Galactic Season 4 - Early Thoughts

Galactic Season 4: A Passage of Peace is upon us, less than a month after the previous season ended. We do at least now understand BioWare's intentions for any given season's release cadence - each aimed for an X.Y.1 patch - and it is just unfortunate that 7.2.1 has come so soon to GS3's end. During Total Galactic War just under a fortnight ago, it was very noticeable on Darth Malgus that numerous guilds were flagging, and it is quite possible that burnout from the end of both GS3 and PvP season 1 were responsible.

There may be other factors behind it, of course, but I am curious to know exactly what impact both seasons really had on the playerbase. While I myself finished GS3 back in early February, I was glad to have an excuse to stop doing stuff. Funny to think that one can just mindlessly do stuff for weeks or months without much question, but with Galactic Seasons 14 weeks can pass really slowly. I guess it's just the extra layers of having to do specific things rather than settling into a more unfocused regime?

Regardless, in my assessment of GS4 as it is at the moment, I shall be putting aside all thoughts of burnout and just trying to be as fair as possible in my assessment of things.

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The Companion

Amity is our newest seasonal companion, and honestly I really don't know how to feel about him. I mean, sure, we finally get another human male Force-user companion to keep Arcann and, technically, Arn company, but the design choices made with him are... very weird. Okay, sure, cost-cutting measures mean that the chances of a fully-voice-acted companion happening anytime soon are slim, but I do find Amity speaking selonian to be... I dunno. It feels weird that he should be able to speak it exactly as they do (courtesy of reusing pre-recorded stuff), complete with accent and hissing sounds, but maybe it could work? 

The next thing is his look. Okay, so I wasn't anticipating a lilac or green-haired sorcerer from a bizarre other-worldly realm, but Amity's aesthetics are really quite weird nonetheless. Granted, they do come up with some reason in his story for him to be clad in full armour without the option to even hide his helmet, but I really do question why he decides to stick glaring lights on his robes in his later customisations. The extra spine, fine, I can get why that would perhaps be necessary given his history, but for someone who encourages meditating, the lights seem counter-productive if ever he decided to encourage meditating in a darkened room.

"Feel the darkness pressing in on you. Feel its calming aura..."

"Amity, I can see your robe's lights through my closed eyelids!"

"..."

Finally, on the list of things I'm not so sure about, his pacifist nature makes pretty much anything involving combat with him seem very bizarre (not as much as his "kill 2,500 enemies achievement", as a guildie of mine pointed out, which is the highest number required for such an achievement in the game!). He does at least say that he's willing to fight if he must and doesn't want to instigate fights, but it still feels quite wrong to have him out-and-about and happily killing things. At least he doesn't say "did I mention I'm a pacifist?" all the time.

On the flipside, I do very much like the concept of the Messengers of the Cold Moon, the faction that Amity essentially represents and who are responsible for sending him on his pilgrimage. A neutral organisation dedicated to helping the galaxy's "ordinary" Force-sensitives without forcing them to commit to the ways of the Jedi or Sith? That sounds very interesting, and honestly I wouldn't mind meeting more members of this organisation in the future. 

I also really like how, in ambient conversations aboard your ship, a Jedi or Sith character can have unique lines about how their views on the Jedi / Sith way of life contrast with Amity's own very strong views when he brings them up. Really nice touch, that, and it brings some additional value to having him across both factions.

So... yeah. Not really sure what to make of Amity quite yet. I suppose I'll just have to wait and see how my opinion on him evolves, but at the moment I would place him roughly between PH4-LNX and Fen in terms of my favourites of the four. Altuur's staying right at the bottom of the list.

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The Rewards

Galactic Season 4 introduces the usual range of cosmetic items we've seen since season 2. 

The unique creature mounts, the Odux, are quite frankly hideous in my opinion. I really don't like their giant noses, and it is quite bizarre seeing the bantha animations without a lot of shaggy fur hiding its limbs when it walks. The new korreali are... okay. They're about as fine as I would expect a single-seat korrealis to be, and I probably would cite them as my favourites of the tech-based seasonal mounts we've seen thus far.

The Aratech Advanced weapons are, so far, my favourites from across all four seasons, just beating out those from GS2. While I don't much like the colour of the special named ones, I am pleased to see them cutting back a bit on the laser-sights which have become awfully prominent, even if there are still  an awful lot of glowy lights. I'm not a fan of things like that, I must admit.

The armour sets both look pretty swish, although sadly their chestpieces don't look entirely versatile. I've done some playing around in the preview windows to see if I can find any better belts than the included ones, and very few options - if indeed any - seem to fit exactly the same way. That's an issue I've begun developing with some big-ticket cartel market items over the past couple of releases - the more specialist something is, the harder it is to use in a wider context. Don't get me wrong, I'm pleased that we are getting some more detailed stuff, but I also think there's a lot to be said for keeping to a generic structure as far as possible.

As themselves, these armour sets are probably my favourite from all four seasons. From a purely versatile perspective, I still feel that the GS3 armour sets win out. 

The final reward to touch on is the Mek-Sha stronghold. I... I can't really say I like it. I mean, sure, it's sold as a warehouse, and it is indeed a warehouse, but I also don't like how it doesn't have much that could resemble an office as pretty much all of it is open-plan. I was intrigued to see what it would be like, potentially as a place for my hunter to set up shop in terms of negotiating contracts (since otherwise she'd be inviting people into her Nar Shaddaa home... yeah, I don't think so!), but sadly it doesn't look like it's fit for even that purpose. 

Oh well.

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Miscellaneous

Following the PvP seasons, which added the objectives panel to the seasonal panel itself, the Galactic Seasons objective panel has also been moved to the seasonal panel.

From a pure, unbiased, perspective this change does make a lot of sense. After all, it frees up the Conquest pane entirely now, and it keeps things entirely in one place irrespective of which season type is active. However, it's also currently quite annoying from a muscle-memory perspective, as I still flit to the Conquest pane to see what's what.

I'm sure I'll get used to it eventually!

Unlike the previous two seasons, I've noticed that the Notes of Reflection - the special currency required to gain reputation with the Messengers of the Cold Moon - do not have a weekly cap. I mean, I don't see a lot of people consistently getting to 200 / 200 being an issue, especially given how tight-fisted mobs are in handing them over in regular content. That said, I do think this is a decent move for those who are prolific in completing group content and are more likely to hit the weekly cap on a reasonably consistent basis. 

I'm not entirely sure what sort of meditations Amity puts us through whenever we visit any of the planets which have a shrine, but my goodness are our characters pathetic when it comes to meditating. Two minutes, oof, better have a ten-minute break before I continue! Arbitrary wait-timers are always going to be a thing in an MMO, I get it, but this does feel gratuitous to the extreme.

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Conclusion

I mean... this is just another Galactic Season, at the end of the day. We've seen four of them now, the past two and this one all sharing the same structure and mostly-similar objectives, and it's just... here we go again. 

Sure, they have improved on the actual characters of the companions, and it is nice to not have the stories of PH4-LNX and Amity connected, either with each other or with Fen or Altuur, for some reason or other. Honestly, I really don't get the desire in general to connect as many things as possible into one big complicated or silly story. Standalone stuff works fine, it really does!

I'm very curious to see how GS5 differs. GS4 might have had some changes introduced based on the feedback (most likely the removal of the weekly cap is one such change), but it was also probably too far in development for it to have any real meaningful impact. Regardless, I think things have definitely improved in small places over the past couple of seasons, and I am interested to see how things develop from here on out.