My Most Played Characters

Earlier in the year, there was a thing going around in the World of Warcraft community that had people tallying up their total /played time to see which classes they liked playing the most, which prompted me to make a post about my own most played World of Warcraft characters. I vaguely recall thinking at the time that it was a shame that I couldn't do the same in SWTOR... which makes no sense, because the /played command in SWTOR is right there! I even posted about it in the past! I don't know when and why I suddenly switched to thinking that you couldn't check your characters' /played time in SWTOR. Sometimes I do worry that it's a bit early for my brain to start deteriorating when I'm only in my forties... either way, that random misconception has been corrected now, so I thought it was about time to check back on all my alts and finally do another post on the subject on this blog too.

Shintar - 239 days

I always like to say that I enjoy playing alts, and I do, but I almost feel like this kind of shows the opposite - that in reality, I'm a maining woman who mains. How else could Shintar the trooper have more than three times the play time of the second character on this list? (Interestingly, the ratio between first and second place was similar for my WoW characters.) Though I guess it does help that she was the first character I ever created, all the way back in 2011, and has remained my main ever since. I fully anticipate a future where I'll be able to say one day that I've spent an entire year of my life playing as her.

Golu - 76 days

I'm not surprised that my Twi'lek Sage is in second place, considering that she was one of my first alts and the second character on whom I hit the level cap of 50 back in the day. She also has remained my "main alt" consistently since then, but I am a bit surprised that her play time is that far behind my main. I guess I haven't spent much time raiding on her in a while.

Fali - 40 days

My first Jedi knight coming in third place is no surprise either - again, she was one of my earliest and most played alts for a while, even if she sees a lot less play time these days. What does surprise me is how quickly the numbers fall off from third place onwards, especially when compared to my WoW top five. I've played SWTOR since launch without taking any noteworthy breaks, and I've pretty consistently stuck to the same characters, so I would've expected my alt stable here to have much higher numbers than any of my WoW characters. However, it looks like those five years of absolutely insane World of Warcraft binge-playing back in my student days still beat close to fifteen years of slightly more moderate engagement with SWTOR.

Racelle - 30 days

I'm slightly surprised to see my second smuggler this high up. She is still an old character of course (created in 2012), but as the previous sentence implies, she wasn't my first smuggler (who ended up further down the list, in ninth place). I guess the first smuggler's Gunslinger play style never really clicked with me, so it makes sense that I ended up giving this one more love almost immediately. Plus there was a time when I did a lot of PvP with her, as she currently sits at valor rank 85.

Sigex - 28 days

It should tell you how firmly I am entrenched on Republic side that the first four spots are all in Republic hands, and only in fifth place do we have our first Imperial character. The "Shinquisitor" was created at the start of 2013 and levelled as part of a duo with Mr Commando. Even though she was relatively late to the party, I do consider her my Imperial main these days (she's also the GM of our Imperial alt guild) so having the most play time out of all my Imps lines up with that.

Looking at the full list of /played across my entire stable of alts, I would say the patterns I saw were very similar to what I noticed in WoW, in the sense that older characters get pushed up the list a lot simply due to the fact that levelling used to take so much longer in the game's early years. My knight and smuggler really haven't seen that much play recently, and yet here they are, in the top five still.

Comparatively, I've got to go quite far down the list to find a character created in the current decade, simply because levelling is so fast and once I'm max level I tend to play less (with the exception of my main, who raids regularly). Fangirl, my first character on the French server and the highest-ranked among these more recent creations (she was created in 2022 for seasons), only comes in 13th place with 13 days /played.

As a bit of a side note, I found that I had an old spreadsheet for this, and since it also had a column for valor rank, I checked that too while logging through all my alts. Turns out I have very few characters nowadays who have never done any PvP, and my average valor rank across the board is 47. Plus I have two characters in the mid-80s - I should really push them all the way to 100 to have a few more Elite Warlords... 

Server Populations Based on Conquest Points

I mentioned in a previous post that I wasn't that busy during the last Total Galactic War, and as a result I ended up poking around on the other servers as well that week. Having a peek at the planetary leaderboards was interesting in terms of how incredibly different they looked on each server.

People often ask about server populations on reddit, which server is the best to play on etc., and I do have some information that addresses this on my State of SWTOR page, but it did occur to me that it's hard to find any kind of data to actually back up people's perceptions of each server's size. Over in WoW Classic, the most common metric is raid logs, which is already very limited because obviously there are plenty of players who don't raid and aren't counted, but in SWTOR we don't even have that. It's also been many years since we last had indicators of population size on the server selection screen.

The best bit of hard evidence about server size I've ever seen is probably this Today in TOR post from January 2023, which compared the number of Conquest points winning guilds had earned on each server throughout 2022. However, at this point that's several years old, and I have no doubt that server populations have shifted a little - plus the Shae Vizla server didn't exist yet, so it's not included at all.

I do think Conquest is about as good a measure of activity as you're ever going to get, as most things you do in game award Conquest points, so most guilded characters above level 10 will leave some kind of Conquest footprint if they are active at all. The problem is that in any given week the planetary leaderboards are very limited in how much they show us. Total Galactic War is a different beast, however...

So I spent a few hours logging through all servers on a Monday afternoon and manually recorded the full TGW leaderboards on all servers. The event wasn't over yet and scores were still updating all the time, but I didn't really care about that as I wasn't looking for precise numbers for this exercise; I just wanted the big picture. Let me share with you what I found:

First off, Total Galactic War includes 28 planets, with each one having ten spots on its visible leaderboard, so up to 280 guilds can make their presence known in this event. However, the only server on which all slots were actually taken was Star Forge.

This doesn't necessarily mean that the other servers don't have 280 guilds - the major gaps were pretty much always on the large yield planets, so the open slots on Darth Malgus (19), Satele Shan (32) and Tulak Hord (37) primarily indicated a lack of large guilds valuing visibility on the board over potentially conquering one of the smaller yield planets. In all three cases it seemed safe to assume that there were also extra guilds on the medium and small yield planets that had simply been pushed off the board. (The same was true for Star Forge, obviously.)

However, Leviathan and Shae Vizla were a different matter. On Leviathan, only 149 guilds were visible, leaving 131 spots empty - nearly half. On Shae Vizla the picture was even more dire, with only 102 guilds making a showing, leaving 178 openings. Some planets remained completely unconquered, with not a single guild even trying to claim a spot. (That said, I'm almost certain someone out there will read this and go "I'm surprised Shae Vizla has over 100 guilds!")

OK, so guilds are one thing, but what about their actual scores? A guild showing up with 2000 points is not the same as one showing up with 200 million. So I tallied up all the scores visible on the board. In total, across all servers, I counted a little under 12 billion Conquest points. Across the different servers, they were distributed as follows:

• Star Forge: 4.2 billion (35% of total)
• Darth Malgus: 3.4 billion (29% of total)
• Satele Shan: 1.8 billion (15% of total)
• Tulak Hord: 1.5 billion (13% of total)
• Leviathan: 500 million (4% of total)
• Shae Vizla: 400 million (3% of total)

There are some interesting inferences you can make from these numbers. While it sometimes feels to me like I'm constantly hearing about players moving off the smaller servers to Star Forge, these numbers don't really back that up. In fact, 35% is exactly the same slice of the pie that Star Forge occupied on the Today in TOR graphic from 2023.

Today in TOR doughnut chart from 2023 

Satele Shan does seem to be the biggest loser, having gone from nearly twice the size of Tulak Hord to only marginally larger, but part of that is also that TH actually seems to have grown a little since 2022, contrary to what I personally would've expected. Again, anecdotally I have the impression that both German and French players have been moving off their dedicated language servers to Darth Malgus for the bigger population - I've seen them chatter away in general chat and get yelled at for not speaking English. Darth Malgus does indeed seem to have grown, but seemingly only at the expense of Leviathan. Still, overall the shifts in activity levels are a lot milder than I would've expected after nearly four years.

However, what these numbers do show for sure is that you can expect to have a drastically different experience on different servers. If we correlate Conquest points to active population, then Star Forge is more than twice as populated as Satele Shan, and literally more than ten times the size of Shae Vizla. That's going to make a difference to how busy the world feels and how often group content is popping.

As for how these numbers translate into actual player numbers... it's impossible to say, as people can generate wildly varying amounts of Conquest points. When I go all out during Total Galactic War, I can generate 10-15 million by myself, but more realistically a guild invading a large yield planet should probably have at least 10-20 active members to hit its target without too much difficulty. (I base this on my personal experience being a member of different guilds on different servers.) If we assume 20 players per 5 million points generated, then these scores would be evidence of at least 48,000 guilded players leaving a mark during Total Galactic War, but I'd honestly expect the total number of active players to be higher. (Though it'd also give those people a heart attack who think that the game only has 4,000 active players nowadays because that's the daily average recorded on Steam.)

A Dev Speaks - Great News for Fans of Operations

On Wednesday my ops team went on the PTS to try out the first boss of the new operation there. I won't go into too much detail because I don't want to spoil anyone here, plus it was obviously only the first version of the fight, so things are still going to be subject to change. In a nutshell, we had a fun time puzzling out what to do as a group of friends, but for a story mode, that first iteration felt very overtuned - just too much going on and too much damage.

I posted my feedback on the PTS forum and read what other people had to say about their impressions so far. Swtorista seemed to have a similar experience to mine, and added that she was not sure what the devs' intent for story mode even was, in terms of how difficult they actually want it to be nowadays. I have strong opinions on that myself, and wrote a whole post a few years ago about how the SWTOR devs have failed to hit the mark on story mode ops difficulty again and again, but it's true that they haven't even officially commented on the subject in over a decade as far as I'm aware.

So imagine my utter astonishment when someone highlighted to me that there was a dev response to Swtorista's question and other things on the PTS forums today. You can read the post for yourself here if you want, but be aware that it contains a lot of detail about the mechanics of the first boss of the operation.

That said, I think there were some exciting spoiler-free revelations in that post, which I really wanted to shout about so that more people would hear about them.

First off, the least important one but still interesting to me:

In the first few days of testing, there were roughly 1,800 attempts on [the new boss] across Story and Veteran Mode, with 104 kills.

Who says nobody in this game cares about operations anymore? Considering that I'd expect only a tiny fraction of the player base to bother with downloading the PTS, never mind putting a group together to actually test group content on it, those numbers were delightful to see.

But the real kicker came towards the end of the post and had nothing to do with the new operation in specific:

If my name [Martin Smith] sounds familiar, it may be because I was part of the original launch team and worked on Operations until I left BioWare in 2016. Broadsword brought me back to focus on Operations content.

There've been times over the last few years when I've had conversations with people in which doubt was raised whether SWTOR even had a dev dedicated to operations anymore, or whether the one ops they put out once in a blue moon was just someone's side project. So to not only have it confirmed that there is indeed a dedicated ops designer now, but to also hear that he's an OG whom Broadsword specifically brought back to work on operations again was crazy exciting to hear. I don't know if that'll mean that we'll get more operations at a faster pace in the future (relatively to the once every three years or so which we've been on for more than a decade now) but for the first time in a long time I feel at least a bit of hope in that regard. Martin (the dev) continues:

My goal is to make the best Operations content I can, but to do that I need your feedback. I want to know what you want from future Operations, and what you would most like to see fixed or changed in existing Operations.

I am working on improving the process of making new content and building better tools to help design, build, and balance Operations more effectively.

Again, this is just so amazing to hear. My #1 thing to fix about existing operations would still be to nerf Dominique on story mode. Recursive blast just requires too much coordination, and the freaking monstrosities that spawn in at the end to root and stun you - thereby preventing you from doing the mechanic correctly even if you're trying - also need to go in my opinion.

I've got to admit, I'm now wondering whether he already spent some time looking at the old ops before starting work on this new content. (I don't know how long he's been (back) at Broadsword.) The reason I'm wondering is that my guildies and I noticed new voice lines in existing operations recently - not newly recorded, obviously, but stuff that was already there but just wasn't playing for some reason. Scyva suddenly has more things to say about Izax now in Gods from the Machine! And tonight my guildies and I did Dread Palace on the PTS for a laugh (currently not tuned for level 85 yet) and in the Council fight at the end, there was suddenly an extra voice line at the start of the phase with the two ghosts - trust me, I've spent so much time in there over the past couple of years, me and a guildie could immediately tell that this line hadn't been there before. It just seemed like such a random thing to suddenly fix years later... but maybe an ops designer who was reviewing old fights and noticed a bug not triggering a voice line might do such a thing? *insert meaningful eyebrow wiggle here*

Truth is, I have no idea whether those things are related, but it's hard not to see them as signs. For years now I've had to tell guildies that operations obviously weren't a priority for the SWTOR dev team anymore and that everyone needed to check their expectations on that front. Without wanting anyone to get overhyped, this is the first time I feel like endgame group content might have a real future in the game again after all.

A More Classic Experience in Our Future

Today was the day of the long-awaited dev stream giving us the first details about 8.0. The devs didn't mention anything about the story or what to expect on Ryloth yet, but there were some very interesting announcements about mechanical features.

Musco started by talking about some (not super exciting to me, but nonetheless very welcome) quality of life improvements, such as fitted gear being added to collections, toys becoming abilities so they no longer take up bag space, and interactable decorations becoming persistent (so the game will remember what state you left them in).

He also surprised me by announcing something I never thought I'd hear any MMO dev promote as a good thing: that they'll be slowing down levelling a little. Now, he didn't use those exact words - and probably for good reason - but it's effectively what he described, giving the current negative example of new players immediately overlevelling their surroundings massively after only three quests. So I don't think the goal is to make things massively slower, but to rein in those early levels in particular. He did say that they'd give us more details later about which sources of XP would be adjusted exactly. 

That said, this is a nice segue into the biggest new feature they announced: adjustable overland difficulty. (I was doing an ops on my main screen while watching the livestream on my second monitor and I may have excitedly yelled "open world difficulty options" at my guildies over voice, shortly before wiping us on Izax veteran mode.) As a simple toggle, you'll be able to adjust the difficulty of mobs for you personally by upgrading from story to veteran or master at any time, which will increase your damage taken, reduce your healing received, and decrease your XP gains.

Now, this was never a feature I personally clamoured for, but I'm aware that it's something other MMOs have and that I've seen players ask for more than a few times. The reason I wasn't that invested into the idea personally is that I don't think the current difficulty is terrible - shortly after 4.0 it was a joke, yes, but they did retune things a bit around Onslaught and since then I think it's been okay-ish. Yes, low level planets are still easy to steamroll, but if you actually do higher-level content and don't always have your companion set to heal, you can still find some danger in places.

Plus, let's be honest - if we take veteran and master mode chapters as examples of Broadsword's tuning for additional solo challenge, they are not great. They can be challenging alright, but in rather un-fun ways.

So by itself, this kind of sounded... interesting, and nice for those who really want it I guess, but not necessarily that big a deal to me personally. However, there was more!

While you can dial your personal difficulty up and down at any time, there'll also be a new venture focused around it, challenging you to create new characters of all eight base classes and level them through veteran or master mode world difficulty (these characters will be locked into their chosen difficulty and unable to change), fulfil certain goals along the way and earn rewards in the process.

As an old-timer I had immediate flashbacks to the Dark vs. Light event from over a decade ago now, which asked us to level new alts of all eight origin stories as well as complete certain milestones on at least one of them (such as making it through all the "Knights of" chapters).

I actually found myself thinking only the other day how Galactic Seasons kind of fill a similar role nowadays as the DvL event back then by making us re-do old content for rewards, but that they never care about levelling and story, and how it would maybe be nice to have something like that again some day as a one-time thing. The nice thing about this being implemented in the form of a venture is that there's no time limit on it, and the fact that you have to effectively level up in "challenge mode" will actually make the experience somewhat different from a gameplay perspective too.

It's also worth noting that it was stated that veteran difficulty is aiming to make the gameplay more reminiscent of the "classic" experience - my post from last year about the notion of SWTOR Classic and why I don't think it'll ever happen has turned into one of the more popular posts on the blog, and there's been some chatter in the comments about how one could create something at least approximating the classic experience in the game as it is now. Commenter Thander's suggestion from back then actually sounds remarkably similar to what was announced! So one can hope that this feature might also appeal to some lapsed players who would be interested in returning if only they could choose to have a bit more challenge in their everyday gameplay.

We'll see how successful the devs will be in terms of getting the tuning right, but the difficulty toggle will be available to try out on the PTS in a later phase, so we all better check it out then and let them know what we think.

In the meantime, if you want to read more details about what else was announced on the stream, including things like new rewards from Galactic Season 11 and the Feast of Prosperity, check out one of these stream summaries from the usual suspects:

• Official website 
• Swtorista
• Today in TOR
• Vulkk

Class Story Counting

I mentioned in a previous post that after I decided to cut back on my involvement with Galactic Seasons, I was hoping that this would free up some more time to get back into the story aspect of the game. I saw it as a first sign of success on that front when I finally completed the Jedi knight class story on the Leviathan server last week, something that's been four years in the making - four years, that is, during which I logged into that character almost every week but was spending all my time on pretty much everything other than story.

As I watched a victorious Jedi flee the Dark Temple once more, I found myself thinking about how it had been a while since I'd last completed the Jedi knight class story, which was kind of weird because it sure has felt like I've been spending a lot of time playing knight story missions in recent years. So this then sent me down a rabbit hole of taking a look at how often I've completed each class story, in what year (if I had data on that) and how it compared to how many alts I have who are still "stuck" on earlier steps of the story.

Trooper:

Completed a total of 4 times:

• On my main on Darth Malgus (female, light side), back in 2012
• On one of my alts on Darth Malgus (female, was supposed to be neutral but I just checked and she has 0 dark side points due to some KotET era shenanigans I think) - this one's been sitting there ready to start KotFE for years now but I just haven't been able to get myself to pull the trigger; according to the blog I completed her class story in January of 2016
• On my Star Forge main (female, light side) in 2024, more than eight years after I first created her on the Ebon Hawk server
• On one of my alts on Shae Vizla (female, light side) in 2025 - one of the few characters I've played in recent years who finished their class story before hitting the level cap (she's level 75 at the time of me writing this)

It's kind of wild to me that there were eight years between my second and third completion of the trooper class story! Though completing it twice in the last two years isn't too bad. 

There also isn't a lot of variety here in how these were played. There is a dark-sider and a male character among the 8 "story-in-progress" troopers I have on top of that, but most of them are still more nice ladies.

Smuggler:

Also completed a total 4 of times:

• On my original smuggler on Darth Malgus (female, light side), back in 2012
• On two alt smugglers on Darth Malgus (both female, one light side, one dark side), in 2013 and 2016
• On Star Forge (female, light side) in 2024

Same issue here with all of them being very similar and an eight year gap between the thrird and fourth completion. I also have "only" 5 more smugglers in progress, as it turns out. At least there are two males in the mix there, and two potential dark siders (for one it's still a bit early to tell). I was actually a little surprised that I don't have more smuggler alts, but I'm thinking it may be because of the fact that smuggler is one of only two classes on which I've managed to take more than one character past KotFE and KotET, which makes it feel like I've spent a lot more time playing smuggler stories than I really have. 

Jedi Knight:

Also completed 4 times!

• On my original Jedi knight on Darth Malgus (female, light side), back in 2012
• On two alt knights on Darth Malgus (both female, one light side and one dark side), in 2017 and 2022 
• On Leviathan (female, light side), as per the start of this post

It's interesting that these are more spread out, with the biggest gap being the five years between 2017 and 2022. I also have 5 more knights still waiting in the wings, but I was surprised on checking that only a single one of those lives on Darth Malgus; all the others are on the other servers.

Jedi Consular:

This turned out to be the Republic class story I've completed the most often: 5 times.

• On my original Jedi consular on Darth Malgus (female, light side), back in 2012
• On two alt consulars on Darth Malgus (both female, one light side and again, another one that I remember being neutral but the game also shows her as full light side now), in 2014 and 2020
• On Satele Shan (male, neutral), at the end of 2024
• On one of my alts on Shae Vizla (female, light side), also in late 2024

This is also the only Republic class story I've completed on a male character so far, and I have no fewer than 10 more consulars on earlier steps of the story, which is more than I have troopers, even. Again there's a six year gap at one point, and I actually completed the story more times in the last six years than in the eight years before that.

Sith Warrior:

This is the Imperial origin story I've completed the most often: also 5 times.

• On my original Sith warrior on Darth Malgus (female, dark side), back in 2013
• On three alt warriors on Darth Malgus (two female, one male; one light side, one dark side and one neutral), in 2017, 2024 and 2026 respectively
• On my Shae Vizla main (female, mostly dark side), in 2024

I actually completed the dark side Sith warrior on Darth Malgus only the other week - she's been one of my primary PvP alts for a while and I was just passing some time while waiting in the queue. This one generally felt like I've done it a few times more recently and the numbers actually back it up, with no fewer than three of the five completions happening in the last two years! I also still have 6 more warriors "in progress".

Sith Inquisitor:

With this one, I was surprised to find that I've only actually completed it 3 times.

• On my first inquisitor on Darth Malgus (female, light side), back in 2013
• On two alts on Darth Malgus (both female, one dark side and one neutral, even if the game once again disagrees with me), one in 2014 and one in 2024.

Two of these completions were forever ago, and then it took me no fewer than ten years to go again! Also, that last completion was an instance of me playing through a class story in tiny chunks over a really long stretch of time so I don't actually remember that much of it.

What's also worth noting here is that I used my two free character boosts on inquisitors, which means that technically I have more of them with advanced story progress than of most other classes, even if those two never went through their class stories. There are also another 7 whose class story is still in progress. 

Imperial Agent:

It turns out this one is tied with the inquisitor for last place with 3 completions:

• On my original agent on Darth Malgus (female, light side), back in 2012
• On my saboteur alt on Darth Malgus (female, light side) in 2016
• On a third alt in 2017 - she used to be on a different server but was merged into Darth Malgus at one point, though I never played her again after that - you can tell she's old because she's level 63 and on Makeb in terms of story

What do you mean it's been almost a decade since I last completed an Imperial agent's base class story?! This is madness! Fortunately I have two of them now that are getting close again. In total, I only have 5 more agent alts in the works, which makes this my least played origin class. Again, this was a surprise considering that I've always been quite fond of the agent story.

Bounty Hunter: 

With this one it's back to 4 completions:

• On my original bounty hunter on Darth Malgus (female, light side), back in 2013
• On two alt hunters on Darth Malgus (both female, both dark side), in 2014 and 2022 
• On one of my alts on Shae Vizla (female, light side) in 2025

Again we have that big eight year gap. 6 more hunters in progress.

Conclusion?

Having completed each class story about four times on average may seem like a lot to some, but considering that I've been playing the game since launch, it's less than I would've expected. It does make sense that my focus on redoing the stories decreased over time, not just because of seasons but also because I engaged in endgame activities in general. Still, for most of these it feels like it's definitely been a while and like I'm more than due for a revisit of those final chapters (the early planets are something I've done plenty of times).

That said, I was surprised that there were quite a few that I've actually completed relatively recently and where the biggest gap of me not doing any story was actually somewhere around the years between 2016 and 2020. While seasonal activities discouraged me from spending too much time on class stories, the fact that they got me playing on more servers actually seemed to help my appetite for going through them again, compared to my main server where I'd already seen and done it all multiple times. 

I was also surprised that in terms of overall character count, consular came out this far ahead with 15, but on second thought it makes a lot of sense: Before Legacy of the Sith decoupled combat styles from origin stories, consular and inquisitor were the only classes where I really loved both available combat styles, so they were my #1 pick for new PvP alts for a long time (and I do prefer Republic over Empire).

I'm hopeful that these completion numbers will go up soon if I continue on my current track, as I currently have a trooper and an inquisitor on Corellia as well as a knight, agent and bounty hunter on Voss.

Where Has All the (Manic)Time Gone?

Having completed every last one of my Galactic Season 10 goals, and having made the decision to dial things back for Season 11, I've been feeling strangely liberated over the last couple of weeks. I can actually come up with my own goals again - goals that I can start and stop at any time, instead of merely trying to figure out how to get through a massive in-game checklist efficiently enough that I can still catch a full night's sleep by the end of it.

As a result of this, I've been playing less but have been enjoying it more, which led my mind down a weird path: Have I involuntarily been reducing my own enjoyment of the game by trying to do too much? If only there was a way to track my play time... oh wait.

More than seven years ago I made a post about how I'd installed an app called ManicTime to track my gaming habits - and then promptly went on to never mention it again. I've referred to it occasionally when writing the end-of-year round-ups for my WoW blog, to figure out whether I'd spent more time playing the modern version of the game or Classic, but I never really looked at anything in great detail. However, I'm still using the same PC I had back then, and I've allowed the app to gather data all this time. Time to have a look!

It didn't take long to tickle the following graph out of ManicTime, showing my SWTOR play hours from February 2019 to June 2026, grouped by month:

So uh... it's a lot! You can see that my play time definitely increased after I started doing seasons on all servers, but there's a lot going on there in terms of ups and downs, so I decided to look more closely at what exactly happened when.

As I already mentioned, my first point of reference was February 2019, which I talked about in the post I linked a few paragraphs up, where I was slightly embarrassed about having accumulated about 130 hours of gaming time in a single month, split between SWTOR and Elder Scrolls Online. Ironically, those 66 hours played ended up being one of the lower data points for SWTOR in the chart.

Over the next few months, my monthly play time only increased, hitting a peak of about 120 hours per month played throughout May and June, which I can only chuck up to me feeling energised with excitement about the (then upcoming) Onslaught expansion at the time, which is something I did write about.

However, this excitement didn't last and my play time started to drop again soon after, hitting the chart's third lowest point in September 2019, a month in which I played less than thirty hours of SWTOR. This makes sense in so far as WoW Classic launched at the end of August, which had me super excited and hogged all my attention for a while, to the point that I was probably only logging into SWTOR for scheduled group content. In a normal week I generally attend three ops nights with my guild which last about two hours each, which in turn adds up to 24 hours of play time in a month even if I do nothing else, so that maths checks out.

My play time increased again when Onslaught actually launched, though that peak did not rise as high as the one for the pre-expansion excitement. The chart's second biggest peak comes in the first half of 2020, which makes sense as this was when the UK went into lockdown because of Covid. While I was still working more or less as normal, just from home, I did have more time to play due to no longer having to commute, and many guildies who were unable to engage in their usual in-person socialising activities were constantly online, making my SWTOR experience feel as alive as it has ever been.

Things dropped off for me in the second half of the year, because while Covid was still a thing, I'd been recruited into a guild in WoW Classic (after having hit a bit of a lull in that game before) and became super active there, once again at the expense of SWTOR. Basically that whole "slump" period from August 2020 to August 2021 was caused by my WoW Classic focus.

There was a brief activity spike in September 2021, though I'm not entirely sure what the reason for that was. There was a Total Galactic War during that month which had me binging on SWTOR for at least a week, and I did also write about being excited for Legacy of the Sith.

Again that pre-expansion excitement didn't last, however, as I got pre-occupied with WoW Classic once more (which had reached the Burning Crusade by that point), though my big investment in that would eventually peter out a few months after that for a number of different reasons.

This leads us to the lowest point on the chart in November 2021, where I apparently played fewer than 20 hours of SWTOR, meaning I likely didn't even do all my usual group activities that month. This makes sense though, as we usually take a bit of a break from ops in the weeks immediately leading up to an expansion, and at the time, Legacy of the Sith was supposed to come out in early December, until it was suddenly delayed until February.

When LotS finally launched in February, I did get active again and my activity continued to rise all the way until May, which I think I can definitely "blame" on Galactic Season 2 and my project to progress the seasonal track on all servers, as the expansion itself infamously launched with not that much content and wouldn't have kept me that busy for that long.

Once my goals were achieved, activity dropped again, with patch 7.1 only producing a tiny bump - I was not happy with the game at the time. But then Galactic Season 3 arrived and I was off to the races once again! And played even more when I decided to also do the meta objective to complete 100 weeklies on all servers.

I'm not going to keep talking about every single peak and drop after that, but I do think it's clear from the patterns on the chart that a new season always increases my time investment. The biggest peak on the entire chart was March 2024 when I launched myself into doing a Galactic Season on six servers at once for the first time, apparently spending close to 220 hours in game that month. That's seven hours per day, every day. How I pulled this off while also working and sleeping, I don't know, but that's what it says.

Anyway, I do think the chart shows that doing Galactic Seasons across multiple servers has indeed massively increased my hours spent in the game. (Compare this to the first season, which just resulted in a more or less horizontal line at the sixty hour mark for four months.) The part of the graph that shows my activity pre-Legacy of the Sith has some peaks and troughs, but most of the time my activity levels hover between 50 and 100 hours of play each month. And I have really fond memories of those times!

Yet ever since Legacy of the Sith, the average seems to have shifted closer to being between 100 and 150 hours, meaning I've spent almost twice as much time on the game, without necessarily having twice as much fun. I often wonder why I feel like I don't have as much time to blog and make videos as I used to and um... yeah, that looks like a big culprit of that to be honest! And I definitely do think that I want to reclaim some of that time to do other things.

I'm not saying I regret spending all that time on Galactic Seasons. I do think in the earlier seasons in particular, the spikiness of the graph shows some real excitement on my part, getting super hyped and binging hard, with a matching drop-off in activity and recovery period afterwards. But I think the graph for the last two years also tells a slightly different story, with the peaks getting smaller and the drops between them more shallow. I've just been playing and grinding consistently because that's what I do now I guess. I think I'd like to move away from viewing the game like that for sure.

A Good Time to Come Back to SWTOR

A couple of months ago I got a very surprising DM, from a player who had been in Twin Suns Squadron with me throughout 2012 and 2013. He'd decided to finally get back into the game and wanted to re-join the guild as well. I've got to admit that he and I hadn't been super close back then, so after more than a decade I barely remembered more than that he was English and had always seemed kinda nice, but that was still more than enough reason to welcome him back with open arms.

Our guild has pretty low churn, so it's not unusual for someone to take a prolonged break - sometimes several years long, even - and then come back and be happy to find that they are still in the guild and able to immediately pick things back up where they left off. But someone coming back after thirteen years was definitely a longer absence than anyone had ever returned from, so his level 55 trooper did need a re-invite, which I was happy to provide.

Since then, he's been online most days and is often hanging out in the social channels. I was honestly pretty delighted to see him go through all the expansions he'd missed in real time, based on which achievements were popping up in guild chat each evening. Ooh, he just finished Shadow of Revan! Ooh, he's doing chapters now! Etc.

I'm pretty sure he's fully caught up by now, but the achievements have kept on coming. The other night I congratulated him on unlocking Bessi, and he replied with something along the lines of "I just keep finding new things to do; it's great!"

While someone coming back after this long may be an unusual situation, I've also noticed an uptick in more "regular" returners, people who've just been away for months or a couple of years at most. Steamcharts also recently registered the highest player count for SWTOR since around 2023.

It just feels like a good time for that kind of thing. Knowing that there'll be a new expansion at the end of the year has people excited. If you got bored of waiting for story updates at some point during Legacy of the Sith and checked out, that storyline is now wrapped up and you can come back and play through everything you haven't seen yet in one go.

Additionally, we're also at the end of Galactic Season 10 now, with Season 11 probably starting in August, and both of these have been bringing back companions from previous seasons, giving people another chance to pick them up now if they missed them before. With only a few weeks to go it's too late to organically complete the Season 10 track in its entirety, but the companions are right at the start of the track so it's not too late to play a bit to just unlock those.

As a reminder, these are the followers you can still unlock from now until July 27th:

• Altuur Zok Adon, the companion from the very first Galactic Season that ran from April to September 2021,
• PH4-LNX, who was originally available to earn between October 2022 and March 2023.

Season 11 will then give you a chance to grab these two companions if you missed them before:

• Fen Zeil, who was previously earnable between February and July 2022.
• Amity, who was the main reward from Galactic Season 4 between March and August 2023.

 So if you haven't played in a while and happen to read this... I'm just saying!

SWTOR Does Currencies Well

The other week I saw this post on the World of Warcraft subreddit complaining about how the new expansion, which has been out for less than three months, already has people collecting over 20 different currencies. I thought this was a valid sentiment, but I'm not here to complain about WoW - instead thinking about the subject actually made me appreciate how well Star Wars: The Old Republic has been handling currencies over the years.

Doing a quick count of my in-game currencies, leaving out credits and Cartel Coins, I counted 35 of them. If that makes you go "that's still a lot, and more than 20", let me highlight that the above post was about new currencies introduced over the course of two months. In the context of SWTOR, I'm counting overall currencies, in a game that is approaching its 15th birthday. That's fewer than three currencies introduced per year! Though that's of course just a made-up average and not really how any of this works.

 

From my point of view, there have been two keys to SWTOR's good handling of currencies over the years:

1. They have not been afraid to remove currencies after some time when they became obsolete. (This is something WoW could learn from I think.)
2. Whenever a currency does get removed, the conversion of anything you've got left is simple and painless (usually it just turns into credits). This has never been a problem in WoW as far as I'm aware, but I had some nightmarish experiences related to the subject in Neverwinter, where they'd usually make you manually trade the old currency for a new one at an obscure vendor, you'd end up with a small leftover number clogging up your currency tab forever anyway, and worst case there'd be some kind of trap where you'd end up being misled into being wasteful.

Going back to the first point though, SWTOR has probably removed more currencies from the game than it has left right now. Back at launch, every planet had its own planetary commendation for example (Coruscant commendation, Taris commendation, Nar Shaddaa commendation etc.) which could be traded in on the fleet for level-appropriate gear pieces. To be honest, this never worked great, because even if you spent enough time on the planet to accumulate enough commendations to buy a piece of gear, it was probably already a bit low level for you by the time you had enough to buy it. Later they were all converted to a single currency simply called "planetary commendation", which worked better, but eventually they got rid of that too - the vendors that used to take them still exist, but now simply sell you their gear for credits. Wasn't that hard, was it?

That's not to say that I don't think there isn't still some room for improvement. Wait, was that a triple negative just now? I think there are things that can still be improved is what I meant to say. I'm not convinced Bessi needed five new currencies for example. There are also some old currencies that I think are pretty unnecessary and were never very useful to begin with, such as Eternal Championship Trophies and Ziost Memory Holographs, because they are so extremely limited both in how you earn them and in what you can use them for. I do get that it might not be worth going back to change them now, however.

Still, overall SWTOR has done a great job at keeping currency bloat in check, so that the number of them in the currency tab shouldn't be as overwhelming as it is in other MMOs of a similar age. 

Happy Star Wars Day!

May the 4th be with you! Today actually happens to be a real holiday in the UK as well, so I'm enjoying a long weekend.

If you like promotions and free stuff, SWTOR has you covered as usual with double XP, freebies for simply logging in, a 50% off collections sale and discounts on various Cartel Market items. I myself picked up the Shadow Sentry armour set this time (aka sexy Twi'lek lady from Star Wars: Visions season 3), a set that I'd kinda liked but not enough to buy it at full price. At 40% off it was an easy purchase, however.

My inquisitor on Shae Vizla is still grumpy even in a great outfit though. Life on Korriban be like that.

Tangentially related, do you remember how close to three years ago I bought myself a posable Darth Malgus figure when it came out? I won't blame you if you don't, but the point is that I said at the time that I now needed Hasbro to bring out a Satele as well so they could do battle in my living room. It took them three years, but it's finally happening! Later today, a Satele Shan figure from the same series is meant to go on pre-order.

As a bonus that almost feels like it was specifically added for me, there's a new Old Republic trooper design as well that wears the classic armour set sported by the guards on the fleet and which my own trooper also wore as part of her original levelling journey. Must have!

With all that and knowing that 8.0 is coming at the end of the year, I feel like I'm eating well right now as a SWTOR fan.

Edit: I almost forgot, the official Star Wars website even had a header image that included Malgus, Lana and Senya on their gaming deals post. How's that for rare recognition?

We'll Be Going to Ryloth in 8.0!

Yesterday was dev stream day once again - I'm usually awaiting these with baited breath, but as alluded to in my last post, I actually feel like I'm a bit behind story-wise right now, so my reaction this time was more something along the lines of, "What, it's already that time again?"

That's not to say that I didn't still enjoy the stream. We got a bit more of a preview of 7.9's story update, which is expected to go live at the end of May. As expected, it will feature the big showdown of all the different factions that's been building up to for a long time now. We'll even get to play as some of those other characters to mix things up - they had a preview of someone running around as Lana and a short clip of someone fighting as Malgus. We'll see how that goes! The HK-55 bonus chapter came out almost ten years ago now, and then they never did anything with the idea of playing as another character ever again. I enjoyed it at the time, but on replays it got a bit tedious, though I'm not sure whether that had anything to do with the mechanics or was just due to the chapter format itself. Either way, playing as all these other characters should at the very least be novel.

They were also talking a bit about 7.9.1 already, which they justified by saying that there won't be a dedicated stream for that patch. To be fair though, we already knew that it'll be the start of Galactic Season 11 and that it'll be more or less the same as Galactic Season 10, only with Fen Zeil and Amity instead of Altuur and PH4-LNX. About the only piece of real news was that the DvL bosses won't be returning for that season... yay, I guess?

In technical news, we were once again reassured that the DirectX 12 work is still continuing and that they are hoping to have an alpha for people to test later in the year. There was also an article on the official site about a month ago that talked a bit about the nitty gritty of the work involved in this, which I thought was quite interesting. I hadn't realised that in many ways this update seemingly requires them to rebuild the game's visuals from the ground up.

However, by far the most exciting part of the stream (to me anyway) was the additional information about 8.0. We still know only broad strokes, but honestly, at this point every morsel of information is exciting to me:

• The level cap will indeed increase by five levels (to 85) like in previous expansions.
• The new planet will be Ryloth, the home world of the Twi'leks, and it will come with dynamic encounters.
• There'll be a new operation with three bosses that will launch with story and veteran mode.
• The way we gear up will change again, but they want it to be an evolution of the current system, not a complete do-over like we've had in previous expansions, and it should be more organic to figure out in game, without necessarily needing a guide.
• There'll be new abilities and changes to class balance.
• The story will take a new direction but won't be completely disconnected from what's going on right now, which is why they can't go into it until we've had a chance to play through 7.9.

Ryloth as seen in season 1 of Clone Wars. 

They expect to have an 8.0 PTS up in summer, where we'll get to test a lot of the new stuff, and there'll be more reveals to come. The list of new features above is not exhaustive - as established in the last dev stream, they just don't want to spill all the beans at once.

The Ryloth reveal personally excited me the most (as you can tell from this post's title), I guess because for once it's a planet I actually already know, from the Clone Wars TV show. I'm not sure it'll end up being the most visually interesting - it's kind of rocky, so they might be able to re-use some assets from Ruhnuk - but it's the home world of the Twi'leks and I love Twi'leks, so that's a win by itself.

I still don't know how soon I'll manage to get more characters fully caught up to where I want them to be. Being excited doesn't change the fact that I've got a lot going on right now, but the news are definitely encouraging to me personally. For more details on what else was said on the stream, feel free to peruse one of the links below:

• VOD on Twich or YouTube
• Written summary on the official website
• Swtorista
• Today in TOR
• Vulkk

Delayed 7.8.1 Dev Livestream Reaction

Soo... there was a dev livestream over a week ago now! I did actually watch it live on my second monitor at the time, while doing an operation with my guildies, and I remember thinking "I've got to get back to this and write a post about it maybe tomorrow or on Friday" - and then things got a bit crazy.

I still wanted to jot down some thoughts on it though, even if it's belated. We know now that the patch will already drop this Tuesday, so I figured I've got to get in there before it'll be no longer relevant.

As had already been mentioned previously, the patch will be called Master's Enigma, and based on the little preview they showed without getting too spoilery, it looks like we're not yet done with Darth Nul's legacy, as she didn't just have that sanctum on Elom but apparently also a starship somewhere. We'll see how that goes!

As an aside, people always complain about there being too much time between story updates, but I've got to admit that this one time they've sped it up I'm actually sitting here thinking "wow, another story update so soon". I've only played through Galactic Threads on a few characters so far, so it feels like I've still got lots of catching up to do. Is it just me?

Anyway, the stream obviously covered a bunch of different topics related to the patch as usual, such as Spring Abundance returning with a new pet reward, the date nights with Kira and Torian, and the newest Cartel Market additions. As usual, I won't go into all of that here. There's a written summary on the official website, and Swtorista, Today in TOR and Vulkk all have their own posts as well. For me, there are just two subjects I really wanted to comment on:

Galactic Season 10 & 11

Keith informed us in his end-of-year Producer's Letter that "[the next] season will work a little differently than previous seasons" and as someone who's a bit of a connoisseur of seasons at this point, I was very curious to find out what that meant.

I'd had some conversations with friends in which we speculated about different possibilities and "bringing back old rewards" was one of those, so finding out that Season 10 will - in terms of rewards - be a mash-up of Seasons 1 and 3 with just a few new rewards added was not exactly a shock. (Season 11 will do the same thing with Season 2 and 4.)

It's not something that's personally exciting to me as someone who already completed all those seasons the first time around, but at the same time I'm actually surprisingly sanguine about it. I could easily imagine others who already have all those rewards being bitter about it ("Not only do they use seasons to recycle old content, now the seasons themselves are recycled too!" - something like that) but personally I actually really don't mind.

I know that I'm in a pretty hardcore minority, and I've seen my fair share of comments and questions from newer players who were interested in one of the companions or armour sets from earlier seasons and were disappointed that there was no way to get them anymore, so I understand that there was demand to bring them back. I'm happy those people get their chance now! Also, I didn't start doing seasons on the other servers until Season 2 (and the Shae Vizla server obviously didn't even exist until Season 5), so I'll have some fun earning some of the older rewards for a second time over there. (Technically I have all of it already unlocked in collections, but this is more fun.)

Also, there was some talk about 8.0 being in development alongside everything else that's happening, so it seemed reasonable to me to infer that putting a little less resource into the next two seasons will free up a bit of extra time for more focus on 8.0, which seems fair enough to me.

Speaking of 8.0...

We still don't know a lot more about what 8.0 will contain, but Eric and Keith dedicated a whole segment of the stream to talking about what their plans for it are in terms of releasing more information over time, which I thought was extremely interesting.

First off, they don't want to tell us too much just yet because the Legacy of the Sith story has two more patches to go and they want to give it a chance to play out in full without spoiling anything or even taking too much attention away from it, which I think is very fair and fits with the devs' commitment to treating the game's story as the most important thing, which is one of the main things I love about SWTOR.

However, they also said that they are planning to release more information in bits and pieces over time, to introduce new features and let us test them on the PTS as they reach a playable state, and I thought that was an interesting and novel approach. Usually expansion announcements are these big, attention-grabbing info dumps, so to know that an expansion is coming without much else, and that additional information will be released piecemeal over the course of a whole year is quite different. It's also a relatively long time to know about it in advance, as traditionally, SWTOR expansions have tended to be announced only two to four months before their launch date.

I'm very curious to see how this will play out in terms of expectations and hype, because on a purely theoretical level, I can think of ways in which this could go either very well or very badly. I'm hoping for the best outcome of course - just saying. Either way, I really appreciate the devs' attempt at being transparent about what's coming, when so much of Legacy of the Sith has been living from one patch to the next, without the slightest clue of what was going to be happening in six months.

One thing Keith and Eric did say about 8.0's content (it was even on the slides) was that they were planning to "create new content, gameplay, and systems that appeal to group, solo, and story players" and that they are aiming to "celebrate the breadth and depth of SWTOR to power new content and systems", which I understood to mean that they won't just be plopping a new planet and five more levels on top of what we have now, but that at least some of the new stuff will be integrated into existing planets and systems, perhaps similarly to how dynamic encounters added something new to do on classic planets. One Keith quote in particular that stood out to me was: "We're going back to old content and do something with it so it feels like new content." Could it be that they'll finally do something with flashpoints again? No, I mustn't daydream too much about specific things I'd like to see, because it's almost never what we expect. Regardless, I look forward to the journey of finding out.

Three Things I Miss About Knights of the Fallen Empire

Back in October, Knights of the Fallen Empire turned ten years old - which is wild to me, when I still tend to think of it as a sort of dividing line between old SWTOR and new SWTOR. New stuff isn't supposed to be a decade old! There was an interesting reddit thread on the subject at the time, with many people reminiscing about what they liked and disliked about the expansion.

I briefly considered writing a post on the subject as well, but ultimately decided against it because I was worried that it would just devolve into me rehashing all my gripes about KotFE for the umpteenth time, and god knows I've done enough of that on this blog.

However, I recently started another alt on KotFE for the first time in a couple of years, and it actually made me realise that there are at least a few things that I really liked about that expansion and that I kind of miss now. This doesn't affect me still not being too hot on KotFE and KotET as a whole, but I thought it might make for a fun post to give some credit where credit is due.

1. Our characters getting to look cool, often

What really got me thinking about this one actually wasn't just my newest KotFE playthrough, but also the release of Galactic Threads. One of my immediate reactions to my first playthrough of the latter was that I was pleasantly surprised by how many opportunities the story presented to take screenshots of my character looking cool.

One of the best things about KotFE, if not the best thing, was how dramatically it improved the in-game cut scenes, and it made use of these new tools by giving us a lot of shots of our characters looking badass, whether they were involved in action scenes, looking determined or just brandishing their weapons. If you're someone who takes screenshots at all, you must have at least one of your character pulling out their weapon in chapter five of KotFE while Lana and Senya raise their own lightsabers next to you. Or how about your various confrontations with Arcann? Lots of cool moments there.

Now, that technology never went away, but after thinking about it, it does feel to me like we've gotten fewer cool shots of our characters in the last couple of years, with much of the cut scene energy getting channeled into NPCs like Sa'har or Malgus instead (at least until Galactic Threads). So that's something I didn't even really realise I was missing, until I was delighted to get more of it again.

2. Frequent story updates

Look, I'm not even going to go into the chapter format, its mechanics and the story quality - but it's undeniable that for a while at least, we got a story update close to every month. I don't think it was worth the trade-off of ignoring everything else, but it was something. In hindsight, it seems deeply ironic that this was also a time when the community complained incessantly that there was "no content" and "nothing to do". And yes, I know that a lot of those complaints were about endgame activities in specific, but still. Pure story players at least were eating well for a while.

It's also funny to remember that the whole "one chapter a month" thing was dropped again pretty quickly with the justification that people didn't want to wait a whole month between story updates, because that was too long. *looks at Legacy of the Sith and gesticulates helplessly*

3. The world and community felt alive

Maybe re-reading some of FibroJedi's old posts gave me rose-tinted glasses, or maybe it was simply because there wasn't anything other than story going on at the time, but I seem to remember the community being very engaged with Knights of the Fallen Empire's story, with many people blogging about their thoughts, speculating what might happen next, and so on and so forth.

While I do recall some complaints that chapters ten to fourteen in particular weren't really moving the story forward enough, in general it felt like there was always something happening in the galaxy from a story perspective. Ultimately we ended up speed-running both the rise and fall of the Eternal Empire within less than two years. This is a stark contrast to the current (Legacy of the Sith) era, where it feels like nothing much has happened, narrative-wise, for the last four years. Or as Ted put it the other week: "I feel like time stands still in SWTOR, or at the very least, it moves slowly."

I think that as a side effect of this, the community has become less and less engaged with the current storyline over time. At least in my circle of friends, I don't know many who rush to play the newest story update the moment it comes out anymore. There seems to be a bit of a sense of "nothing's going to happen that's so important that I feel like I need to see it for myself as soon as possible". I also don't see many other fans producing story reviews like I do, though I feel like Galactic Threads has got people at least a bit more curious again after the long enforced break due to the voice actors' strike.

I'm hoping that as we're starting to wrap up Legacy of the Sith and get a new "era" to look forward to, these developments will add a breath of fresh air both to our characters' in-game day-to-day lives and to the community's engagement with what's new in a galaxy far, far away. 

What to Expect from SWTOR in 2026

I mentioned briefly in my 2025 in review post that Keith dropped a Producer's Letter for Q4 shortly before Christmas. I appreciate that he's been doing these pretty regularly for something like two years now, but most of the time they spend more time looking back than forward, and the little tease he tends to give about what's coming next is rarely enough meat to write a full blog post about.

This one was different though, as he actually gave us a pretty clear road map for most of 2026, something we haven't gotten in a long time. I couldn't tell you for sure when we last got a road map in fact - searching this blog for "road map", it looks like we got quite a few of them around 2017/18, and then the last mention of the subject is this post from early 2020 in which I cite a forum post from Eric Musco stating that they were going to move away from giving us full road maps. Huh! I'd forgotten all about that.

Anyway, the point is we did actually get a road map for the first time in six years or so, and that's definitely worth talking about. Instead of simply reproducing Keith's exact words (the link above takes you straight to the source if you so desire), I also wanted to add some commentary and context to a few of the things he said, to provide additional detail based on what we already knew and to manage expectations.

Firstly, the (in my opinion) most important bit that wasn't part of the actual road map itself was the update that they are still working on DirectX 12 and have made a lot of progress, but since it's still not quite ready they can't give us a date for when this feature will make it into the live game. I'm not the best person to tell you what DirectX is and why it's important to upgrade (in fact, from my understanding, players are unlikely to notice any major changes immediately), but all you've got to know is that it's a back-end system and that the game currently runs in DirectX 9, which came out in 2002. Yes, you read that right, that's oh two! To quote Wikipedia, "at the time of its release, it supported Windows 98, Windows Me, Windows 2000, and Windows XP". I was 19 years old and just out of school when this system came out! I bet some of the people reading this weren't even born yet! So I can damn well see why it's overdue for an upgrade if we want the game to keep running smoothly.

That said, on to the actual road map items. We already knew that the next patch, 7.8.1, will include date nights for Torian and Kira, the next Galactic Season, and (unusually for a point one patch, because of how the voice actors' strike previously delayed it) the next story update called "Master's Enigma". What's new is the comment that "this season will work a little differently than previous seasons" - we don't yet know what this means, but I think it's interesting to highlight, as I was wondering whether they had anything special planned for Galactic Season 10 due the round number. It could be related to that, or it could simply be that the devs felt it was about time to mix things up a bit since the last few seasons have all been very similar with pretty minimal changes. While you could argue that there's no need to change something that works, we MMO players do also get bored if things stay completely the same for too long.

Where things get spicy in terms of news coming from the road map is the sneak peek at the next story update coming after 7.8.1 - which is scheduled for summer and will be called "Legacy Reborn". It seems likely to me that this title refers to the expansion's titular "Legacy of the Sith" in some way, though I'm still not entirely sure what that's meant to be - Darth Nul's? Malgus's? We'll see. Though as a completely wild guess, I'd also love it if this was a double entendre of sorts that included some kind of update to the legacy system. (Speaking of features that have stayed 100% the same for a long time...) But that's just pie-in-the-sky dreaming.

What we do know about 7.9 for sure is this: "As the Legacy of the Sith story reaches its finale in 7.9: Legacy Reborn, we'll be introducing the next story Era just around the corner! Without giving too many spoilers, you can expect quite the shake-up across the galaxy. We'll give more details about the next Era in 2026."

This comment builds on the expansion tease from the last dev stream - it sounds like we'll be getting an 8.0 at the end of 2026!

Before excitement and speculation get too wild though - /Jawaface pointed out that it seems quite deliberate that Keith repeatedly refers to it as a new "era" and not an expansion. Back when I speculated about whether we were ever going to get an 8.0 at all, I said that if we're going to get another expansion, it's important that it lives up to what people expect from an expansion, considering many players' disappointment with the launch of Legacy of the Sith. Keith consciously using a different term may therefore be a deliberate choice to lower expectations - which is of course not something people ever love to hear, but I'm keeping an open mind.

I do think it might mean that we may have to be ready for 8.0 to not necessarily work like previous expansions. Maybe the level cap won't be raised, or there won't be a new operation, or - well, basically think of any feature you'd usually associate with an expansion and consider that this particular thing might not be included this time. To be clear, I have no doubt that 8.0 will still be a sizeable and exciting update and I very much look forward to hearing more about it! Just... attempting to set expectations, you know. (Ted from the SOTOR Podcast also noticed Keith's word choice here and discusses it in his latest episode.)

Either way it looks like 2026 might well end up being the most interesting year for SWTOR (in terms of content) that we've had in a while. I can't wait to learn more!

Happy 14th Birthday, SWTOR!

Back in my birthday post from 2023, I said that "the one thing that seems to be a constant with this game is that nothing is constant; that it's an endless roller-coaster of ups and downs" and 2025 certainly did nothing to disprove that theory. After it had a pretty good year in 2024, 2025 was once again a rather challenging time for Star Wars: The Old Republic, this time because of the 2024-2025 video game voice actor's strike.

While it technically started mid-2024, it wasn't until this year that it really began to impact SWTOR. We were originally told that the new story slated for patch 7.6 at the end of 2024 wasn't quite ready yet to go live on the intended launch date, with no official reason given, but with the promise that it would be released as soon as possible. However, weeks of waiting turned into months, and then the next story update intended for patch 7.7 also couldn't go live for some reason, making it increasingly obvious that the lack of voice acting was what was posing the problem, even if the devs seemingly couldn't comment on it in any official capacity.

I guess nobody really expected the strike to go on for that long - at close to a year in duration it certainly clocked in as one of the longest in the union's history. I sympathise with the voice actors' cause so there are no hard feelings from me on that front, and I also think that the devs at Broadsword did the best that they could under the circumstances.

This ended up turning 2025 into the year of dynamic encounters: while the first batch was launched at the end of 2024, the devs soon ended up giving us more achievements to do those same encounters again, new customisations for Bessi that encouraged us to do them yet again, as well as - eventually - even more planets to do them on.

Shintar the trooper gets another year older. 15 was a good number of shots to put into a grid for a change. 

It was all good fun, but I've got to admit that the lack of story definitely put a  noticeable damper on my own enthusiasm for the game. In a way that was actually a surprise to me, because while I do love the story and spend a fair amount of time replaying it in all its different permutations, I tend to think that the main reason the game has been so sticky for me has been my guild with whom I run operations every week. I actually still think that's the case, but going 558 days between story updates (the longest content drought of this type in the game's history) really made me realise just how much I still depend on the story as something to get excited about in regards to SWTOR. Dynamic encounters were fun, don't get me wrong - I played and enjoyed them, and I still do, but it's just not the same without having my character chat and go on adventures with her companions every so often.

I look forward to getting the next story update a little bit sooner as well as hearing what the devs have in store for next year.* If the roller-coaster theory holds any water, then 2026 could be a great time for the game again... until we inevitably crash down in 2027 due to some unpredictable fallout related to the EA buyout or whatever. (I definitely hope that doesn't happen - I'm just a bit cynical.) You've got to ride the wave while it lasts.

Previous SWTOR birthday posts:

Happy Birthday, SWTOR!
Happy 2nd Birthday, SWTOR!
Happy Third Birthday, SWTOR!
Happy 4th Birthday, SWTOR!
Five Years of SWTOR
Six Years of SWTOR
Seven Years of SWTOR
Eight Years of SWTOR
Nine Years of SWTOR
Happy 10th Birthday, SWTOR!
Eleven Years of SWTOR
SWTOR Turns Twelve Today
SWTOR Is a Teenager Today

*I drafted this earlier in the week, and then Keith dropped his Executive Producer's Letter for Q4 yesterday, which includes a roadmap for 2026 that promises two more story updates in the first half of the year to wrap up Legacy of the Sith, and 8.0 coming out around the game's fifteenth birthday. Definitely looking promising!