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.

~~~

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.

~

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.

~

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.

~~~

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.

Musings on Personal Goals

It has been some time since I last provided a general update about my feelings regarding SWTOR. As the number of posts since December will doubtless indicate, I am feeling significantly better about things than I was for most of last year, and I am also happy to say that I have settled into a decent balance between time spent in-game and outside of it.

I have had two main goals on my mind throughout the past couple of months:

Firstly, Luck of the Draw. When Galactic Season 3 was on the horizon, I was initially deeply sceptical about my chances of completing the season in-full, that is to say all 100 levels plus all meta achievements. Still, I reasoned that it was at least worth giving it a go and see how I felt about it, since as I have expressed before it is rather easy to start these things "too late" and subsequently miss out on all rewards, etc.

Despite my initial reservations I am happy to say that I ultimately stuck with it, although I am still thinking that the current setup requires a bit of a shake-up going forward. I suspect that the novelty of farming reputation tracks for 12 - 14 weeks every time a season crops up will have worn off in quite a big way if they repeat it ad nauseam.

Still, it is done, and now we wait to see what sort of things GS4 entails. 

Secondly, character-gearing. When 7.2 launched, I unlocked the ability to buy 332 mods using gear from a couple of Columi and Thyrsian crates I'd saved up prior to the patch, and subsequently went on to upgrade all my characters' earpieces, legendaries, and relics up to 332 as well. I told myself, and voiced this plan to others, that I wouldn't get the 336 gear; no longer being involved in progression ops, I don't really need gear of higher rating than 326, although higher gear is still almost always useful.

However, a few weeks later it settled in that the longer I put off upgrading gear to its highest potential outside of R-4, the more painful it would be to upgrade it beyond 332 when the time came. It was already going to cost me 360 OP-1 catalysts per character to upgrade earpieces and relics to 336 from 332, and if we eventually get the option to upgrade Rakata to 340 that's a further 120 catalysts per gear piece on top of that.

So my current goal is to get all characters up to 336 rating, although of course for the time being the highest legendaries can get to is 334. I only have one more character-pairing to go, that being my hunter-smuggler duo, and I'm hoping that I can get at least one of their three required pieces as loot from a veteran mode op. Every piece is, after all, 120 catalysts saved, but if needed I will of course splash out if I get back up to 360 catalysts before that point.

Alongside this, I've also been getting each character their own separate set of tacticals. Each character already had their own main and off-hand weapons, so I've further reduced the number of items they need to send across to their partnered-character by at least one, but I imagine this is where things will stop. It's far too costly to source legendaries for all characters, at least while I still need them for upgrading the few 332 legendaries I have left, and crafting augments is too much of a palaver at the moment to get full secondary armour sets for them.

Still, only a few more pieces to get then I'm done with this goal as well. After that, who knows? Maybe I will decide to start splashing out on alternate legendaries. 

I'm not too sure that's a serious concept, though.

Perpendiculars of Grey

The Gree event is probably my favourite of the original SWTOR events that are still in circulation today. I don't really feel that the BBA week suits anyone other than my hunter - hopefully for obvious reasons - and I've never really gotten over my distaste for rakghouls as a concept.

I do still kinda regret missing out on the first rakghoul event, though, but since exams took priority ultimately it was a necessary loss.

The Gree event, meanwhile, is just... serene. You aren't dealing with horrific creatures or scumbags across the galaxy, but instead just seeing a bizarre research project in progress. Even the instanced boss, Xenoanalyst II, is hands-down the most pleasant raid boss in the entire game - it acts more like a laboratory professor dealing with its latest batch of test subjects and wanting to see how they react to certain stimuli than it does a 'traditional' boss, even celebrating its defeat as it still meant it gets decent research.

However, while it has been out for almost ten years now there have been a couple of things I haven't been all that invested in. Firstly, the PvP aspect. Sure, the original purpose for Ilum was this big open-world PvP planet and this is BW's attempt to pay homage to that, but I've never really been one to seek or incite fights. 

Secondly, the additional world bosses, Gravak'k and Surgok'k. Sure, I'd killed them a handful of times on Harbinger, but the times when organised groups for the two bosses coincided with my being available were very far and few between, even within my own guilds. The ability to transfer to The Red Eclipse at least meant that I was in guilds that were active and more likely to kill these bosses, but again it just seemed very rare when something actually could and would happen. 

Still, I managed to acquire ten kills of Gravak'k and nine for Surgok'k. It would have been ten for both, were it not for my abstaining in protest at my guild's actions on one such evening in 5.0. We'd killed Gravak'k and headed over to Surgok'k's cave to find an Imperial team gathering to kill it. Our tank for the evening charged in, followed by the rest of our group, effectively stealing the boss from under them. I stayed back by the entrance of the tunnel, still mounted, doing nothing but watching the Imps run past me. 

I'm sorry, but I tend to take a very negative view on actions like that.

The end-result of not focusing a lot on these aspects of the event is that I still lacked the Gray Perpendicular and Blue / Red Octagon legacy titles by the start of 2023 while many of my peers had had them for years. 

Well, finally, I have acquired Gray Perpendicular at last.

It was a bit of a weird thirty minutes, to be honest. On the Tuesday (24th), someone put in Imperial Ilum chat that they were seeking group members for a Xeno kill, and I promptly signed up. They pulled together a group of 13  including themselves in the end, and then it became very clear that the group leader unfortunately didn't quite understand what they were trying to do.

Unable to get any more than 13, they announced boldly ten minutes after the group had started that the plan was to do 16-man veteran mode for a chance at the Red Sphere. Now, veteran mode Xeno has historically been one of the hardest bosses to pug due to its DPS checks, and 7.0 ramped it up a fair notch even with higher gear now being accessible. A group of 13 stood no chance, especially as the group only had one healer and one tank.

A good number of people traipsed into the instance, assuming it to be set for 16VM, when it wasn't. They were asked to leave when a couple of the others tried and failed to enter, but the group leader still didn't set the phase even when asked. However, the ops leader never set the phase properly at all. Best guess is that they'd never learnt how to, which is fair enough I think. SWTOR doesn't actively teach you how to do such things outside of the read-only tutorials which most seem to just gloss over or forget about, so if you've never had to actively do it and only see others do it, I can understand not knowing what to do about it.

To top it all off, whether it was because the group was proving more trouble than it was worth or they just fancied doing the daily while it was there, they kept the group waiting and went off to the the Gray Secant daily. This understandably ticked off a good number of people, with at least one threatening to quit. They passed leadership over to the solitary healer (who, incidentally, didn't realise they were the only healer), and left.

So after about twenty minutes' general confusion, we remaining 12 headed into Xeno SM at last. It went well enough, although a couple of people needed to be taught about the consoles while the fight was active, and afterwards someone asked if we could go and do the other bosses. Fortunately, nobody left so we had enough to make it a feasible venture, although we acquired a thirteenth member anyway.

Gravak'k was messy, but we got it down without wiping. We did lose most of the group, though. Surgok'k was straightforward, with no deaths whatsoever, and finally... it was done. Gray Perpendicular unlocked. I'm not intending to actually use the legacy title but it's still nice to just own it, y'know. I wouldn't have made a post about it except for just the rather unusual circumstances behind my tenth Surgok'k kill. 

I do hope that ops leader managed to get into a Xeno VM group after all that without much hassle.

An Overdue Perspective on... Galactic Seasons

The Galactic Seasons have been available for almost two years now, having started in April 2021 (how time flies!) and yet I haven't really commented on them except in passing.

This is because, until recently, I feel that I haven't been in the best position to comment on them, at least from a fair perspective. Season 1, The Stranger from Kubindi, was an interesting concept marred by horrific execution. Season 2, Shadows of the Underworld, shared top-billing with the sheer grind of early 7.0 and that really coloured my perspective of the whole thing. Season 3, Luck of the Draw, therefore, is the first season where I feel I can approach the system and offer a mostly-unbiased view of it all.

That said, I shall of course be touching on both prior seasons as part of my assessment of the system as a whole. After all, the system changed so much between the first two systems that it would be remiss not to comment on where it improved and where it might have become more tedious.

On with the show!

The Advantage of Shorter Storylines

Legacy of the Sith attracted a fair bit of criticism when it launched with a remarkably short storyline. Granted, this was also largely because there had been a fairly major part of the expansion delayed until August, but the resulting expansion has had many refer to 7.0 as an "expansion" in quotation-marks.

I'm reminded of a comment I saw reviewing 7.0's launch, deriding it for being too short to be worthy of a tenth anniversary, and that only a campaign totalling "20 hours at least" would have been acceptable. 

It is true that other MMOs are capable of releasing large story updates which do take a fair bit of time. The Elder Scrolls Online has released several chapters - their version of expansions - over the past few years, each with at least 20 hours of content. This is not including the four dungeons that may provide extra context for the goings-on or the small zone DLC that provides its own story and, over the past four years, an epilogue to the story started with the first annual update.

World of Warcraft of course puts out massive expansion updates, with each individual zone released being the equivalent of at least medium-sized planet in SWTOR. 

I'm not familiar with how Final Fantasy XIV handles its expansions, so for the interests of fairness I shall be leaving it out.

Of course, neither of the games I mentioned has to put nearly as much effort into the voice-acting compared to SWTOR, which must pay forty-eight voice actors in all three languages just for the main classes alone every time an update comes out that involves our characters in a more robust manner than just rolling out the KotOR overlay. They can afford to spend more money and time on building large worldspaces and flooding them with short bite-sized quests that are mostly quite basic in structure.

That's not to say that SWTOR hasn't experimented with the WoW formula. Rishi is by far the closest we have come to seeing a WoW-style quest system, and I'm honestly so glad they never tried to repeat it. The quests were numerous, but they were also incredibly short and ultimately many of them could just have been part of longer quest-chains, as is more traditional-SWTOR.

However, there is one quite significant advantage to shorter quest-chains. Replayability.

Thoughts on 7.2: The Good, the Bad, and the Eeehhhhhs

As I have expressed before, I'm not a big fan of Mandalorian-themed stories at the moment. They are rather over-exposed, being prominent in no fewer than four television shows across the past decade and having a sizable presence in The Old Republic. 

All that is fine if you are a huge fan of the culture, and the sort of exposure they're getting would, I imagine, be idyllic if you've always been a huge Mandalorian fan. I, however, am not. 

Alas, with Mandalorians now becoming a prominent force in the main storyline of The Old Republic, this is one instance where I cannot just put said content to the side and focus on the stuff that does interest me more. Patch 7.2 continues the storyline started technically back in 6.0 before 6.2 really got going with it; the growing rift between Shae Vizla - Mandalore the Avenger - and several clans who are disgruntled with her leadership and uniting under one banner.

Last time we saw them, these clans had united behind she of the inconsistent voice and armour colour, Heta Kol, and they attacked The Spirit of Vengeance II - Shae's flagship - in both a show of force and in a successful attempt to steal the banner of Clan Cadera. After that, they disappeared to parts unknown. Well, now we've found said parts unknown, and it's time to take the fight to them.

Along the way, courtesy of the Digging Deeper story update with 7.1, we're also being treated to more story about the Kateen siblings. Sa'har's brother, Ri'kan, being in-league with Heta Kol was a twist that really caught me in particular off-guard, and it succeeded in giving me something of an anchor point to be interested in where that element was going. 

Then there's also the new PvP season, something which I have not yet had any personal experience of, and some new and exciting indications for SWTOR's future.

All-in-all, while 2022 might not have started well for SWTOR, it's certainly trying its damnedest to end it on a bang. What are my thoughts on all that we got this patch? Read on and find out!

Adventures in Orlando

Before I begin talking about the main subject of this post proper, let me take you all back in time a bit.

I’m old enough to remember the first time DVDs were released commercially. I remember going into our local Sainsbury’s branch with my mother and seeing a whole stack of blue boxes, each containing a silver DVD player and five accompanying DVDs. I can’t quite remember what all of them were, but I know for sure that two of them were The Full Monty of all things and a truly dire adaptation of James and the Giant Peach. Since when were giant mechanical sharks and underwater undead pirates part of the story?

Since my family and I had quite a lot of VHS tapes, the transition to DVDs was relatively slow at first, although the advantages were immediately apparent. For one, no longer was there a need to rewind after finishing watching a film. For another, DVD menus opened all sorts of benefits, such as scene selection and bonus features. Finally, there was the increased portability potential. Cars were being produced which had in-build DVD players and screens on the backs of seats, providing passengers new entertainment opportunities.

While my family never owned a car with an in-built player, we did own a portable DVD player which we strapped to the back of the driver’s seat for me to watch during long journeys on the way to various holiday destinations. With the number of times my family goes on holiday, it saw a lot of use prior to around 2014 or so when we stopped using it.

One of the films that we would take with us in the early days was The Lion King, which to this day is still my favourite animated film. I was the sort of person who liked plugging in not only the main disc but the disc containing bonus features as well, and in this instance the bonus features contained an entire section themed around the Animal Kingdom Park in Walt Disney World.

Young me was transfixed. Firstly, this thing looked like an entire country, not just one part of a theme park. Secondly, since the only Disney park I knew about at the time was the one in Paris, this was also the first time I realised that there were other Disney parks around the world. Granted, this did seem confusing at first; after all, if Disney was French, as I thought at the time, why would there be parks in America, let alone even bigger ones?

Retrospectively, I do find it amusing that my young mind had effectively normalised the concept of foreign language dubs for films due to this misunderstanding of Walt Disney’s nationality.

If this section on the DVD was designed to advertise Animal Kingdom Park, it did its job; the dream of visiting Walt Disney World had firmly planted itself in my mind. The issue, of course, was that it was very difficult to justify doing so for several years. Sure, there were things we could have found to do, but it’s a lot of money to just gamble on whether you can find things to do for a long enough time to make it worthwhile.

Things got kicked up a notch when it was announced that an entire section devoted to Star Wars, known as Galaxy’s Edge, would be opening within the Hollywood Studios Park. Suddenly, there wasn’t just Star Tours, which we had done a few times in Paris, but an entire array of specialist themed shops, eateries, experiences, and additional rides in the offing.

Time continued to pass on by, and around 2019 the idea to visit Orlando was floating around as a serious prospect. We even popped into a Virgin Holidays branch to pick up a brochure. Nothing came of that, however, and I’m very glad about that considering that the very next year the COVID-19 pandemic hit.

Again, we waited, this time to be sure that nothing would emerge to interrupt potential plans again, and in late 2021 we begin formulating plans for 2022 with the help of the ever-reliable Trailfinders. Initially, we were looking at a December holiday due to the timings working out best for us around then, but it soon became apparent that for a first-time trip out there, December is one of the worst times to go. After some mulling around moving it to February half-term 2023, one of us suggested looking at October half-term 2022. We checked everything was a-okay with my parents’ workplaces, booked the hotel and one of two days out in wider Orlando, and we were sorted!

To begin with.

See, there are multiple layers to organising a holiday in Disney. You may be booked into a hotel, but that’s just step one. You then need to look at the website or download the My Disney Experience app, where you’ll have the options to reserve parks whenever you like (assuming there’s availability), and 60 days before you go you can start booking restaurants and certain special experiences. This is also where you can buy Genie+, the revised Fast Pass system, with options to start booking rides opening at 7:00am each day.

This is where things got a little bit confusing. My family and I are not exactly what you would call technologically adept. As the most adept member – and even then, that’s being generous – it was up to me to try my best to co-ordinate and link my parents’ accounts to the app so that we’d all see the same things, and that took a good amount of time due to quite confusing layouts and all sorts of hoops the app has you go through. It was all sorted in about thirty minutes, but it wasn’t a fun thirty minutes for any of us.

Additionally, for some reason people within the UK cannot use the app or the website to book experiences. I learnt from reading a forum thread of people griping about this that one way around this was to use a VPN to connect to somewhere in America, and that would allow you to book without phoning in. I can confirm that this does work, but since I’m paranoid I still ended up changing my Disney password upon doing this just in case the VPN wasn’t as secure as it claimed to be.

We were done with everything we could have wanted to be done with by the time September arrived. All we had to do was wait again until Thursday the 20^th of October.