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!

The Blog's 14th Year Was a Bit of a Dud

Last year I made a big song and dance about how prolific I'd been on the blog (more than 100 posts written for the first time since 2019!), so it makes me a bit sad to have to admit that this year has been the complete opposite, with my posting frequency hitting a new low of around five posts per month, for an annual total of just over sixty.

This puts me a fair bit behind even the second least active year of this blog, 2022, when a last-minute delay to the launch of Legacy of the Sith completely sapped me of motivation in January, and then I had a major funk towards the end of the year due to the bad state operations were in (one of my top three worst times in SWTOR for sure).

It's kind of weird because I didn't really feel particularly bad about SWTOR this year at all. It was still my most played game of the year by a mile, and I don't really recall any periods during which I was having a bad time. The voice actors' strike and lack of story updates just made it less interesting to talk about, somehow. Doing dynamic encounters all year was fine but simply didn't inspire me to do a lot of writing about the game, good or bad. It's almost as if my enjoyment of SWTOR doesn't correlate to my urge to write about it in a linear way:

• When I'm having a great time with it, I definitely want to write about it all the time. I have so many thoughts and I want to get them all on the page while the going is hot!
• When I'm having a really bad time (rare, but it has happened), it also makes sense that I don't feel like writing very much. Maybe I'll make one or two posts to vent but then I'd rather focus on other things that I actually enjoy.
• However, when I'm having a mostly okay time, like I had for most of this year, it's also kind of killer for my inspiration. I may have some fun playing in the moment, but it doesn't leave me with a lot to say about the experience.
• Conversely, when I'm having a slightly annoying time, this is another motivator for me to write a lot, because there are still things I like but they are just being dragged down by all these flaws, and I feel like I basically have to cry out for the devs to fix them so things can be good again. (I suspect the "Knights of" expansions were a prime example of this, as there's no other expansion that I've talked about as much.)

That said, as much as I enjoy psychoanalysing myself, I was also stressed in real life for quite a few months, and played a fair amount of WoW, so those things also took away from this blog in terms of both free time and motivation.

Regardless! Enough of the general yapping, let's look at some of the things I actually did write:

January and February saw the last two installments of my "Around the SWTOR-sphere" column before I dropped it. I still think it's a great concept and there absolutely is lots of community activity that deserves highlighting, but what with my general lack of energy, a project that very much required loads of it was naturally the first thing to go.

I also started the year by writing a wishlist for features I'd like to see in 2025, none of which became reality. Don't worry, I'm used to it. As I was still somewhat energised from patch 7.6 in December, I wrote top ten lists about the new dynamic encounters on Hoth and Tatooine. Even though I waited with writing them to make sure that I had sufficient experience with all the encounters under my belt, I've got to say that a year later, I'd definitely change some of my rankings anyway.

I also wrote a post called "SWTOR Classic - an Attempt at a Realistic Assessment", which surprisingly turned into one of my most popular posts in terms of random Google traffic. Or maybe it shouldn't be a surprise, considering that it's a very niche topic that not a lot of people talk about but that would definitely cross the minds of at least a small subset of players. Lest you think that it being popular in terms of Google must mean that SWTOR Classic is something the masses are secretly craving, we're still talking about fewer than one hundred hits per month here.

By February I was already struggling for inspiration a bit, reaching for subjects like my pet peeves in PvP or whether the newest Cartel Market bundle was good value. When Galactic Season 8's theme was announced to be uprisings, I was not thrilled. In March I also had reason to be sad when the OotiniCast shut down. By April I was talking openly about how unmotivated I was feeling. 

In May I tried to rank all previous Galactic Seasons by how much I enjoyed them. Patch 7.7 dropped and like I said above, I had some fun but it felt lacking without a story update.

At least June was a good month for me, as I got to celebrate earning the Dread Master title from completing the timed run for Dread Palace master mode and my guild conquered Belsavis during Total Galactic War (in a rather degenerate way), finally earning me the legacy title "The Galaxy Conqueror".

I made people come and pose with me on FA-1 Command Walkers to commemorate the occasion. 

In July I had a decent time with the Night Life event after the devs finally made casino chips a legacy-wide currency, and I had a lot of fun joining the New Outriders for a guild event on Star Forge.

August saw me completing the timed run in master mode Scum & Villainy, and Galactic Season 9 launched, bringing with it the removal of cut scenes in the group finder, which I was not too happy about, even if I understood the devs' motivation. Nonetheless, I enjoyed this season's theme a lot more than the previous one and felt that it was off to a good start.

September saw me hitting a few more personal milestones, such as completing all the hidden achievements related to the dynamic encounter "Trial by Fire" on Hoth and hitting legacy level 50 on the Shae Vizla server. (Yes, I'm still there!) I also wrote the super-nostalgic post "10 Moments in SWTOR's History for Which You Had to Be There", which I'm still pretty proud of.

In October I talked about how people shouldn't be too freaked out about the EA buyout just yet, the success of date nights, and how I thought the special Czerka stims used in the last two Galactic Seasons weren't working out so great.

November mostly consisted of more talk about running flashpoints for GS9, until December finally gave us patch 7.8 and the story update we were originally meant to get a year ago. I also got to round out the year by defeating Dread Master Brontes on master mode, which has probably made 2025 one of my most successful years in terms of ticking off challenging old ops achievements.

We'll see how I'll do in terms of blogging in 2026. After this year's low, I'd imagine that the only way is up!

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!

A Nemesis Defeated

This wasn't the post I was planning on publishing today, but I'm just too giddy not to share it immediately.

Dread Master Brontes is the operations boss about whom I've probably written the most on this blog. Back in 2019 I detailed my history with her in this post, explaining how my group mates and I had been defeated by her nightmare mode incarnation over and over again.

A little over two years ago, I finally ended up beating her on 16-person master mode of all things, and noted at the time: "I just hope I don't need to wait another ten years to tick the box for the 8-man achievement."

Aaand... *insert drumroll here* tonight it finally happened!

Unfortunately there won't be a kill video this time, as my video recording software did not cooperate.

We generally seemed to be a bit cursed all evening. First Mr Commando randomly wrenched his back (he does have chronic back problems that rear their head every so often, but usually not randomly while he's just sitting at his desk), which required a time-out so he could stretch a bit and take some painkillers. Then the friendly guildie who'd offered to fill in for one of our regulars who was absent started having internet connection problems, which led to a couple of wipes and warranted various restarts on his end.

I was in this weird head space where I simultaneously really, really wanted the kill and felt that it was absolutely within our reach (I finally understood how every single part of the fight worked and had the impression that everyone else did too) and at the same time felt weirdly zen about not getting it, almost certain that we'd continue to fail somehow and finish another year without having bested this boss (after all, it had happened several times before, and all the random mishaps described above did not fill me with confidence).

However, in the end, we persisted and were victorious! I'm still a bit bummed that I didn't get a recording (there was some excited shouting for sure) but as I said to my guildies, I'd rather get the kill without recording it than have my recording work all evening and then have nothing to show for it but more wipes. I'm not sure yet what we'll attempt to tackle next, but I don't need to worry about making a decision on that yet anyway, as this was our last progression night of the year and we won't be back at it until January.

Wreckage on Dantooine - A Bold Experiment

Aside from a new story update, patch 7.8 also gave us a new zone that is very unlike SWTOR's typical content updates. The crash site on Dantooine was explicitly designed around being filled with dynamic encounters, with everything being centred around them.

It consists of three sub-zones or biomes, and each one has one of three states or levels. Doing dynamic encounters in the area levels them up, and once all three biomes have hit level three, an instance with a special nightmare-difficulty boss designed for a group of four unlocks for a limited time.

There's no time limit on the level progression itself, so biomes don't regress in levels if there aren't enough people around (unless the planetary instance shuts down entirely). Worst case there just isn't any advancement for a while. Unlike normal dynamic encounters, the ones on Dantooine aren't on a timer, so they just sit there forever until someone comes along and actually completes them. Progress for all encounters applies to everyone taking part, and once it's completed, it goes away and another encounter spawns somewhere else.

It honestly sounds a bit like something out of another MMO, and I've seen people who've played Guild Wars 2 compare it to some of the zones in that game, namely Verdant Brink and Silver Wastes. Having never played GW2, I have no idea how accurate that comparison is, but it does seem very clear that the zone is very "un-SWTOR-like".

My own first impression was quite positive, even if the experience was very chaotic. I did have to roll my eyes a bit when literally the very first encounter I attempted to do turned out to be bugged on launch, followed by another bug preventing me from progressing the introductory quest line. However, I eventually managed to resolve the latter with a workaround and quickly found myself getting swept along by the crowd. I didn't even care that much about achieving anything specific, I just followed the masses around and tried to click or attack things wherever we went in an attempt to get credit for whatever it was we were currently doing. So that was fun.

However, I also heard quite a bit of less positive feedback from other players. All three biomes are very hostile, with various environmental debuffs slowing and damaging you, with the idea being that progression through the reputation track will unlock various counters to that which will make things less painful. Most of the time it's impossible to mount up, and even as a healer I found myself dying quite a bit.

Now, I wasn't terribly deterred by that, but I can definitely see how others might be. The comparison that came to mind for me personally was The Maw from WoW's Shadowlands expansion, which I thought was a fine enough endgame zone at the time but which seemed to be almost universally disliked.

Population is another concern, and I saw someone from Shae Vizla comment that for them, the crash site zone was effectively dead on arrival since there aren't enough endgame players on that server to make it viable. While it's very much possible to progress the zone at a slower pace, many enemies are very tough and have huge amounts of health, to the point that I'm pretty sure that quite a few encounters are not actually soloable. Even as someone who's a big proponent of group content, I find that a bit concerning, and I hope that the devs will at least review the tuning of some of these encounters.

There's one in the glacial area for example that has multiple stages, and on the final stage you're supposed to defeat six champion mobs, three of which have a knockback while the other three have a long stun. Mr Commando and I attempted to duo this as tank and healer and were killed pretty quickly, as we were both simply stunlocked and whacked to death with no means of defending ourselves. We did eventually complete the encounter after a few more people joined in, as with the mobs taking turns attacking and killing different people, we could eventually zerg them down, but it was hardly what I'd call an optimal experience.

At the same time I really want to love the new zone because I really appreciate that the devs are trying something different with it. I guess one downside of trying to keep all content relevant forever is that adding more of the same type of content, be it daily areas or flashpoints, hits diminishing returns after a while. Adding a completely new type of endgame on the other hand has a chance of engaging people in new and exciting ways.

From my point of view, the zone is very beautiful and following other people around to dispatch enemies together can be very zen. The area is also very explorable, as it's been out for a week and even the content creators that constantly gather data and are trying to write guides are still in the process of figuring some things out. A lot of rewards simply drop from killing different mobs, so as long as you keep running along and hitting things, you're bound to be rewarded in some way.

I haven't attempted the four-man boss yet as it's supposed to be super hard and we haven't got a guild group together yet to attempt it in earnest. Having this boss be the "reward" for levelling up all the zones has also been somewhat contentious, as it's odd to let more casual players progress through the entire zone just to suddenly have them hit a wall at the end of the quest line. While Eric Musco has stated that unlocking enough of the reputation buffs should make the boss accessible to all eventually - as they are supposed to massively lower the difficulty - I don't think that's very well communicated in game right now.

Looking at it from the perspective of NiM raiders on the other hand, it's probably a bit odd to be reliant on "the masses" to level up all the biomes just so you can access the boss and work on your progression. I personally don't think it's a huge deal as I'm very much in favour of different types of players working together synergistically, but we'll see what the community reception is like in the long run.

Either way I applaud the dev team for trying something different with this zone, and I at least am absolutely planning to spend a lot of time there over the next few months.

Patch 7.8 Ramblings

Patch 7.8 with the long-awaited story update and more landed this week, and for the first time in a while I felt like there were so many things going on in SWTOR at once, I hardly knew where to start. And I loved it!

I finished my last Galactic Seasons achievement on Darth Malgus last week (which means I should probably write my usual season review soon) but on the other servers I still need a few more weeklies for the last meta achievement, and I didn't want to abandon them completely this week, even if there was new content to explore on my main.

Mostly I just ran the featured flashpoint on each server, which was Legacy of the Rakata this week. And oh my god, the skips! Fortunately there's not too much annoying jumping going on in this one, but I was continually surprised by the number of trash pulls for which I learned that you can literally walk right through them without aggroing anything as long as you walk down a certain narrow line between two specific mobs. I always wondered who was the first person to figure that out and how it spread.

Primarily I wanted to check out the new story of course, but on launch night I saw a few people talking about bugs so I decided to hold off at first, because with the level of anticipation I was feeling, I figured I really couldn't deal with the disappointment of then running into a blocker. Fortunately the aforementioned issues were fixed quickly, and as of the time I'm writing this, I've played through the Galactic Threads story once. I can tell you that my first impression was very positive, but before I write my full review I need to see it a few more times on different classes. It seems like the kind of story that's mostly the same for everyone, but at least one part of it is gonna be different for Imperials, and there were a few other small moments where I found myself thinking "I wonder if you get a different line here if you have a different origin story". I've got to know!

One thing that was very obvious was that this update was originally meant to be part of patch 7.6, which also brought us the XR-53 lair boss on Ilum and the first batch of dynamic encounters on Tatooine and Hoth. Because the story has us going to all these places and there would've been some very obvious synergy there, discovering dynamic encounters for the first time as you're also cruising around Tatooine for the story. As it was, I was like "nope, I don't want to help promote your band right now, I'm 100% on Tatooine encounter achievements, bye". Though I did pause to help out the Weary Travellers at the taxi spot, because I can never ignore those. And on Hoth I helped rehome an ice cat, because I can rarely resist that either. I could just tell that it probably would've been an even better experience if it had come out as originally planned.

One tiny thing I'll comment on in terms of the story - and I guess this could be considered a spoiler if you're a purist, but it's only a small thing that happens literally in the first five minutes - is that I took the opportunity to flirt with Rass Ordo, and for a moment it looked like it was gonna go somewhere, but then he wasn't in the mood. It just made me realise I'm so ready for my trooper to finally kiss someone. Since her creation almost fourteen years ago, she's taken some flirt options here and there, but has never taken it all the way! I sure hope Rass is around in the next update as well.

Next to the story, the other big addition that came with the patch was of course the new dynamic encounter zone on Dantooine. Again, I'll have to make a longer post about that later on, but first impressions are once again positive, even if I had some issues with bugs on day one.

On top of all that, it was the start of a new PvP season, so I once again jumped back into warzones and some lower-level arenas. Within the same evening, I had one Voidstar match that was absolutely beautiful, with amazing, objective-focused teamwork that I see so rarely in a pug, and an Ancient Hypergate where someone yelled insults and ALL CAPS at me after I failed to defend a pylon. I put them on ignore as I've had to do with others before them, but it still always gives me an unpleasant adrenaline rush in the moment to be attacked like that, and no matter how much I tell myself that I don't need to care about the opinions of some random internet stranger, it can be really hard not to dwell on it. Always reminds me of why so many people avoid PvP.

Finally, the devs once again made some minor changes to the user interface this patch. They keep doing that and I'm sure they have their reasons, but it's honestly always a bit jarring and strange from a player perspective. Did we really have to devote development time to making the quest tracker ALL CAPS for example? However, I will say that in this particular case, all was forgiven on my part the moment I noticed that they also added a scroll bar to the quest tracker at last, which is something that filled me with delight. I always hated how that feature always just kind of "gave up" after five missions or whatever the previous limit was and simply added "X additional missions tracked" at the bottom. It's not really helping me to say I'm tracking these missions if I can't actually see any details about them, is it? Well, with the addition of the scroll bar, I finally can. Thanks, Broadsword!

The Subscriber Login Event in the Rear View Mirror

Lots of exciting things are happening in my favourite MMOs, but sadly real life has been kicking my arse lately so I haven't had as much time to play games as I would've liked, never mind writing about them. Still, tomorrow SWTOR gets its first story update in one and a half years, so I thought I had to sit down and post at least briefly - not about what's to come, but about the subscriber login event that's also coming to an end tomorrow.

Back in September I was kind of "whatever" about it, looking at it from the perspective of someone who's never had a reason not to continue subscribing to SWTOR, but now that it's coming to an end I wanted to take a moment to say that I actually ended up quite liking it. It was nice to get something marginally more useful from the weekly login reward for several months.

It was particularly nice for my alts on the other servers, where I spent all my currency on buying Rakata gear for my level 80s, and if I had tokens left over at the end of that I spent those on some extra OP-1s for further gear upgrades. Do I need this gear for anything? Of course not, but it's still a nice thing to have.

On my main on Darth Malgus, I ended up buying the two ship droid customisations and after that, all the different pets. I think at the end I had purchased every single one of them except for one. Did I think they were all amazing? Not really, but on Darth Malgus I have more gear and currencies than I know what to do with at this point, I already had all the emotes that were on offer, and I'm not huge on regeneration toys, so the pets were the next best thing. Especially since they were all originally from the Cartel Market, so now they're in my collections for future unlocking if I should fancy it.

Can I just say that it's kind of funny in hindsight that a single pet from the vendor cost as much as three Rakata gear pieces? Interesting value assignment there...

If you were a subscriber, what did you end up doing with your tokens?

Some of my guildies - who are usually not necessarily representative of the wider player base - were almost aggressively uninterested; it was actually kind of funny. Like, you're already subscribed and the devs are giving you free stuff, don't you want it?

The funniest to me was one particular guildie who's been a subscriber since launch and seems to have remained subscribed out of inertia more than anything, as he doesn't even really seem to play anymore - he just logs on once every two months or so to join us for a social night or something and then disappears again. He also hated the gearing system that was introduced with Legacy of the Sith and was always moaning about the fact that the the gear he got from being carried through an operation wasn't the best yet but required further upgrading.

So naturally, when this event came around, we were all like "oh man, this is going to be great for Nev; finally he can get the 340 Rakata gear he always wanted for simply logging in" - and then he didn't log in until literally the penultimate week of the event. We told him that he still had time to get three pieces if he just logged in four times during the last week, but he didn't do that either. Too busy, he told us afterwards, before stating wistfully that he wished he could just buy gear with Cartel Coins. (I know, I know. But hey, pay to win wouldn't be a thing in any game if there weren't people who liked it.) 

GS9 Week 14: Flashpoints, Flashpoints, Flashpoints!

A little over a month ago I wrote about how much I've been enjoying the current Galactic Season, and how I'd been thinking about setting myself the stretch goal of completing the full meta achievement on all servers this time (instead of the basic 100 levels). I'm not here to tell you that I've achieved that, but at this point I can say that it's definitely happening. I've reached season level 100 and defeated my 250 enhanced enemies on all servers, with the only boxes left to tick being a couple more Flashpoint Frenzy objectives and about 20 more weekly objectives in total.

It's been really surprising to me how energised I've felt for this season. I always say that this whole "doing seasons on multiple servers" thing means walking a fine line between a fun challenge and burning myself out with too many digital chores, and usually I tend to start losing steam after around eight weeks. This time though, I've kept going all the way to level hundred, to the point that my secondary legacies were only slightly behind my main one, and even after that I've just kept going... and going... and going.

The weekly flashpoint objective has been a big part of that, and I've written about my fascination with seeing the flashpoint scene on different servers. This week was particularly amazing for that as there were a total of three weekly flashpoint objectives: Korriban Incursion and Assault on Tython were both featured veteran flashpoints for the week, and the objective to do any random master mode flashpoint was also up. I ended up doing all three of these on all servers (minus the master mode on Shae Vizla since I couldn't get that to pop), for a total of 17 flashpoint runs throughout the week, and it was thoroughly enjoyable for the most part. Sure, not every single run was amazing, but I'd say the majority were at least funny or interesting in some way.

Tython and Korriban were good flashpoints to do repeatedly because they are relatively short and have maps that are slightly more open than the average instance, meaning people can take different routes. There are a number of skips of varying difficulties, which I all saw done at some point, but I also saw every single one of those trash pulls taken down the old-fashioned way and more. Some groups pulled mob groups I didn't even know existed, even after all these years, such as when someone in Korriban Incursion accidentally hurled their sabers over a ridge and a bunch of angry tuk'atas descended upon us. I had no idea those were even there!

As far as skipping goes, on Tulak Hord, Assault on Tython popped up as my random master mode and the tank was very careful to skip as much trash as possible while we took out the artillery targeting arrays in the first part of the flashpoint, just to then randomly charge into several groups of enemies just before Major Travik while commenting that he wanted to do the bonus (which requires you to kill a certain minimum number of trash mobs). "Why did we just do all that sneaking then?!" I exclaimed, to which he replied that he wasn't sure either; it was just a habit. That cracked me up.

My favourite experience of the week - and perhaps of the season so far - was this week's master mode flashpoint on Satele Shan though. I'm still never quite sure on that server whether I'm better off queueing late in the evening or waiting until the weekend and trying early in the morning my time. This week I tried in the evening again, and even while queueing as both dps and tank the wait was long. I decided for once to spend my time doing something that was neither good for seasons nor Conquest and simply drove around Belsavis, doing the Macrobinocular mission step there, uncovering the map and picking up some datacrons. After what felt like nearly an hour's wait I was about to give up when I finally got a pop.

The group finder made me the tank in a master mode Cademimu run. When nobody gives me "bat out of hell" vibes I usually ask whether people want to do the bonus, and there was enough support to do it. The Cademimu bonus boss is called Garold the Dark One, which always makes me laugh because Garold sounds like a hybrid of Gary and Harold, neither of which are good Sith names. Anyway, we tried to fight him and promptly wiped. The healer immediately apologised, saying it was their first time and they had mistakenly rolled right into a red circle.

As I always love an opportunity to teach people when it arises naturally, I gave the tip that all ranged could just stand behind the railing by the elevator to avoid being pulled in by the boss, in order to stay safely outside of his AoE. On the next attempt we tried that, but someone fell down the lift shaft, two people died and we hit the enrage. I just thought it was entertaining and perfectly natural progression! On the third attempt we got him down and I think everyone was very pleased.

After dispatching General Ortol, one person in the group asked whether we were up for running another flashpoint for the weekly. I had only really queued for the seasons objective, didn't need the weekly mission and was tired... but that group had such great vibes, I did want to run with them again, so I did. The second flashpoint we got was Mando Raiders, and this time there were no wipes, just some minor shenanigans that got me musing about how nice it was to be the tank when you have a group that genuinely wants to be led and learn, and for whom you sometimes do have to work a bit to keep them safe if they accidentally butt-pull some extra turrets.

It was just a good vibes week all around, and I'm getting to the point where I think I can ease up on most of the other seasons objectives and just keep running the weekly flashpoints until (close to) the end of the season. 

An Expansion Tease & A Peculiar Controversy

On Wednesday it was time for the dev stream preparing us for the launch of 7.8! And it was... okay? To be honest, there were less "news" than I'd hoped for, though to some degree that was to be expected considering we already knew a fair bit about the patch's major features. Still, I was a bit surprised that they spent a full fifteen minutes recapping the Legacy of the Sith story so far - I have no doubt that's useful to some, but probably not to that many among your hardcore audience that come to watch you live on Twitch. Whenever I glanced at chat people were complaining that they were bored and wanted to move on, and I had to remind myself to not pay too much attention to chat because it always contains a lot of negativity, sadly.

Also, what they told us about Galactic Threads was pretty much the exact same stuff they told us about it a year ago when it was originally meant to launch. Really, the most exciting bit of genuinely new news to me was a note that they'd be updating the large ceiling hooks in strongholds to work like large floor hooks, meaning they'll also contain a three by three grid of small hooks. This is great because the devs gave us a bunch of new small ceiling decorations this season which look really nice but were hard to place in an effective way due to the lack of small ceiling hooks available in almost every single stronghold. Either way, 7.8 still looks exciting to me and I'm very much looking forward to it.

One slightly sad piece of news for German and French players was that the voice work for 7.8 still isn't ready in their languages, so they'll only be able to play the new story in English for now. I wonder why Broadsword couldn't get that done while the English voice actors were on strike - the German and French ones weren't, as far as I'm aware! Either way, I guess it's up to these players to choose whether they want to play through the new story in English or wait even longer. 

(Side note: Sometimes I wonder whether a future project for me, once I hit legacy level 50 on all servers, could be something like playing through the class stories in German. I bet hearing all those player characters and familiar NPCs talk in completely different voices would be wild. But I'm getting sidetracked...)

Anyway, I'm not going to go into much more detail about things like new Cartel Market additions and so on. As usual you can find full, detailed breakdowns elsewhere:

• Official SWTOR website
• Swtorista
• Today in TOR
• Vulkk

I just want to talk about two more things that came out of this livestream. First off, Papa Keith appeared at the end of the stream, and as he so often does, casually dropped a hint about something yet to come that would hype players up. Specifically he said that in his producer's letter for the game's anniversary, he'll be giving us a roadmap for what's coming in the new year, and that they'll be "wrapping up Legacy of the Sith". That's kind of like... telling us that they are working on an 8.0 expansion without telling us that they're working on an 8.0 expansion.

EEEEEEEEEE!

I'm trying not to get too excited just yet because it hasn't been stated explicitly at this point, but it's hard not to be hopeful. I still stand by everything I wrote about the prospect of a new expansion a little over a year ago, but man, would I ever love for a good expac launch to make the game feel exciting and invigorated again. I'm looking forward to learning more.

Now, for something completely different - at the end of the stream, they showed off the new loading screen/key art for patch 7.8:

My reaction to that was something along the lines of "Nice. Lana and Shae's faces look a bit weird though. Oh well." And then I moved on, because a character looking slightly off on the art of a SWTOR loading screen is a pretty common thing. I remember when Legacy of the Sith's key art was first revealed, one of my guildies commented that Lana looked like Adam Driver in a wig, which made me go "oof" but I could also see what he meant!

When I checked social media for chatter about Wednesday's dev stream, I was surprised to see a few comments that accused the new key art of being AI generated. Warning: I'm going to go into way more detail than this probably deserves, but it's a subject that interests me and I kind of fell down a rabbit hole, so you've been warned.

As a certified AI hater my reaction was of course to be shocked and want to find out more. From what I've seen of the SWTOR devs they've always struck me as very pro human creativity and anti AI art, but who knows what's going on behind closed doors when there's money to be saved? I tried to look for more information on where this whole idea came from, but couldn't find more than the same three people or so repeating that it was "obviously" AI, no explanation needed, which was of course not helpful.

Finally Tacogoats, a SWTOR player I follow on Bluesky, shared a link to a tumbler post of his in which he attempted to break down the evidence he saw for the art piece being artificially generated. And for all the details he circled... I did not find it convincing at all. The comments seemed to either be flat out wrong (no, Anri is not missing her index finger; it's right there), issues that I couldn't make out at all, or even if I could kind of see what it was that was bothering him, I still didn't see how these things were in any way evidence of AI involvement. So what if the one knuckle on Malgus' hand has a slightly odd edge? Cause human artists never create the slightest imperfections when drawing hands? I was expecting some kind of "gotcha" like a line from something in the foreground merging into a different line in the background, like you can often get with AI art since it doesn't actually have any concept of three dimensionality. However, there was nothing of the sort.

In fact, the more I looked, the more I became convinced that this couldn't be AI. AI image generators are very good at conjuring up things for which they have lots of references. They can easily create a photorealistic image of a non-existing human because their training data contains millions of photos of humans! What they are not good at is creating very specific details for which they don't have (enough) references. And let's be real, random SWTOR NPCs are not something for which any AI is going to have lots to work with.

I remember when I encountered the very first image generator I'd ever seen - a few years ago now - I tried to get it to generate images of Darth Malgus and Satele Shan and it failed utterly. I think Malgus was a black blur with angry eyes so it clearly had some vague reference for him, but Satele pretty much just resulted in random noise. Obviously things have progressed somewhat since then, but it's not like the internet suddenly got flooded with millions of screenshots or art of all these SWTOR characters that wasn't there before.

I actually got curious enough to dust off my OpenAI login and ask ChatGPT to generate me a "painterly" image of Lana Beniko (since she's one of the characters on the key art). I'll be honest, the result was actually better than I expected. It clearly had enough material to deduce that Lana's a white, slightly angry-looking woman with mid-length blonde hair and a side parting. I also asked it to generate an action shot in which she'd have her lightsaber out and again - it wasn't totally terrible in my opinion.

But two things stood out to me: that it was actually very good at giving her an attractive face (even if it doesn't look exactly like Lana does in game) - which is something to think about when the first thing anyone mentioned being slightly "off" about the key art were the faces - and the fact that the AI had absolutely no clue what sort of armour she wears, dressing her in a generic black combat suit with matching pauldrons and a cloak.

Now, I'll be the first to admit that ChatGPT might not be the best image generator and that my prompting was extremely low effort - I'm sure someone could prod an AI into producing something better, but anywhere close to the sort of detail we actually see in the key art? That seems incredibly unlikely to me, not with where we're at right now. And all that's just talking about a single character, never mind five of them in a balanced composition. In a way, going down this rabbit hole has actually increased my appreciation for this new loading screen.

I can't blame people for being paranoid and suspicious. Corporations trying to cut costs by replacing real artists' jobs with an inferior AI-generated product is a real thing. But so is people being overly paranoid and thinking that everything is AI when it actually isn't. As a creative person myself (even if my hobby is writing, not drawing or painting), someone accusing my stuff of sounding/looking like AI would actually be more hurtful to me than just saying that they think it's terrible. We're not doing the art community a favour by immediately accusing things of being "AI slop" as soon as we don't like something.

Bonus AI laugh: I also asked ChatGPT to generate me an image of Shae Vizla and that one was a lot less charming. It clearly had enough of a clue to give me a red-headed Mandalorian, but what the fuck is that armour? Why is the "blaster" I asked for in the prompt just a plain old 20th century gun? And why is there another random Mandalorian's helmet attached to her thigh?!

Star Wars: Visions Season 3

Did you know that season three of Star Wars: Visions has already been out for several weeks? For some reason I've seen zero promotional material or even buzz about it, so thanks to Vulkk for bringing it to my attention the other week.

As someone who's not an anime fan, I was a little disappointed that we were back to all anime, all the time (after the wide variety of animation styles that were featured in season two) but oh well, I guess spotlighting Eastern animation in particular was always supposed to be the show's focus. Either way, I wanted to jot down some thoughts on each short again.

1. The Duel: Payback

As the title implies, this was a sequel to season 1's "The Duel", which had been almost universally beloved. In short, I thought this was good too, but somewhat less interesting to me personally. I was also a dork and had forgotten the details of the original, so I at first thought that it was going to be about the Sith lady from season 1 getting revenge, meaning I perceived the cyborg Jedi coming after the Ronin as a kind of surprise twist. It was only on rewatching the original Duel that I realised that actually, we saw the Sith lady die, so this was always going to be about something else. 

2. The Sound of Four Wings

This was probably my least favourite of the batch for reasons I struggle to articulate. I didn't think it was bad or anything, everything about it just felt kind of generic and uninteresting to me. 

3. The Ninth Jedi: Child of Hope

Another sequel to a popular season 1 episode, though I felt that there was very little connection to the original with this one. The thing that stood out to me about the original Ninth Jedi was the surprise twist, not the generic anime protagonist, so a sequel that follows that character on a completely different adventure was always bound to not grip me in the same way. I still enjoyed it overall though, except that I found the little droid sidekick a bit grating. Maybe I'm just over cutesy characters that always speak in third person. Just how many times do you think the word "Teto" appeared in the script? 

4. The Bounty Hunters

This one was merely okay to me. There were parts that had me intrigued and parts that left me feeling a bit disappointed. The droid actually coming back with his assassin personality activated was a pleasant surprise for example, but I didn't love that the protagonist wore this face mask for the entire episode, making you think that maybe she's sick or scarred or something, but then it's literally nothing.

5. Yuko's Treasure

I didn't think an episode featuring a little kid and a droid shaped like a teddy bear would be my favourite but somehow that's exactly what happened. It just had a certain charm (comparable to Skeleton Crew) that really worked for me.

6. The Lost Ones

Apparently this one was another sequel, to season 1's "The Village Bride", but I only found that out afterwards and again, I wouldn't have been able to tell because what was interesting to me about the Village Bride was the culture of the village that got saved, not the relatively generic protagonist. Still, I liked it as a stand-alone too, as the studio's world building was very strong again. 

7. The Smuggler

In this one I liked the story as a whole, but somehow the English voice actor delivered every line as if the main character was supposed to be six years old (when she was clearly a grown woman) and that really threw me off. Other than that I thought it was cool.

8. The Bird of Paradise

This one was the most visually beautiful episode of this season in my opinion, and I liked that it was more contemplative and had a somewhat open ending. 

9. BLACK 

I have no idea what this one was about beyond the description provided in the episode summary. It's totally psychedelic and impressive from an artistic point of view - and I'll say that I was engrossed for the entire duration, but I also wouldn't want to watch it again. Definitely something different though.

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As a whole, I feel like this season was perhaps the weakest one so far, though not by much. I just didn't really care that much about the sequels to previous episodes and would have wished for more visual and narrative variety. Still an interesting series though, and I continue to appreciate that it tries to do different things with the Star Wars property.