will probably be familiar with the trash skipping run inside the jungle biome. I swear Bioware is aware of it as well and tries to sabotage it every so often, because I'm reasonably certain that those manka cats weren't always where they are now! Anyway, during one such run I was amused that someone had actually highlighted part of the way with some  raid markers in an attempt to prevent people from pulling adds or falling into the lava. Not that that ever works...
 

Some people might feel embarrassed when running into someone else wearing the same outfit as themselves, but not me! In fact, I was absolutely delighted when I randomly encountered this handsome chap on the fleet who just happened to wear the exact same set of gear as me and with the same dye in it as well. It wasn't even something from the Cartel Market, so what were the odds?

Trying to take selfies while mounted can lead to strange results, that's all I'm saying.

IntPiPoMo count: 72

Day 6: Environments #IntPiPoMo

Wondering what the hashtag in the title is all about? Click here. Want to know all the themes that I have used and will be using for my 10 Days of SWTOR Screenshots? You can find the full list here.

Let's start with another picture that I originally took for my Flashpoint Friday series and then never used: lightning on Taral V. I had to spam print screen a lot to actually catch a strike!

Makeb is mostly known for its beautiful mesas, but this volcano base is on Makeb too and I think it looks impressive in its own right.

Every time I get to this day in this series I mention how I don't look up enough and all the amazing sights I miss out on due to this. This year, exhibit A of this is the Rishi Maze a.k.a. an entire galaxy visible in the night sky! I wasn't even aware of it until someone told me to look up into the sky while on the northern island on Rishi - which was well after I had already run through Shadow of Revan multiple times without ever doing so.

Can you guess where this is? It actually took me a moment to remember myself: It's part of the caves in Temple of Sacrifice, around where the Underlurker... lurks. Pretty scenic, don't you think?

Even though what happens on Ziost is terrible, the lifeless black-and-white world that it becomes retains a strange beauty of its own.

Even though it might be hard, I ask you not to focus on my knight's mighty bust in this picture, as that wasn't the point - it's the funny glowing creature on the ceiling! This was in KotFE chapter seven when you enter Zakuul's old world, and I just thought it was funny that someone put in the effort to place that little creature there, inside a phase you can't go back to and where few people will even look up and notice it. Though apparently Darkbrew noticed it too! Before reading his post I didn't know that there were even more of them.

This was taken on the Tatooine Star Fortress and just fascinated me because it seemed like an odd result of the Star Fortresses' modular nature. They do tend to have some wildlife from the planet they are guarding situated behind glass panels somewhere, but slotting sand people in the same place comes across as a bit strange. They just kind of appear to have been plopped into the middle of some sort of animal nest here.

Finally, I think I've said it before, but I was quite pleased that KotFE chapter fourteen allowed us to return to Darvannis. I generally like desert planets, and I like how Darvannis manages to capture a different "flavour" of desert than Tatooine, what with the strong sandstorms, palm trees and perpetual dusk.

IntPiPoMo count: 51 - that's the target hit, but I will continue!

Bioware Answers Some Questions About Flashpoints: An Interview With Michael Backus

A couple of months ago, a strange thought struck me. Star Wars: The Old Republic turns five at the end of this year and I've been maintaining this blog for just as long, but I've never approached anything from the point of view of a real fan site. But really... why not? For all intents and purposes, this is a fan site, and who else is going to ask questions about the nitty gritty details of gameplay or the everyday worries of a loyal player? Since I was still working on my Flashpoint Friday series at the time, I had flashpoints on the mind and decided to put together some questions to pose to Bioware via community manager Eric Musco. And he said this was fine! It took a while until I got my answers, but they did arrive eventually. So, without further ado - my first ever official interview!

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Can you tell us a little about yourself and your role at Bioware? [AKA: Who am I interviewing? I didn't know in advance who this was going to be as I wasn't sure who would be responsible for flashpoints!]

My name is Michael Backus, and I’m the Lead Designer on Star Wars: The Old Republic. I joined the BioWare team over 8 years ago and have spent the majority of my time on SW:TOR. My job really has two main parts: The first is to manage the Design team on SW:TOR. The second is to work with leadership and bring the vision of the game to life at AAA-quality for our players. That means sharing the vision with team members, documenting designs, and working with the team to flesh out the details of designing new features and gameplay.

Currently all flashpoints are set up to be PUG-able through the group finder. Have you considered adding a higher difficulty option that would allow smaller groups of friends to challenge themselves similar to what you experience in hard or nightmare mode operations? Some of us have very fond memories of Lost Island HM at launch. 

We have, but it’s always a balance between making Flashpoints accessible to more players versus building a custom experience to allow for a greater challenge but for a much more limited set of players. That being said, we are always looking at opportunities to deliver higher difficulty to players looking for that increased level of challenge.

At launch, flashpoints seemed to be set up to offer an alternate gear progression route to operations since they dropped the same set pieces, though one tier lower than you could get in raids. For a while there were even plans to have different difficulty tiers of flashpoints (Lost Island!), but all of this was soon scrapped. I can understand that the tiering system would likely have become unwieldy over time, but can you give us some insight into why set pieces were removed from flashpoints? I always thought that they made for great rewards. 

You touched on it a bit in the question. The main idea was to streamline gear progression. Building and maintaining so many different stat combinations and tiers of gear added confusion to the gameplay experience for some players and made it a much more difficult system to grow and maintain. It is much easier to communicate that set pieces come from Operations. Flashpoint gear progression was designed to be a stepping stone into Operations, so reinforcing that opportunity in the gear progression sent a clearer message.

Over time, flashpoints seem to have served a couple of different purposes. For example Hammer Station is a relatively inconsequential story, just something fun to do with your friends. The Foundry or False Emperor on the other hand are important encounters that were clearly meant to feel even more epic by requiring a whole group of people. The newest flashpoints have mainly been used to drive the main narrative forward (Forged Alliances et al.), but with the inclusion of solo modes for many of these, the lines between regular quests and flashpoints have become somewhat blurred. What do you see as the main purpose of flashpoints going forward? 

Going forward we want to expand the appeal by increasing the fun of playing these experiences. Early in the game’s history we leaned-in more on cinematic storytelling in group content, but since we have had such a strong response to the storytelling in Chapters we then looked at the value of making make group content like the Star Fortresses. More dynamic with a focus on the gameplay.

What's the most challenging aspect of creating new flashpoints? Are they very resource-intensive to make? If so, why? 

That’s an interesting question, mainly because what’s the most challenging can also be some of the most fun for us as a development team.

For instance, if we look at creating a new level, the amount of effort is quite large. We come up with a critical path for both the level and the gameplay. Then, we have to have the area blocked out and scripted so we can playtest it and make sure we’re doing something fun. Then, you have the time we spend on building the environment art—we often create new environments so an area has unique features or a different look to it. Then we have our artists work on making the area beautiful, which requires texture, lighting, and propping work. And that’s without getting into the other Art work we do to create a quality experience: New creatures and bosses, their abilities, and any animation or VFX time to make the level come alive.

Although this sounds like a complex process, it is still a lot of fun. I mean, we’re creating something new for the Star Wars™ universe. That means our Writers, Designers, and Artists are working together to come up with something new and fun, while consulting with our partners at LucasFilm to make sure we capture the feel of Star Wars and The Old Republic. So although it can be a long process with a lot of moving parts, it’s very rewarding when we see these areas completed and enjoyed by our players.

Do you have a favourite and least favourite flashpoint? Maybe one you're particularly proud of and one that makes you think "yeah, we thought that was a good idea at the time but we wouldn't do it again"? 

I really enjoy Colicoid War Game because we tried some very interesting things in that Flashpoint. It starts with a shooting gallery then contains some heavy group puzzle elements. In the spirit of ‘it was a good idea at the time’, we’ve found it’s a more difficult Flashpoint to communicate and isn’t terribly PUG friendly since it’s SO different from the others.

One of the main points of contention when pugging flashpoints is the matter of "space-barring"/skipping the cut scenes, as some people really enjoy them while others just want to get to the end as quickly as possible because they've seen it all before. Sometimes people can even get kicked from the group over this. Have you ever considered trying to implement anything to alleviate this conflict of interests?

It’s a difficult balance. We did extensive testing to try and minimize this problem pre-launch. We have a ‘decision timer’ that was tweaked to try and get the balance right, but it’s never perfect. At the same time, in a sense, we pioneered multiplayer dialog in the MMO space, so these were problems that hadn’t really been identified before. I think one thing that’s helped recently is minimizing cutscenes in the middle of Flashpoints such as Star Fortress to try and keep the action moving.

In 4.0 all existing flashpoints were revamped to be tactical. This has been great for levelling as it's easy and fast to get into groups for them now. However, in some places the difficulty still seems a little off for the new paradigm, for example there are no kolto stations around the bonus boss in Maelstrom Prison, and Jos and Valk from Blood Hunt are known pug killers since they have so many abilities that are hard to survive when you're low level. How happy are you with the way this revamp has turned out? Are you still monitoring people's performance in different flashpoints and making adjustments where needed? 

I would say we’re happy with how the revamp turned out. As you mentioned, there’s always additional balance we need to tune and we’re constantly assessing those issues and opportunities. One important thing to mention is how much we value when players report the issues they find, so please keep those reports coming! We definitely want to make these experiences as fun as possible.

Another minor downside of the 4.0 changes is that narrative cohesion is lost for new players since it's not obvious at which point in the levelling process each flashpoint is supposed to take place. Do you have any plans to address this, perhaps by having the group finder interface provide additional information about each flashpoint? 

In general, we want our class stories and world arcs to lead you to these experiences. There are definitely exceptions to this and we agree that’s not ideal. Right now, since this content is found in Group Finder we’re not looking to address this issue. That being said, it’s a great idea to give more information to the player, especially when it gives backstory or context to their experience.

Why were Colicoid War Game and story mode Kaon Under Siege/Lost Island not included in the 4.0 revamp? Are there any plans to make these more accessible/relevant again? 

These were part of the ‘good idea at the time, but’ world. As I said earlier, Colicoid War Game is very difficult to communicate to a new player in a manner that facilitates understanding of what you are supposed to do. It facilitates a bad experience because of how different the mechanics are compared to similar instances. Kaon and Lost Island leaned very far outside of our standard difficulty curve, and there isn’t really a simple fix to bring them more in-line with existing Flashpoints. We felt it was better to avoid funneling players into these experiences.

How come the heroic Star Fortresses weren't included in the group finder on release? Any plans to change this and/or to open them up to a wider range of levels? 

This was an oft-debated topic and we erred on the side of making the experience cleaner for as many players as possible at launch, while acknowledging the solution didn’t solve all possibilities.

We were faced with problems like:

• There are many Star Fortresses—each having their own location and not just being one entity. This means each location would be in Group Finder. If there are now 6+ options instead of 1, players are spread out, potentially impacting queue times for players. 
• We also assumed players would want the ability to go to a specific Star Fortress in order to progress specific content. We were very sensitive of creating a situation where players would have their queue pop and one or more group members didn’t get the Star Fortress location they wanted. This would force those players to leave the group and re-queue, creating a situation that everyone would dislike. 

Ultimately, I can tell you that we’re constantly looking at the situation and if player behavior or demand changes, we’ll revisit this decision and see if there is a better solution. For instance, if players have done their specific planet Star Fortresses and now just want to queue for them together, there may be a strong argument to add them to Group Finder as one entry.

Have you considered how the new flashpoint system will deal with new additions to the game yet? E.g. next time the level cap goes up, will they all just level with it? Would new flashpoints also be accessible from level 15 onwards? 

We’ve absolutely considered this and our goal is to continue to make all our previous gameplay areas relevant each time we increase the level cap. There is still considerable work involved in that process, not to mention testing time, but it’s something we feel is important for our players.

Thanks for taking the time to answer these questions!

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While I didn't necessarily like everything I heard (R.I.P. Colicoid War Game), I certainly enjoyed some of the insights Michael gave into their thought processes here, even if there was still a good dose of "Bioware vagueness"™ in some of the answers. While I made a point of avoiding explicit questions about future content (you know they wouldn't have been able/willing to answer those), I also think he made it quite clear that going forward we can look forward to more content similar to the Star Fortresses in style. And yes, I know there have been rumours spawned by datamined info along those lines as well.

I hope everyone enjoyed this departure from the usual fare here! As usual, feel free to share your thoughts in the comments.

Flashpoint Friday: Star Fortress

I was initially hesitant about whether to include the Star Fortresses in this series or not, which is why I left them until the very end. I eventually decided in favour because there is no denying that they are labelled as [FLASHPOINT] in game, even though they have very little in common with any of the other flashpoints.

General Facts

Star Fortress is a level 65 flashpoint accessed from Odessen that requires you to have made it up to chapter nine of Knights of the Fallen Empire. (In case that doesn't already give it away, it was added to the game with the release of KotFE in October 2015.) You cannot enter a Star Fortress any other way, even if you are grouped with someone else who has them unlocked. They also aren't part of the group finder and need to be entered straight from the Alliance base.

While every Star Fortress is the same in terms of gameplay, there are technically supposed to be six different ones: one each above Alderaan, Belsavis, Nar Shaddaa, Hoth, Tatooine and Voss.

Unlike regular flashpoints, the Star Fortresses are not designed for a group of four players. Instead they have an easy solo version and a heroic mode, with the heroic mode still being soloable if you are both sufficiently geared and skilled. The heroic mode follows the same basic format as the solo mode except that everything has a lot more health, and the final boss fight has you facing off against a different opponent that is considerably harder than the end boss of solo mode.

Also, unlike in regular flashpoints, if you die, you can't simply pick things up right where you were defeated previously but instead wake up in a prison cell and have to go through a little sequence to free yourself and escape.

Fights

Similar to Kuat Drive Yards, the Star Fortresses have a modular design that is random every time you enter one. Excluding the boss level, the skytrooper production level in the middle (which is the same every time) and the two "transitional" levels which just consist of a short walkway, each instance consists of four floors you have to fight your way through, with each floor potentially having three different layouts as far as I could tell. Unlike in Kuat Drive Yards however, there are no different objectives to pursue here.

Example: The first floor could look like any of these.

There is little excitement to be had while fighting your way through the levels, as your opposition consists of Zakuulan troops and droids that pose little challenge. At one point in the instance, a bonus objective will light up, highlighting a certain room you have to clear out, which will earn you reputation with your currently active companion and with the one associated with that particular Star Fortress (see story section below). Also, one of the upper levels and one of the lower levels will contain a named "paladin", basically a hard-hitting Knight of Zakuul that serves as a sort of bonus boss. There are achievements for killing all of these.

Otherwise the only bosses you have to face are the Skytrooper Praetorian on the skytrooper production level, who uses various stuns and summons adds, and the instance end boss. On solo mode, this is the AI Ephemeris, which initially sics adds on you until you destroy its backup power cores, which results in it possessing a droid body that you can then kill.

On heroic mode, the final boss is the Exarch overseeing the Star Fortress (a special type of Knight), and you cannot face him or her until you've chased them all the way around the station's central sun reactor. This is quite challenging as the chase consists of several phases, each of which has the Exarch being guarded by two gold mobs, and more weak opponents continually streaming into the room, all while you have to interact with a console and sometimes kill a special add to move the encounter to the next phase.

None of the bosses drop "traditional" flashpoint loot - instead you gain lots of decorations as well as various item level 208 mods and enhancements, which is the same level as the gear you can buy with common data crystals. Additionally there are quite a few achievements that encourage you to re-run the place, including the ones to kill the paladins already mentioned, as well as ones to find lore objects or take on special challenges. If you get your influence level with your Alliance experts up to ten, there are also hidden caches on each level that you can unlock for extra combat abilities. I've previously written a bit more about some of these features here.

Story

Not much story takes place inside each Star Fortress, however the story arc surrounding them is actually quite interesting. In KotFE chapter four Lana mentions that Arcann has had powerful battle stations built in orbit around several planets to keep their population in line. This is brought up again in chapter nine, when the actual side story arc for the Star Fortresses becomes available.

Planets that are being suppressed in this fashion are Alderaan, Belsavis, Nar Shaddaa, Hoth, Tatooine and Voss, and while you have a contact on each of these planets, you know too little about the interior of a Star Fortress to take action right away. You get tasked with exploring one of them to find out more, which means doing any one of them on solo mode first. While doing this, you learn that each Fortress is protected by a ground-based shield generator that needs to be destroyed before the Fortress itself becomes vulnerable (very Return of the Jedi-like).

After this, Alliance alerts for the contacts on the six planets pop up in your companion panel, and you can start each planet's individual story arc. They all follow the same basic plot: Your contact asks you to scope out the shield generator, then tells you that they and their allies don't have enough resources to mount an assault. You are prompted to hand in five resource crates of the type you get for doing heroics at max level, and then the attack can begin. Destroying the shield generator is trivial, and afterwards you are asked to destroy the Star Fortress in heroic mode. (You cannot start the heroic mode for any planet until you complete this part.) If you succeed, your planetary contact joins you as a permanent companion.

While the plot is very basic, what makes the story interesting are the interactions with your would-be companions. They are all gibberish-speaking aliens, presumably to save on voice acting, but many of them are given vibrant personalities and some very interesting conversation options. For example my Jedi knight was given the option to talk about her missing companions while chatting with Choza Raabat, the Ithorian Jedi who serves as your contact on Alderaan. (Though no, he didn't know anything about Lord Scourge's whereabouts either.)

Conclusion

That the Star Fortresses are labelled as flashpoints is a bit baffling and makes one wonder whether Bioware is trying to go into a new direction with this content type. Oh, to have been a fly on the wall when they came up with this... The fact that the solo mode seems to be the default and that the heroic mode is soloable as well initially gives the impression that this is meant to be a challenge that's primarily meant to be tackled alone. On the other hand the final boss on heroic is significantly easier in a group and well worth grouping up for, being more reminiscent in difficulty of the way heroic missions used to be. Also, the actual story arc can only be completed by doing all the heroic modes.

With all that said, the Star Fortress flashpoint occupies a strange place in the game, unlike any of the regular flashpoints. Locking access behind the first nine chapters of KotFE makes it quite hard to get into, and the lack of any sort of group finder option for it makes it even harder to get the heroic modes done if you can't or don't want to take them on alone.

It's not a good way of acquiring gear, however it's great for decoration drops and some of the better mods and enhancements can fetch a decent price on the GTN. Inside the flashpoint itself there also isn't much going on in terms of story or interesting mechanics (except for the heroic end boss), which makes them kind of grindy - which can be a good or a bad thing, depending on your preferences. Considering its story focus, SWTOR doesn't offer many opportunities for the kind of "mindless grinding" gameplay where you just mow down mobs for an hour while watching television on the side, but the Star Fortresses are actually really good for that. And the extra companions are fun, if not really needed considering the deluge of companions you end up with on your way through KotFE.

Finally I wanted to note that this marks the last installment of my Flashpoint Friday series. 27 posts and nearly a full year later, I've used it to talk about all the flashpoints currently in the game. I'm quite pleased with myself for having been able to stick to my fortnightly schedule for the entire time without missing a beat even once, but I have to admit that I'm also kind of glad that it's over. While I stand by what I said in the past about a series being a great way of providing yourself with something to write about at all times, it did start to overwhelm the regular content a bit when I started running the KotFE chapter discussions as well. Also, a full year is a long time to commit yourself to writing about a very specific subject like this - I suspect I'd think twice before doing that again.

Thoughts on Star Fortresses

While I've given the "new" endgame introduced in KotFE a thumbs up in principle, I have to admit that I haven't felt particularly engaged by it on a personal level. It seems that people are mostly excited about doing heroics if they didn't really do them before, but I've been doing them since the game came out. I got the "complete all heroics" achievement the moment they introduced achievements (because I'd done them all before), and I've done them even more times since then. But just grinding them at max level? Meh.

Likewise, I don't really care that much about companion power. I never really had any issues with my companions even before 4.0. I like unlocking new ones to see their stories, but once the story ends, so does my interest. I think the highest influence rank I have on any character is 12, and that's only because some companions start at 10.

The one thing that has intrigued me a bit are the Star Fortresses. It's like a bonus storyline that's gated behind content that is challenging to solo. My pet tank and I burnt through it quickly during the first week, and he became obsessed with chain-running them until he had all the achievements. Once that was done, he seemed to lose interest too.

The one thing that bugs me about Star Fortresses is that I'm not sure what they are supposed to be, what their role is supposed to be in the grand scheme of things. I almost felt a little offended when I first found that the tougher missions had both "Heroic 2+" and "Flashpoint" in the name. What are you, a heroic or a flashpoint? You can't be both at once; that goes against everything I believe!

Once inside, Star Fortresses kind of come across as a poor man's Kuat Drive Yards, which is to say they are mostly bland-looking space stations that try to be interesting by not being exactly the same every time. But where Kuat at least mixes it up with different scenarios, the Star Fortresses just do things like lock some doors and open others, put the bonus bosses (called paladins) in different rooms and rotate through a couple of different bonus missions. It can be kind of fun to stick your nose into every available nook and cranny to see where things are hiding this time, but it's not that exciting.

Only the final encounter with the exarch on heroic mode is genuinely interesting in my opinion, set in front of the backdrop of the glowing sun reactor, and with a gradually increasing challenge level as you fight your way through the room, even if you're in a group.

On the plus side, unlike Kuat the Star Fortresses give some pretty good loot. There are a lot of decoration drops in there, as well as miscellaneous pieces of gear that you could sell for decent amounts of money, at least early on.

One thing I found amusing is that if you die anywhere but in the final exarch encounter, instead of reviving on the spot, you wake up in prison! This is a fun little play on the way a convenient probe usually just revives you on the spot without the baddies interfering in any way, which is one of those things that simply requires suspension of disbelief. Once imprisoned in the Fortress, you have to go through a short little routine of tricking and defeating the guards to free yourself.

Another aspect that's interesting are the (sometimes hidden) achievements. For example there's one to kill an exarch with their own fiery beam of death, which my pet tank made a point of getting, so I got it as well simply by tagging along. There is one for doing the heroic version in a group and with every possible buff inside the instance unlocked, which I also did with my pet tank. There is one to spy a droid belonging to the Shroud outside the station, which seems to have an annoying RNG component to it. At first I thought I was looking in the wrong place because I ran Fortress after Fortress without ever seeing it, but once it appeared it was plain as day. I never missed it, it just didn't seem to spawn in all those earlier runs.

Finally there is "One For All", which awards a title and requires you to solo the heroic mode with no buffs. I got it on my "can't play her for toffee" Marauder with a rank five companion, but it did take a while. I died a lot and just kept throwing myself at things until I eventually managed to grind them down. At one point I was sufficiently frustrated that I was willing to give up and activate the main buff after all, except that there didn't seem to be a way to go back to that part of the Fortress. If my only options were to abandon the whole thing or to press on, I decided to go for the latter after all.

Basically everything from the moment you encounter the exarch is pure pain. Personally I thought that the first room with the two gold knights was actually the worst. They just hit so hard! I kept dying before I could even get one of them down. I think I eventually succeeded with the help of a lot of cooldown chaining.

The same was true of the subsequent rooms, where you have to deal with an ever growing amount of adds before you can force the exarch to move on. Again, I died a couple of times but just kept giving it another try every time my heroic moment was up again. (As an aside, that's when I noticed that they replaced Legacy Force Storm with Legacy Chain Lightning... how sad!)

The exarch also killed me a couple of times, but again I eventually managed to get there by chaining all my cooldowns. Really, that seems to be the key to this achievement: perseverance and remembering all your buttons.

Currently I'm going back to them on my Marauder every so often to unlock all the companions related to the storyline, but it just feels kind of tedious on my own. Plus it's just not as fun to do on multiple characters (in my opinion). Are there people who love the new Star Fortresses?