Welcome back to my (semi-) regularly occurring column on the EA-BioWare online role-playing game Star Wars: The Old Republic. I hadn’t been doing these for a number of months, mostly due to a lack of time, but also in part due to a temporary lapse in my subscription. Didn’t take much to get me back, though. They’ve been really good at encouraging me to jump back in, whether it’s been the return (again) of Revan, the final battle of Knights of the Fallen Empire, or the amazing trailer they just released for Knights of the Eternal Throne.
You might’ve noticed that this is not being called “SWTOR Weekly” anymore. I’m changing it to “SWTOR Today” because a) it might turn out to not actually be weekly and b) “today” can refer to ANY day! In any event, we have a lot to talk about and while my viewpoint is very much a middle-of-the-road perspective, as I am subbed, but I’m not a raider AT ALL, I feel like the upcoming game update 5.0 (and actually sooner ones, too) will be hitting us all in positive and negative ways.
So, we’ll kick this off by watching the trailer for Eternal Throne again, because it’s awesome:
I will say that this means SO MUCH MORE to those who’ve finished Fallen Empire, but it’s still a marvel to behold and only continues to fan the flames of people’s desire to see more animated features that tell Old Republic stories in such dynamic fashion.
Moving on to the actual meat of what we’re getting in game update 5.0 “Knights of the Eternal Throne,” one of the biggest thing is the continuation of the story from Fallen Empire. In case you missed it, the Sith Emperor wasn’t content to have one empire, but instead had two. One he ruled as a life-sucking psychopath who was only held in check by his old foe Revan. In his other empire, he was a semi-benevolent ruler with a family. How did he manage this? Amongst other things, he’s gotten really really good at jumping into different people’s bodies. Remember, back in Legends, body-jumping was a specialty of the Sith because they could not become one with the Force and instead roamed the galaxy as disembodied wraiths.
Without giving away too much (seriously, if you don’t play, go watch the cinematics on YouTube, it’s great), you wind up fighting against the Emperor and his crazy evil children after they’ve pretty much brought the Sith Empire and Galactic Republic both to their knees. Where were you during all this? Frozen in carbonite for about five or so years after a failed attempt to defeat them initially. Your primary mission following your release from the carbonite is to build an alliance of Jedi, Republic, Imperials, and Sith to fight against the Eternal Empire.
Past the story parts, game update 4.0 and its updates didn’t bring a ton to the game in terms of modes of play or expanding the endgame. They brought out a massive amount of grindy single-player-focused content, but almost nothing for group play. That’s something that they’ve been accused of ignoring in the past, with an arguable degree of validity. I look at their endgame offerings and I see a ton of content to play, but then I have never even touched Operations (SWTOR’s name for raids). Flashpoints (again, their version of instances or dungeons) are pretty perfect for me, since I don’t have dozens of people to play with anymore, maybe even just a couple. A lot of Flashpoints even have a solo mode so those of us without a group can still experience the great storytelling of events like Black Talon, Hammer Station, Maelstrom Prison, and The Foundry.
One of the things that the devs have seen as a hindrance to people like me, who largely askiew the big endgame portions, is that it’s hard to figure out how to get into those places. Flashpoints, Warzones, Operations, Galactic Starfighter, and Heroic missions had all been located in a multitude of different spots within the game world and within the UI. What they’re bringing to the table in game update 5.0 takes care of that particular hurdle with an all-in-one screen to let you select what endgame content you want to take part in.
This screen, called Galactic Command, displays all the above-mentioned non-quest challenges and allows players to try them all with varying difficulty levels. This is really great even for story people because all the chapters for Fallen Empire and Eternal Throne are replayable from this screen with much more difficult modes. Fallen Empire’s chapters were, by and large, considered way too easy. Uprisings, a new form of 4-player endgame, will also be included here. Playing each of these modes contributes to a new leveling system called Command Rank.
Just like with Overwatch’s reward system, each time you level up your command rank you get a crate of stuff. The stuff will be appropriate for your class/advanced class/spec AS OF THE TIME YOU CRACK THE PACK. To reiterate, if you are playing a Knight Guardian for your first several levels of command rank, you get a full set of tanking gear, but you know you sometimes need to be geared for DPS. You can change your spec to damage, then you can crack packs that you already have or get new ones, and you’ll get DPS appropriate gear. To me, I love the sound of this! It’s another feeling of accomplishment and it’s one that can be done at my speed. For hardcore raiders though, it’s the end-times.
Why are they so down on it? Several reasons. Firstly, it is the ONLY way to get top tier raid gear. There’s no more of the classic MMO method of farming specific Ops in the hopes of getting specific gear drops from bosses. It’s certainly true that drops in raid farming have been greatly simplified and streamlined from what we had prior to 2010 (I believe World of WarCraft Cataclysm was the first to make serious changes to how drops are acquired). With the command crates, however, you don’t know what you’re going to get. When you farm a raid, you know what you’re looking for, even if you don’t get it. The crates are blind packs, even if they’re customized for you. A good thing they’ve done for this though is that if you do get gear you have no need for you can hit the Disintegrate button on that item and you get command xp out of, helping you get to your next command rank and another crate. Rinse, repeat.
Secondly, this is only open to subscribers. This means that people who have been Preferred status (not subbed, but have spent some money in the Cartel Market) relied on the FP, Ops, and Warzones weekly passes that were purchasable in the CM. These are gone now too, and from the sounds of it, people had been buying these by the bucket load and they’re gone now. Money has been spent and within 24 hours of announcing it they’re gone, before 5.0 even gets here. Again, it doesn’t impact me at all, but for a loud majority it’s a significant problem. You also have to be level 70 to start Galactic Command, but with everyone who cares about it already at 65 waiting for the patch to drop, it won’t take people long at all to get there.
Third, and this is one that I take some umbrage with, Galactic Command is character specific, not Legacy specific. This means that all the work I do on my level 65 Consular does not have any impact on my level 60 Trooper (outside of Dark vs Light ranking, a totally different topic). I can understand it to a degree, as this is meant to embody one character’s domination of the galaxy. On the other hand, they’ve done such a great job of having all of your work within a Legacy matter. So, if you run a Bounty Hunter healer with one group, but you also run a damage-dealing Sorcerer for another, you need to spend time grinding Command Rank with both and you still run into the RNG (random number generation) of the crates mentioned above.
I should point out that the folks at BioWare-Austin have been listening to everyone. They spend probably more time than they’d like going through reddit, SWTOR websites, and their own forums reading everyone decrying that the end is nigh. They aren’t just reading the feedback, they’re acting on it. Already, they’re fixing issues that are being brought up, most recently the loss of the weekly passes. Those are definitely gone, but they are looking for a reasonable replacement. The best guess right now is that they’ll have a Galactic Command weekly pass that will allow access to ALL the modes in GC, rather than buying passes for each one as previously done.
They’ve also stated that leveling up in Galactic Command will go VERY quickly. Presumably, it’ll go very quickly up to a certain point. Per Eric Musco, the community manager, getting from level 49 to 50 will take significantly longer than getting from 9 to 10. You also get more points based on the level of difficulty, so people who are playing Nightmare Mode Ops will get more command xp (cxp) than those running Tactical Mode. Operations require more people, too, which is another determining factor for increased cxp. Flashpoints only need four people, so they will naturally generate less cxp than Ops.
I, for one, welcome this change FOR MYSELF. I can certainly understand people who say that they have not been taking care of endgame people and this feels like the nail in the coffin. Do I think it actually is? Hell no. 2016 was the year that story came back to the game, and they’ve already stated that 2017 will be the year of endgame content. Should they have been doing both, the way that WarCraft continues to do? Well, yes, but I don’t think that catering solely to raiders and PvP’ers is the way to make the game better. They did a lot of that in all the game updates from 1.0 up until 4.0 and those were times that were far far less for me. I have my story again, and I can’t wait for endgamers to get their day, too.