Passage of Peace, Past

Galactic Season 4 is finally in my rear-view mirror at last. Despite my growing reservations about Galactic Seasons as a concept, I have ended up dutifully doing my part each time, although by now the process feels incredibly formulaic and in dire need of another rework.

The trouble is, it doesn't feel like there isn't a lot they can change to me. The objective system works well enough, and it's always nice when something that in recent years has been kind of neglected like a comparatively obscure world boss gets featured. Much like the introduction of level-scaling, I like how that particular aspect of the whole thing makes older content both relevant and actually involving. 

My appreciation for what SWTOR has done over the years has grown exponentially since getting involved in World of Warcraft. That game honestly feels horrifically dated compared to what SWTOR has going for it at times.

That said, I am definitely looking forward to seeing what Galactic Season 5 has up its sleeve to try and make things different. Honestly, the thing I would like to see be looked at or removed entirely, even if just for this upcoming season, is the seasonal reputation track.

A new reputation track is a pretty safe option to add as a new grind. It keeps people tied to specific content or areas for a while if they want shiny rewards from a reputation vendor, and with seasons it's just another thing to add to the checklists for specific weekly objectives and achievements. However, since the seasonal reputation is entirely tied to a currency you receive for completing seasonal objectives or killing foes, that can result in quite a big grind depending on what you do if you wish to stay afloat.

Sometimes, that's easy. If you're the sort of person who happily pugs flashpoints and story mode operations like no tomorrow, you'll likely end up swimming in the stuff. If you are a progression raider who spends half their week working up to a final boss and not necessarily killing it, and that's the only group content you do, that's an entire sector of content where you're effectively locked out of gaining currency for.

Not even the Jawa Intel feels like it helps a great deal while out killing foes on daily runs if that ends up being your main source of income outside of objectives. Sure, it does help, but the drop rate on the things is still really quite woeful. 

PvPers, meanwhile... okay, so it's been a while since I've done a PvP match and associated weekly, so maybe they've changed this, but I don't believe there's any way for them to earn currency just from doing PvP.

Oh, and even if you do get an absolute shedton, you're still limited to a 5,000-per-week reputation cap. Again, I get it, they have to stretch it out somehow as completing 100 weekly objectives for the achievement will take fifteen weeks minimum, so completing the reputation track six weeks before that isn't something I feel the developers are happy to let people do. Unfortunately, this does mean that if you start working on the reputation "too late", even by just a week, you're completely screwed and have no chance to complete the track in time to complete the relevant achievements.

The thing is, I can get why they've done it this way. It's clearly a hangover from the original design of 7.0's content: encourage players to do as much of everything as possible in order to maximise their gain of relevant stuff. However, there is a very fine line between people feeling "encouraged" and people feeling "forced", and in this regard I can definitely sympathise with PvPers in particular who care enough about seasons to complete everything, as their favourite activity may well yield nothing.

All of this is why I feel the seasonal reputation tracks require a rework. Just a slight one, it doesn't need to be massive, but I would like to see things change.

The most immediate thing I can think of would be to increase the source of currencies. Adding them to the PvP daily / weekly boxes if they aren't already there would allow those who only do PvP to maintain a steady income without needing to go elsewhere. Operations are trickier, in that while I would perhaps like to see them spread the currency tokens across bosses much like tech fragments are, that may lead to certain operations (looking at you, Scum & Villainy) being a better source if only by a couple, up to a few, tokens. 

At least all operations of a certain type and difficulty giving the same amount from the last boss is fair, even if it means those who just do progression raids without killing the final boss miss out on currency.

Secondly, I would like to see an option added for players starting later than others to "catch up" with the reputation if they would wish. I don't really know how feasible this option is, as there has been no indication that the developers can even allow the weekly cap to be adjusted on a personal basis. Added to which, there would also need to be a system in place to detect which players would be relevant for a catch-up mechanic.

If it is possible, I would like to see a multiplier-system be introduced. Let's say a player who is still at the lowest tier in week five is allowed access to a token which temporarily increases the weekly cap by a factor of 1.75, in other words up to 8,750, increasing to a factor of 2 in week 6, and so on. Any tokens that player activates during this time are also multiplied by that same factor. This would, in theory, allow them to use the same number of tokens to reach the original weekly cap as before, but still at potentially a fast enough rate to complete the track in time.

It might not even be possible to begin with, in which case pipe dream, but I'm just trying to think of ways that the developers can make this particular grind feel less annoying the later you come to it. I mean, sure, at the end of the day you're not going to get everyone through, but I do feel sorry for everyone who does come to it late, or believes they're fine until they get a rude awakening that oh no you're not, and by then there's nothing they can do.

Thirdly, there is also the option to have the objectives themselves drop reputation tokens rather than just currency. Make it so that the 8-pointers drop a large blue, and the 12-pointers drop a purple, and you're away. By all means, continue to have the currency as a backup option, as it would still be required to allow players to keep earning the reputation, but then maybe that itself needs a rework. Rework the jawa, make it so that he'll sell a reputation trophy of your choice from any inactive season to you for various jawa scraps, and you needn't continue adding seasonal currency after seasonal currency.

It would be nice to cut down on that. Remember when their goal was to reduce the number of currencies we had to minimise confusion? 7.0 says "hi!".

Fourthly, and easiest of all, make the dang things cheaper!

~

In all seriousness, I really wouldn't mind it if with GS5 we saw the removal of the reputation track, even if just for one season. I don't really know what its replacement could be in terms of achievements, although since each companion has a specific activity associated with them as a weekly objective, maybe they could make it so that you had to complete that activity a certain number of times during the season.

Or maybe just... don't add a new achievement for the sake of it if there is no reputation track to do. Just leave off with earning level 100, the 100 weeklies, and the umbrella achievement for both. 

If they do end up adding seasonal reputation tracks with each successive season and we don't end up with a break somewhere along the line, I really hope we get a change in the current status quo. It's been fine enough for the time being, but there have been some serious flaws exposed throughout the last three seasons that could really do with being addressed.

Trouble is, I don't really think there's a lot they're ultimately going to be able to do. I'd love to be surprised, though.

~~~

To bring this back on-topic for my finishing GS4, it was... alright. I still feel that Amity hasn't done quite enough to beat PH4-LNX as my favourite of the companion, despite my own disappointments about how Fay was handled, but he was decent enough. I do miss being able to dress up the seasonal companion like you could Altuur, but I get why they've shifted to full-body-and-outfit customisations, and at least with Amity they actually did a full unique costume rather than just the gloves as they did with Fen.

Well, I say "gloves", but really they were just his hands with a glove texture appended on. That's SWTOR's aliens like duros for you. 

I don't really know what, or who, I'd like to see next. Amity fulfilled my previously-expressed wishes for a faction-specific soldier and a Force-user in one go, but I'd still like to see something that feels like it's quite special at some point. Fen, Altuur, Fay, they're all in some regards representing the neutral underworld, when there is so much potential for more.

I'd still love to see us get someone whose role in the galaxy actively clashes with at least one of the factions, rather than someone who fits in no-matter-what. Give us a disgruntled Imperial soldier, a Sith, a Jedi, someone who doesn't necessarily plug-and-play. It could be really interesting to see how a character of a specific faction responds to their situation, whether it involves us helping them feel better about continuing their role now that warfare has broken out if you're of the same faction and loyalty as they are, or maybe even convince them that there is more to life than just being the same-old-same-old and to break away from their former ties if you're of the opposite faction or are a saboteur.

Heck, some of the best stuff in SWTOR comes when characters with specific dichotomies enter into dialogue with one another. Lana and Gnost-Dural's conversation prior to Objective Meridian still stands out in my mind as a really good interaction between two people of different origin and alignment, and even though the Alliance can be allied with either the Republic or the Empire as well as its own thing, it is still presented as maintaining some of its prior neutral elements.

But what is the point of that if the writers aren't actively trying to find opportunities to explore those elements? In general, it would be really interesting to get some feeling about how your personnel are feeling, like maybe some updated ambient conversations like the ones you hear as your alliance specialist influence grows, just so we know how our current personnel are feeling about potentially fighting their loved ones.

It's certainly still quite fertile ground. I hope to someday see it explored, and I feel a seasonal companion would be a decent way of going about things. We shall see what we shall see.

Broadsword, Part 2

I haven't really posted about my thoughts on SWTOR's rumoured move to Broadsword since my last post on the matter, and that's mainly because... well... what was there to say? It's all so unknown, whether it actually would move at all, whether it would go to somebody else, and what sort of impacts that will have. I will happily theorise about in-universe stuff until kingdom come, but something like this, which is actually meaningful?

No, there's just no point getting caught up in "what this will really mean!!!" for the game and the community. What will happen will happen.

However, earlier today after a couple of posts by Keith Kanneg acknowledging the rumour and answering some general questions about it as best he could - I mean, he's never going to convince those who've already decided this is the game's final death knell, is he? - we finally have official confirmation that Broadsword is indeed taking over the reins of SWTOR.

These posts echo a general feeling I have seen from ex-SWTOR developers and those more in the know about BioWare and such things; that Broadsword is better-handled to carry an MMO forward than BioWare is. I mean, BioWare are not a bad game studio, nor are they a bad studio when it comes to crafting stories, but an MMO is not a game that BioWare is traditionally best at running. 

With a game series like Mass Effect, mechanics and gameplay are on the whole secondary to the story. That's not to say that they aren't important, but you tend to remember characters and dynamic moments in the storyline more than you do how a particular class plays. Doubly so for Knights of the Old Republic, the gameplay of which has aged horrifically while the story still holds up well. An MMO, on the other hand, often ends up being far more about the gameplay than the story, as people spend so much more time just doing stuff once they've done all the story, whether that be daily zones, PvP, raiding, etc., etc. 

The point is, unlike a traditional single-player game like Mass Effect or Dragon Age which is one-and-done, with DLC as an additional extra thing to invest in if they're asked to or want to, with an MMO you've got to do a lot more stuff on a regular basis. Sure, BioWare have proved capable of doing this; the 2.0 patch-cycle stands out as a prominent example of what the company could do for the game at its strongest, and since then no expansion or patch-cycle has ever really come close to repeating its sheer volume of content in a similar length of time.

I'm not envisaging for a second that Broadsword will be able to instantly turn things around and make every subsequent expansion like 2.0. However, if certain rumours are correct and BioWare were using the income from SWTOR to bump up other projects more than they were to improve SWTOR itself, then not having this drain will be immensely beneficial somewhere along the line. After all, everything costs money, and if BioWare weren't investing nearly as much money into SWTOR as it needed... honestly, I don't see how things can't improve.

Truth be told, I'm honestly more scared for BioWare's future than I am SWTOR's. They haven't had a lot of big successes recently, with Anthem and Mass Effect: Andromeda both being disappointments financially. Sure, they had Mass Effect Legendary Edition, but that was just a remaster; impressive, yes, but if you've already played the full trilogy several times over there's nothing really new there that you couldn't experience second-hand.

Point is, with the next Dragon Age and Mass Effect games still being worked on and nowhere near release, that suddenly puts a shedton of pressure on BioWare to get them right. After all, they won't have SWTOR to keep them afloat anymore, so if either of these games fails in EA's eyes... I honestly don't see BioWare surviving.

I really hope it does continue to persist, however. It's had some wonderful games throughout its time, and it would be sorely missed.

For SWTOR, however, I am very much looking forward to seeing what this move will result in. Even if it takes a while for things to manifest, it's nice to think that things are looking relatively positive now it can actually flourish without anything holding its investment opportunities back. I wish everyone with the current team well, both those moving to Broadsword and those who are sadly being left behind and needing to find their way. I'm really hoping those folks can find new work in good time.

Until the future, then. Let's see what it holds.

Oh, and we also have news that the next Galactic Season is coming with the next patch, which was previously stated as being towards the end of Summer. Another instance of a Galactic Season starting roughly a month after the previous one ends. Joy.

Thoughts on 7.3: The Good, the Bad, and the Eeehhhhhs

A new story patch is out, and of course I have to offer my thoughts on it.

7.3: Old Wounds follows immediately on from Ruhnuk, and both us and Shae Vizla are seeking answers about Nul and her datacron from Darth Malgus before it potentially gets too late. We're also invited to Voss, as Sana-Rae and Arcann finally have answers from the expedition we sent them on towards the end of 6.0.

There's a fair bit to cover, so let's get started!

Contemplating 7.3, Galactic Season 4, and Gaming Apathy

After all the recent hubbub about SWTOR's future, the news that Old Wounds would be launching on the 13th of June is very welcome. It's roughly when I expected it to be, as when the PTS went down towards the end of May I stated that I could maybe see it due a fortnight later (in other words, the 6th), so a week later is still pretty close to my original estimations.

In the meanwhile, I'm just chugging along with the latest Galactic Season, and am almost at the end point now. Certainly, I no longer need to worry about maintaining a consistent income of Notes of Reflection each week, as once I hand in those which I accrued this past week I'll only need a couple of hundred more reputation to hit the cap. Yes, I could always pop the reputation boost tokens and get it done on Tuesday, but I know from experience that the persistent nature of the 24-hour long buff (i.e., it cannot be clicked off, and it doesn't tick down when logged out) bugged me the last time I tried it so am not keen to repeat that again.

Besides, I'd only use it to boost one token. All that, when just waiting seven days would do just fine?

Regardless, once that's done it's just focusing on the last 23 objectives then that's this season done and dusted at last.

At that point, I don't really know what my plan is. I have noticed a growing sense of apathy towards not just MMOs but video games in general these past couple of months. Notably, when Jedi: Survivor was on the horizon, I just felt... nothing. Sure, I watched a few of the gameplay fluff videos explaining what was what, but I honestly felt no real pull. As a subscriber to EA Play Pro, it is a game I would get access to through that, so I acknowledged I would at least give it a go, but I had no real desire to actually buy the thing.

And indeed, it didn't stick the landing as far as I'm concerned. The original game, Fallen Order, was okay, but as the sequel got nearer and nearer I honestly just felt I didn't need to see the crew in action again. I was quite happy with the open ending of the original, and I have to say I just didn't feel much excitement for a sequel even back then.

I'm finding the same sort of thing about the new game that's just been announced, Outlaws. I mean, it looks pretty, don't get me wrong, but I'm just not feeling much excitement about it. It doesn't help either that it's an open-world game, and those are extremely personal taste. I have to say that my experiences with the tedious design of Mass Effect: Andromeda's open world environments really haven't endeared me to the concept, although to be fair MEA has a fair number of annoying RNG quests where you have to hunt certain items in enemy camps, and there is every chance that you can scour the entire map and come back to the camp you cleared first and find the item has spawned there again.

So... I don't know about anything game-related at the moment. I'm still keeping going with SWTOR and WoW, because I have some very good friends who I'm enjoying playing that content with, but beyond that... I'm just not feeling very much excitement about games. I don't know quite what's responsible for this, but something in my brain this year has flipped. Maybe it'll be temporary, maybe it's the start of a more long-term thing, I don't know.

What I think I'm trying to say about all this with relation to SWTOR is that I'm glad that 7.3 is coming next week, because it falls in the window where I'm still actively wanting to engage with it. I'm sure I would have come back to it were it to launch after I'd finished seasons, or at least prolong my probable post-seasons game break until after I'd seen all I wanted to see with the newer update, but it being imminent works very well indeed as far as I'm concerned.

Ultimately, I still have three-and-a-bit weeks to go until I reach the end of Galactic Season 4. Anything can happen during that time, so I'm not committing to anything until that point. In the meanwhile, my plan is to take things as they come and go from there. What will happen will happen.

Broadsword

7.3 is being launched in "the next couple weeks", but in the meanwhile IGN has completely upstaged the announcement by prematurely revealing that SWTOR may soon be moving to a new developer: Broadsword Online Games.

I must admit, I had never even heard of this company before this news broke. I believe I had heard of Ultima Online, but I certainly couldn't have told anyone whether it was an MMO or an online fighting game like Mortal Kombat. Regardless, neither this nor its fellow Broadsword game, Dark Age of Camelot, seem to match SWTOR in terms of philosophy. Notably, both games have more emphasis on PvP.

As for what this means for SWTOR, it's far too early to say for sure. Needless to say, the news was met with doomsaying on the subreddit (but what else is new there?), and the IGN article was quick to say that the move would include more than half of the team currently working on SWTOR.

It's the nitty-gritty details which are the unknown quantity. Things like voice-acting deals, exactly where the story team are in developing the rest of 7.0, philosophy regarding difficulty and types of group-content, and how future crafting updates may be handled; all of that is quite unknown how a new studio will manage things compared to BioWare, and as a result it's also unknown how much that could potentially change. Granted, with half the current team and a former BW employee who worked on SWTOR as the head of Broadsword if it moves there, there is always the likelihood that several changes will not be any more significant than they would usually be.

I mean, how many times has BW itself shaken up the formulae for gearing, content difficulty, and all that? They seem to have shaken things up to a drastic degree for the past four expansions, and it is quite possible that whatever the BW team might potentially have been planning already for the inevitable 8.0 will still come to pass under new ownership. One thing you can guarantee is that even if what a new developer produces is actually something that BW came up with before the move that the former will get the blame if it goes wrong.

It's an interesting piece of news nonetheless. If a move does go ahead, I'm curious to see exactly what comes of it later down the line, especially the closer we get to a new expansion. I for one find it rather a strange concept to move a game to a different studio when the team is possibly only halfway through a current expansion, so I wonder now more than ever just when 7.0 is meant to be drawing to a close (we do at least know that 7.4 is still planned to go ahead, however!).

BioWare's Revised Flashpoint Philosophy

Shrine of Silence, coming with 7.3, brings with it a shift in how BW have been delivering flashpoint content in recent years. Ever since the Shadow of Revan prelude, Forged Alliances, every flashpoint released has been a part of the "critical path" of the story. That means that in order to continue or outright conclude a given story, a flashpoint must be done to advance it.

This in turn resulted in flashpoints having much more of a scripted element than they did before. Sure, there was the odd cutscene here and there in the original bunch, and a few thereafter, but the bigger cutscenes were almost always at the end. Starting with 5.0's Crisis on Umbara, solo-story flashpoints had various decent-length cutscenes present at various points throughout the entire thing to convey plot updates.

Well, with 7.3's newest flashpoint, that philosophy is reverting back to how a lot of flashpoints used to be; Shrine of Silence has its own story, completely independent of anything else going on in the Interpreter's Retreat, and it does not need to be completed in order to conclude the rest of the story which is coming with the patch. This seems to be BW's goal going forward for the immediate future, and I am curious to see where it leads.

The biggest question I have to ask is; is this going to be their new philosophy for all flashpoints going forward, or just a select few? 

I certainly wouldn't mind more flashpoints dealing with 'extra' threats, as it makes the story on whichever planet we're visiting larger than just what we're asked to deal with in the moment. A flashpoint being more of an "oh, by the way, while you're here..." thing also feels much more 'old-school' than the more recent method of using them as a story vessel, which in my view is welcome.

But at the same time, I also wouldn't like to see flashpoints be removed from the crit-path entirely. Much in the same way as they can expand a story with 'extra' stuff, they can also be used quite effectively to show off the power of a story-critical character in a way that can be seen again after the solo-experience in an expanded and more dangerous format. The alternative, of course, is the development of more chapter-like environments as seen in 6.2's Echoes of Oblivion, and... yeah, I'll take more flashpoints over those!

That said, with certain characters already being recurring antagonists and some being set up as new recurring antagonists, continuing to add flashpoints as a crucial part of a given storyline will inevitably lead to certain bosses being defeated in group content time and time again. I mean, Republic characters already face a certain Sith Lord as the final boss of three flashpoints!

I guess ultimately my main curiosity about what this means for the immediate future of SWTOR's story is what format Malgus's inevitable break-out will be delivered in. I have always been hopeful that we would see that in flashpoint form (just... maybe with one of the rescuer's inner circle as a boss rather than Malgus again...), and this news doesn't entirely derail my hopes that we will see it as such. I still feel that a flashpoint set on either fleet would be really interesting and fun after almost twelve years of just knowing them as passive hubs, and I really wouldn't like this potential to be squandered by them instead resorting to a solo-only phase.

Unless that was always to be the plan, of course, but then that's a wasted opportunity if ever there was one!

Moving away from a solo-story instance of course brings in extra problems; for players who aren't interested in group content and have neither the skill nor the gear to complete a 'proper' story-mode instance, this will most definitely not be an ideal move even with healing pods and the return of the Jesus Droid in Shrine. It's of course not my place to comment on whether I believe Shrine is particularly complicated, given my exposure to harder content, so I'll say nothing more and move on.

I have to say that all this reminds me of what they've recently been doing for the operations. Issues with flashpoints being a part of the critical story were eventually addressed by the introduction of solo-mode flashpoints, but other than the Temple of Sacrifice instance there is no such workaround available for operations. This was particularly problematic for Dread Fortress and Dread Palace, which were needed to complete the Oricon story in-full.

So, arguably starting with Ravagers and coming back in force with Nature of Progress and R-4 Anomaly, BW just decided to make the operations an 'extra' thing to do on their planets as well rather than an actual conclusion for their storylines. Gods from the Machine kinda went backwards a bit on this point; while it is not required to go in and kill the six gods to conclude the Iokath storyline, completing the operation is the only way to gain full closure for what happens, especially given that just finding TYTH alone was a big deal for all three factions in play.

So we're now potentially entering a time when BW are treating both of their main PvE group-content instances as somewhat separate entities from the ongoing storyline. It's going to be rather difficult to adjust to if it does become a major thing rather than every once in a while, but I can't deny that I am curious to see the results!

~~~

My major concern with their new philosophy, regardless of how many flashpoints it is due to apply to, is that they don't end up making these 'extra' flashpoints like the uprisings in terms of how really forgettable they were. Granted, the uprisings themselves don't really make an awful lot of sense, as they were just a bunch of instances created for the sake of giving players some group content in the vein of star fortresses before they got back to focusing on flashpoints with 5.4, so their stories weren't that well-established on the whole.

I suppose that is one major advantage of appending them to something already going on and just expanding it slightly. It doesn't need to make sense in the grand scheme of things; it just has to make sense within the instance itself, and that arguably is why the uprisings feel like they failed. They tried to make sense in the wider picture, but in so doing didn't make an awful lot of sense within the instances themselves, and we also don't really know if they were meant to tie into the Order of Zildrog or not!

I am definitely curious to see what BW does for its future flashpoints. I hope that we will continue to see them be a part of the crit-path, but I can also appreciate that this will be something of a breath of fresh air.

The planets I would love most to be updated with new areas

With the news that 7.3 would be taking us to a brand-new area on Voss, the fourth planet after Corellia, Belsavis, and most recently Manaan to receive an extra landing zone, one has to wonder what other planets would make for good secondary areas if BW were to add them. 

There are a handful of benefits to returning to a planet rather than always being shunted off to new ones. Primarily, you can have a new story that continues or perhaps even concludes elements of stories from the base-game, allowing players to see how that planet has moved on in the years since we left it behind without needing to change things on the original planet instance itself.

I still remember a lot of the changes made to the game to improve its flow in 4.0. Imperial Alderaan got chopped and changed quite a bit!

A new area also opens itself up to more exciting opportunities that would be very difficult to fit into an existing area, especially for universal faction-neutral entrances. A flashpoint or perhaps even a raid instance springs to mind; something that a single player or a group can pop along to that's tailor-made for that area. Then you have the bog-standard of weekly missions and potentially a reputation track, just to give people some reason to keep coming back to explore.

So, with this in mind, here are my picks for planets I'd like to have the opportunity to revisit at some point in the future: