Speculating About Galactic Season 8

We got another Executive Producer Letter last week, and again it was mostly a summary of what happened in the game over the past few months, with only a couple of vague hints as to what's to come in the new year. Personally I didn't think too much about this at first, but then I saw several friends go absolutely wild with speculation about one particular line, which I thought was quite entertaining in itself, so I thought it would be fun to compile all the theories I've seen in a post as well as to add my own thoughts.

The line that got everybody talking was this one:

[Our next Galactic Season] will be a fun one as we throw you into some content you may not have played in a bit...  

The intriguing bit is of course the question of what's "content you may not have played in a bit". I think there are only two things we can exclude for certain here: content that is very popular (because people are presumably playing it all the time), and content that is no longer in the game (because then there would be no "may" about whether we haven't played it recently).

The main categories of content I could see Keith referring to here are as follows:

• Old side content that people maybe do for a bit when they first start playing, but then get what they wanted out of it or simply get bored: Bounty Contract Week, which formed the basis for GS7, would fall into that category for me.
• Content that just isn't very popular with the majority of the player base for some reason or another: A prime example of this one would be Galactic Starfighter, which does have a passionate community that loves it, but it's extremely small compared to the player base as a whole.
• Content that isn't very rewarding: These activities may be fun to do once or twice, but there's just very little incentive to repeat them. The main example I can think of here would be uprisings - while I've never been a huge fan of them myself, people sure did run them a lot back during Knights of the Eternal throne when they were a prime source of Command XP. Nowadays their rewards feel pretty laughable for the effort: I recently ran some during Total Galactic War for the Conquest points, but being awarded ten tech fragments at the end almost felt insulting.
• Content that may well be fun and appealing, but isn't very accessible for some reason or another. Here my prime example would be Kuat Drive Yards (a flashpoint people used to farm like crazy when it first came out) no longer being in the group finder since 7.0. 

I think the thing that jumps out as an immediate problem is that in each of these cases there's a reason the content isn't being done as much as it used to, and simply making it central to a new season wouldn't automatically solve whatever's keeping people from engaging with it right now.

For example I've seen it suggested that the next season could be centred on Relics of the Gree, the same way the current season had Bounty Contract Week active at all times. This wouldn't be the worst thing in the world as I've always enjoyed the Gree event, but unless the devs add at least some new rewards to the reputation vendor, I fear I'd quickly suffer from the same kind of "been there, done that a hundred times" boredom I experienced during GS7.

I also think that the devs wouldn't make a season purely focused on group content. As much as I enjoy playing with others myself, I think that having a whole season centred on one particular type of group content, be it uprisings or flashpoints, would not sit well with a lot of players considering how solo-focused the game has become. I also don't think that the season would be about anything that's particularly difficult, such as veteran or master mode chapters.

I think a Starfighter season could work, if only because they could simply call it space-themed and have GSF-related objectives for those who're brave enough to PvP and on-rails space mission objectives for those who'd rather stick to PvE and solo play, similarly to how GS7 had both the soloable bounty contract objectives and the world boss objectives for groups. My only concern here is that space combat in any variety doesn't seem to be that popular with the player base as a whole. Anyone remember when the devs were first hyping up the "Super Secret Space Project" that turned out to be GSF? I was never quite sure how they expected that to turn out...

Do you have any thoughts on what Keith's hint might have been about? I've really enjoyed seeing people's ideas (even if I've got to admit that the basic notion of another season focused on old - or worse, unpopular - content doesn't currently excite me). I'm curious to find out next year whether the speculation came anywhere close to reality or whether we've ended up barking up the wrong tree.

Whatever happened to...?

Bioware keeps adding new features to The Old Republic at a decent pace, and even if they slip up in certain areas sometimes (such as letting us go with no new operations for over a year), you can feel safe in the knowledge that they are probably working on something new in the background. Recently, GSF players have been worried that their favourite part of the game might be in danger of being forgotten because every time the subject is brought up, the devs declare that they currently have no plans for new GSF additions. However, at least Galactic Starfighter is still being talked about. There are other parts of the game that haven't seen updates in much longer and genuinely seem to have been forgotten by most people. Here are three that I've been thinking about lately:

1) Original Space Combat

It seems to me that the last time this received a significant update was in patch 1.6 when heroic space missions were introduced. That was over two years ago. But does anybody even care? Unlike with GSF, I haven't heard anyone clamour on blogs or podcasts that Bioware needs to make new space missions. Were they really that unpopular? I have to admit that I never liked them very much myself, and I can only think of two people I know who ever played them with any real gusto, but I also seem to have a vague recollection of Bioware stating that a fairly significant percentage of players were doing at least one space mission per week. (Though of course I can't find a link to that piece of info anymore.)

I kind of have a suspicion that Galactic Starfighter was more or less intended to replace the original space game, which is why they stopped updating the latter. Of course it's a bit questionable to replace a PvE game with a PvP one, and while GSF has found its fans, I wonder how many players actually migrated towards it from the original space combat. Of the aforementioned two fans I mentioned, only one really took to GSF as far as I know.

At least the original space missions are still in the game, and most players probably give them a try at least once, considering how prominent that quest icon is on your starship. The fact that space combat has never been relevant to any other parts of the game actually has the advantage of making it timeless.

2) Legacy

This one might seem a bit odd at first, considering that we probably spend a fair amount of time looking at our legacy window to check things like achievements or reputations (all of which are legacy-wide). What I'm talking about however is legacy as something other than a simple accumulation of character perks.

Remember legacy levels? I have to admit I almost forgot that they exist, considering that I hit legacy level 50 over two years ago, which caused my legacy experience bar to disappear. I'm sure I'm not the only one who expected these to gain some sort of purpose eventually, but they never really did. The maximum legacy level has also never been raised, even though the maximum character level has gone up to 60 in the meantime.

Or how about that family tree? I have to admit I always thought that it had some potential for roleplaying additions, but Bioware never really did anything with it. I would have loved to be able to connect it to the characters of other players!

Basically, the legacy system originally appeared to be something that could really allow us to build our own story in game and build stronger connections between our characters. However, nobody has really shown any great interest in taking it in that direction in the last two years, neither the devs nor the players. It still has its role to play as a point to collect achievements and certain character perks, but I can't help but think that it could have been - and could still be! - so much more.

3) Matrix Shards & Cubes

The first time I actually felt compelled to hunt datacrons in the game was when I built my first matrix cube. At the time, good relics were pretty hard to come by, and none were better than this simple item that you could build yourself... even if it did require some effort. These days, I like to pick up as many datacrons as possible whenever I level a new character - but sadly all those matrix shards effectively go to waste, as Bioware never added new matrix cubes for level 55 or 60.

Why not, I say? I'm not saying that these new matrix cubes would have to be best in slot, but having new versions of these at all would offer players at least an alternative way of getting something for that particular gear slot.

I find it strange that while Bioware keeps adding datacrons to give people stat boosts (and players embrace them, with all their crazy jumping requirements and secret puzzles), this secondary function of datacrons seems to have been all but forgotten.

Would you like to see any of these features updated and added to? Or can you think of other parts of the game that both devs and players seem to have forgotten about?

Mastered

I was away from the internet for a week and had three posts pre-written and scheduled to be published throughout my absence. I was looking forward to finding comments in reply to them in my inbox upon returning home. Unfortunately, I messed up the scheduled publishing process, so none of them actually went up until I returned home and made them all go live manually. I suck. If you missed any of these posts due to them all going up at once, I just wanted to briefly point them out now:

Assault on Tython and Korriban
300 Posts!
Huttball on Quesh

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I've pointed out before that, for someone who never misses an opportunity to mention how underwhelmed she's been by the Galactic Starfighter expansion, I've actually spent a not insignificant amount of time playing it. In line with this, I'm proud to announce that last Sunday I finally achieved mastery of my first ship, the SGS-45 Quarrel gunship. It only took me, what, four and a half months since the expansion's early access for subscribers? Go me.

I remember when I first looked at the way you can customise different ships in GSF: it seemed to me that the available options were all about playstyle choice. However, while there is definitely some of that in the different components that are available, there is a significant amount of vertical progression to it as well. Fully mastering a ship is essentially the equivalent of getting a player character to the level cap. The power difference between a ship with no upgrades and a fully mastered one is insane.

That isn't entirely bad, mind you. With some upgrades in particular, you can really feel the difference it makes once you get them, and that sense of having achieved something feels good. But the way people of such vastly differing power levels get pitted against each other at random... is less so. There's an achievement for getting a silly amount of kills without dying, which I figured I was never going to get due to not being all that great... until I ended up in a match against a bunch of clearly un-upgraded ships that popped like bubbles whenever my gunship shot them. While I was pleasantly surprised to get the achievement after all, I also felt vaguely dirty after that match, as if I had ganked a bunch of newbies - which, in a way, I had - except that it was simply a consequence of the game thinking that this was perfectly fine match-making! The problem is, I'm not sure they can afford to split the game into brackets for different upgrade levels without making queue times go through the roof. Not to mention that things like people with both mastered and un-upgraded ships would present difficulties for any matchmaking algorithm.

All that said, I have to admit that I've honestly warmed up to Galactic Starfighter. Having a fully upgraded ship certainly helps, but I also feel like I've got a better grip on how to play by now, at least when it comes to the slower ships. I'm still far from being a good player, and maybe I simply benefit from flying a gunship a lot (as a lot of people on the forums claim that they are overpowered), but during most matches I feel like I can carry my weight. I've also grown fond of my bomber - for domination matches at least, hugging a satellite of my choice, pooping out drones on cooldown and firing the occasional torpedo at people engaged in dogfights with my more agile brethren. It's almost relaxing.

Who'd have thought that starfighting could be an acquired taste?

Of Bombers and Deathmatches

I'm not sure if you've noticed, but even though every time the subject of Galactic Starfighter comes up I make sure to emphasise that I'm not very keen on it and how very bad I am at the game in terms of skill... I keep playing it. I don't invest massive amounts of time in it, mind you, but still. I only participate in space PvP on my main, and only often enough to complete the weekly mission (meaning I play about four to seven matches a week), but why do it at all if I'm not a fan of space? To be honest I'm not sure, but I suspect that a variety of reasons play into it:

1) People have told me in the past that I seem to have a masochistic streak.

2) As terrible as I am at flying my ship and shooting things, I continue to be amazed by how many people there are who are even worse at this game than I am. The other day I got into a deathmatch where my team only got a total of three kills and pretty much ended up being farmed at the spawn point. Of the three kills we got, one was made by me, another was assisted by me, and I got two medals. Nobody else on the entire team even managed to acquire a single medal. This blows my mind, but at the same time it also gives me hope that maybe I can be better than that. Just a little. It makes me want to keep challenging myself to improve my performance. We'll see how long that'll last.

The fact that I got an achievement for losing that game just made it all the funnier.

3) Since I really like SWTOR and want it to do well, I at least try to see the bright side to all of its aspects; so I'm trying to find some fun in GSF even if a large part of me keeps telling me that it's really not my cup of tea and that I should just let it be. We'll see how long that'll last as well.

Anyway, after that little ramble I wanted to talk a bit about the 2.6 additions to Galactic Starfighter: a new gameplay mode: team deathmatch, and a new ship type: the bomber.

As far as team deathmatch goes, I have exactly one thing to say about it: it's pretty boring. I was a bit disappointed that the deathmatches seem to take place on maps very similar to the ones for the domination games, but the real problem from my point of view is that you can tell how it's going to end pretty much after one minute, and then you just have to sit through another ten minutes or so of the winner-to-be grinding the loser-to-be into the dirt over and over again.

To be honest, I believe that this is an inherent problem in any kind of PvP that has no other objective than to kill the enemy. If you have to balance pure PvP skill with an eye for strategy and teamwork to achieve objectives, this creates interesting scenarios where your ability to kill the enemy matters but isn't the only way to victory. If it's only about killing your opponent on the other hand, the thrill is usually very short-lived as match-ups are rarely balanced and one side tends to gain the upper hand very quickly. Arenas suffer from this as well, but at least they don't last long. If your enemies grind you into paste within a minute in an arena, at least you only have to do it one more time to prove that it wasn't a fluke and then you can go home. In Starfighter's team deathmatch on the other hand, no matter how hopelessly you're losing, you'll keep respawning until the enemy has scored fifty points (or the timer runs out), which means that on average every member of your team has to die four or five times, which is pretty tedious.

As for the bomber... I had no problem getting one as I had enough fleet requisition saved up to buy one right away, though I wasn't sure which of the two options to pick as I felt like I didn't really know much about the advantages or disadvantages of either of their components. In the end I went for the one that drops turrets and repair drones. I had pretty high hopes for this ship, as it sounded like it would support a slower sort of gameplay, which would make it ideal for less twitch-inclined players like me.

After trying it in a few fights... I'm not sure what to think of it to be honest. I can tell that a bomber that is left to its own devices to guard/support a specific area can be quite powerful, laying more and more mines/turrets/whatevers as time goes on. I honestly find it a bit too slow though, not to say boring. Even when you do well, it's not particularly inspiring to get messages about your turrets killing things that might not even be in your sight.

Also, the special turret/drone/mine-laying abilities all seem to have pretty long cooldowns, the range on the main weapons is short, and the ship is slow, meaning that in most cases I'd arrive to the battle late, prop down a turret and a healing drone, and then die before the cooldown on my signature abilities was up again while enemies danced around me and shot me from outside my regular weapon range. There was one particularly comical instance of this where the game actually flagged me as non-participating while I was frantically flying in circles, trying to actually get in range to hit something, anything at all. This got a bit better once I got to upgrade my ship a little though.

I'll probably experiment with it some more, but for now I've actually gained a whole new appreciation of my gunship and the ability to actually kill things occasionally...

Tips For Terrible Starfighters

Okay, I know I said that Galactic Starfighter is pretty clearly not for me, but I hate discarding whole aspects of a game that I generally enjoy without taking them for a proper test drive first. Not to mention that the expansion is still new and thus "the thing to do" and I feel a bit left out not participating, so I've been playing a couple more matches in an attempt to get some entertainment out of the whole thing after all. I did succeed - to a point - so I thought I'd share my strategies for enjoying Galactic Starfighter even if you're terrible at shooters.

1. Get the quests

I wasn't actually aware of this initially, but there are separate quests for Galactic Starfighter on the PvP mission terminal, first an "introduction" which just requires you to play a single match, and then a daily and weekly similar to the regular PvP missions. The daily only requires you to play two games or win one, which should be achievable for even the most PvP averse.

The reason I mention this as something that can help you enjoy the game is that it adds a pacing mechanism ("just going to do the daily") as well as a consolation prize if you're doing badly ("well, at least I got the daily done").

2. Fly a gunship

Of the three spaceship types, the gunship is supposed to be the sniper. It's a bit hard to be a "proper" sniper when your enemies can see you on the map from miles away, but basically there are two advantages for the shooter-impaired like me in flying a gunship: firstly, you don't have to worry about moving your ship at the same time as sniping, and secondly, unless you're directly facing off against another gunship, you'll be able to shoot your enemy before they are in range to shoot you. Those things count for a lot when you easily find yourself getting confused while flying in circles and have trouble targeting things on the move.

3. Don't go in alone

This is a good strategy if you're weak in normal PvP as well, but I'm finding it more important than ever in space since the combat is so twitch-based. If I end up going one-on-one with anyone, I'll lose and they'll barely get scratched. That doesn't do me or my team any good. Instead, I try to stick with a large pack, and let the scouts and fighters get ahead of me (which pretty much happens naturally since gunships are slow). Then, once they've engaged the enemy and are distracting them... ka-pow goes the railgun from a safe distance!

4. Learn to reroute your power

There's a point in the tutorial where it explains how to use the F keys to reroute power to shields, weapons etc. - which is where I immediately zoned out because it sounded waaay too fiddly for my liking. I'm glad I let someone convince me to give it a try anyway, because it's actually very easy. There's no major fiddling required, just hit F1 to reroute power to your weapons, which is nice when you're sitting in a relatively safe spot and just sniping away. F2 powers up your shields above everything else, which can be handy if you're under attack and just trying to get away and get some breathing room. F3 reroutes power to your thrusters, which is most useful at the start of a game to get to the objectives as quickly as possible. And F4 puts everything back to a "balanced" state, which works well when you simply can't decide what to focus on at that particular moment. (This happens to me a lot.)

5. Embrace death

Sniping is fun as long as the enemy is too distracted and far away to fight back, but if they get a chance to break off and get in my face, I'm pretty much toast. I'm learning to accept this. If you're feeling rebellious, you can even try to crash yourself into an obstacle just before they can get a killing blow. They'll still get points for getting an "assist" but it can make you feel a little more in control to rob your opponent of that final kill shot. Plus, respawning at the start gives you an opportunity to get back into combat from a fresh angle and find a good sniping position again, hopefully undisturbed by direct attacks for at least a little while.

Using these highly sophisticated tactics (cough) I even managed to get a couple of killing blows already, and I'm up to a whole two (gasp) achievements. Feel free to share any of your own tips for those of us who are terrible at starfighting!

Galactic Starfighter Early Access

Today was the early launch of SWTOR's Galactic Starfighter "expansion". I have to confess that I nearly forgot about it. I explained before that I'm not a big fan of space combat, no matter whether it's on rails or not. Fortunately the game was kind enough to remind me of what was happening by changing its loading screen.

Upon checking my mailbox, it felt like someone at Bioware had read my recent post about mailbox spam and decided to mess with me some more by handing out no less than two titles and four (!) full sets of orange gear to all of my characters in celebration of the expansion launch. I thought about simply chucking them since I'm not particularly keen on the fighter pilot look but... it's four free sets of adaptive gear! Even if I'm not too keen on the look, you never know when a spare orange belt or pair of bracers will come in handy... (Yes, I'm a bit of a hoarder.)

Despite of my scepticism about the whole concept, I was keen on having a look at the new gameplay anyway. I dutifully read through all the tutorial text, seeing how I'm the kind of person who always reads the manual (and I hadn't read up on any expansion details beforehand). It all looked very slick and like there's actually quite a bit of depth to it, with the system giving you plenty of options to tweak both your fighter's appearance and abilities to match your chosen playstyle. I was very pleased to see that there was also an actual playable tutorial that allows you to at least get used to the controls before jumping into actual player vs. player combat. I'd already had horror visions of me dragging my team down while I was still trying to figure out how to steer.

An ugly but useful crew member.

I had previously wondered whether Galactic Starfighter was going to be anything like Star Trek Online's space combat, which is relatively slow and sluggish. The answer is no. SWTOR's starfighters are extremely responsive to even small mouse movements, which makes the gameplay very, very twitchy.

Whether that's a good thing or not depends on what kind of gamer you are. For me it's a bad thing. I don't do shooters. I've tried, I'm bad at them and I don't particularly enjoy them. Maybe I could get better after hours and hours of practice (though probably not by very much), but why should I bother if it's no fun?

I played three matches. My team won two of them, but no thanks to anything I did. I watched my guildies jump into their first couple of games and immediately the achievements started rolling in. Me? I didn't get any achievements, I didn't get any medals, I didn't get any kills. I hardly even managed to do any damage. I'm bad enough at this shooter stuff, more so in three dimensions, that I spent most of my time flying in and then getting picked off by people I couldn't even see. While I tried to clumsily get a lock on them, they just danced around my tail and killed me. Over and over again.

Erm, which way is up again?

I think it's safe to say that this expansion is definitely not for me. I'm actually a little sad because it all looks very cool, but it's just totally different from any kind of gameplay that I enjoy. I'm sure that a lot of people will enjoy it (shooters are a popular genre after all) and I hope that this will have a positive effect on the game. But if part of the reason you play MMOs is that they aren't massively twitchy, as it is for me, then unfortunately this expansion adds nothing for you.

The Galactic Starfighter "Expansion"

When Rise of the Hutt Cartel was turned into a free goodie for subscribers last month, I remember seeing a couple of people comment that this might be a sign of a) another expansion coming out soon, and b) Bioware considering giving away future expansions for free (or at least including them as part of the subscription). Personally I didn't think that either of those sounded particularly likely, but as it turns out these commenters were right. Last night a press release was posted on the official site to announce "Galactic Starfighter", a new expansion that is planned to release as early as December. And unlike Rise of the Hutt Cartel, it's going to be completely free from the start and available to everyone; release will just be staggered so that subscribers get access earlier.

Its main (and only, to be honest) selling point is 12 vs. 12 freeform space combat. Now, this is something that a lot of people have been asking for pretty much since the game's launch, and as a result, overall reactions to the announcement have been very positive from what I've seen. This is good! For me personally however... this whole thing is pretty meh to be honest. I've written about why I don't really do space combat, and it's got nothing to do with the current system being on rails. It's just not my cup of tea. I'll try to keep an open mind of course and will probably give the new space PvP a try at least... but I don't really expect it to grab me.

What I personally found the most interesting about this whole announcement are the semantics. Back when Rise of the Hutt Cartel was announced, I was already very sceptical about calling that an expansion, because it didn't seem to bring enough to the table to really be worthy of the title. (To be fair, in hindsight I feel that it did introduce enough changes to be indeed worthy of being called an expansion... though perhaps an "expansion light".) This Galactic Starfighter thing on the other hand... from everything I've read, the new space PvP is going to be all there is to it. More levels? Nope. Any PvE? Nope. How is that any different from a big patch then? In fact, as someone who isn't into space combat, this "expansion" will likely add less to the game for me than any of the major patches have done so far. Where's the distinction between patch and expansion then, other than semantics, especially if both are free?

I wonder if they are now trying to go for a model along the lines of EVE Online's, which releases free "expansions" all the time as well. (Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong about any of this, as I don't actually play EVE.) The important difference is of course that EVE is a sandbox game so expectations for what qualifies as a significant content addition are very different. I'm not sure that calling a big patch an expansion every now and then is going to do quite the same thing for a theme park MMO.

In space no one can read your whisper

Anyone who's been reading this blog for any amount of time will probably have noticed that I dabble pretty much in all parts of the game: I level alts, I do dailies, I run flashpoints and operations, I do PvP, I craft etc.. However, there's one part of the game that I pretty much never talk about, and that's the space game.

On my very first character I spent a little bit of time completing the first three space missions once I got my ship (I remember failing a couple of times on the space station one until I got the hang of where my targets were), but then that was pretty much it. Other venues of gaining experience were much more interesting and soon almost everything offered by the space mission terminal was grey. Oh well, whatever.

Later I decided to go back and do the rest of them after all, just because I could. I outfitted my ship with the best ship parts that money could buy (grade five I believe, this was before the release of heroic space missions) and got started. I was very disappointed when I found that the second tier of missions was pretty much a carbon copy of the first, only with different flavour text and everything doing a bit more damage. On the first mission of the third tier, I got obliterated by the enemy within less than thirty seconds, despite of being vastly overgeared for the whole thing. That's when I decided that it wasn't worth the bother.

I mean, I'm pretty sure that I could beat those space missions if I put some effort into learning how to do them properly. But what's my incentive? The space game is completely removed from everything else in the game - which is good for me in so far as I don't feel like I'm missing out on anything by not doing space missions, but still...

Worse though, I really don't care about the way space missions play out in any way, shape or form. I want to play my character, not her space ship. I don't like being tied to my screen for minutes on end with no opportunity to pause or allow myself to be distracted for even just a moment. (If you think that operations and PvP are the same in that regard, you've never seen me play during either of those...) But most of all, I hate being cut off from all communications, in an MMO of all places. I'll admit that with the way the space game functions you probably wouldn't have time to type anyway, but that you can't even see chat messages while in space has always bugged me. If I wanted to play a single player game, I would do that (and it wouldn't be some space shooter to be honest).

Now, that doesn't mean that I absolutely loathe the space game. Every now and then I'll even redo those first three space missions on a lowbie alt for a change of pace. However, most of the time I find it simply so much less interesting than anything else I could be doing in the game (including idling on the fleet and chatting) that it doesn't even register.

And that's also the reason why I'm always very skeptical when people campaign for SWTOR to have "more mini games". I play MMOs for a fairly specific kind of gameplay, and I'd prefer it if the developers didn't spend too much time tacking on additions that are completely unrelated to everything else. If I want to play "mini games" there are already hundreds of other ways to do so out there, no need to be in an MMO for that.