Date Night Data

Earlier in the year, Narrative Director Ashley Ruhl gave a talk at 2025's Game Developers Conference, on the subject of SWTOR's date nights. I believe it's technically available to view online, but only if you have an expensive subscription to the GDC website. So I was quite pleased when /Jawaface pointed out to me last week that at least the slides for the presentation were now freely available to view for everyone.

Slides alone obviously don't give you the whole picture, but they do give you a pretty good idea of just what was discussed. It being from a conference for game developers, the talk was obviously primarily targeted at that audience and covered things like the technical side of setting up certain cut scenes for example. If I as a layperson had to sum up Ashley's message to other developers based on these slides, I'd say it's to not give up on passion projects for your game because your time will eventually come, and that you can get a surprising amount done by repurposing existing tools.

What I as a player found the most interesting though was the below slide, clearly added to show that date nights were a success. It shows the completion rates for the new main story added with patch 7.5 (that was Desperate Defiance) compared to the four date nights that were added in the previous patch (for Lana, Theron, Arcann and Koth).

It shows that 30 days after release, more players had completed at least one of the available date nights than 7.5's story. Now, you could argue that maybe that's not an entirely fair comparison, seeing how date night missions only take about five minutes and are available to anyone who's completed the "Knights of" expansions, while 7.5 required your character to be all caught up with several years of additional story updates added since then (plus it also took more time to complete). Nonetheless...

I thought this was quite impressive. As someone who's generally less interested in the romance aspect of the game compared to others, I was kind of surprised just how popular these were. Also that Lana looks to be about twice as popular as any of the other three companions in this comparison, but then I guess she's the only woman running against three men. I guess this is why those of us who aren't that crazy about Lana will never be able to get rid of her... (I'm joking. Mostly.)

I suspect that the numbers for the date nights released after that must have been less exciting, considering that all the other companions are limited to specific classes as opposed to being available to everyone. Personally I still haven't done any beyond Theron and Arcann, as I just don't have the right combination of characters far enough progressed through the story. One day I guess...

Anyway, I just thought that was an interesting little insight into content performance, of the type that devs usually don't share with players (while at the same time we as players love to get our hands on it - as was also evidenced by all the excitement about John Hight's leaked slide about WoW subscriptions from his GDC presentation last year).

My SWTOR Feature Wishlist Going Into 2025

The start of a new year is traditionally a time for plans, predictions, resolutions - or wishes, as it might be. So I figured this might be a good time to finally make this post about features I really wish the SWTOR devs would get around to updating or adding. I don't really expect any of these to happen in 2025 in specific to be honest, but I just want to throw them out there because this kind of thing isn't actually something I usually spend a lot of time talking about.

I originally drafted this post several months ago under the simple title "feature wishlist" but then I saw someone comment in a video (I forget which one it was exactly) that "devs hate nothing more than feature wishlists", which gave me pause at the time. I have no idea whether it's true, but it's the kind of statement that sounds like it could be? After all, MMO developers are always working on new things that they're hoping will excite players, and the last thing you'll want to hear while you're doing that is someone going "whatever, can you please work on all this other stuff instead".

Anyway, like I said, I decided that now's the time to go ahead anyway, so without further ado, my biggest wishes for SWTOR in the next year (and beyond):

1. A solution for queues

I wrote a post in June last year in which I talked about how I'm worried about steadily increasing queue times for PvP, but to some extent this problem applies to PvE as well, depending on what content you want to do and what server you play on. If you're on Star Forge or Darth Malgus, you're mostly fine, but on any of the other four servers your odds of signing up for an automated activity queue that never pops have slowly been growing over time. Simply put, the game has too many different queues for the number of players it actually has nowadays.

You might ask why that matters, especially if you're someone who primarily plays solo, and my answer is that it's simply not healthy for any multiplayer game. It's frustrating for people who just want to play the content (and who are being led to believe that they should be able to, why else is that "queue for PvP" button even there), but it can also leave a terrible impression on new players trying to get into the game for the first time.

I find myself thinking back to SWTOR's first year, when it still had hundreds of thousands of paying subscribers, and yet people would regularly post screenshots about how it was supposedly stone dead, showing themselves standing on the fleet with not a single other person being there. You know why that was? Because when the population started dropping, the devs opened free transfers everywhere to consolidate players onto a smaller number of servers, but it took them months to actually close down the old/abandoned servers, and people were logging into them all the time with no idea what was going on, just to find that apparently "nobody" was playing the game anymore. Queues that never pop can have a similar effect, if perhaps not to the same degree.

Now, there are a number of ways to address this problem. Server merges are one, and you'll find a good number of people suggesting those, but I've got to admit I'm not the biggest fan of that particular solution myself. I like giving people the option to play in distinctly different environments that are busier or more quiet depending on their preference, and then we'd also have to deal with the issue of millions of characters all needing unique names again. However, I do think that this queue problem is bad enough that I would embrace even this radical solution.

Another option would be the introduction of cross-server queueing at last. Now, this is something that people actually asked for way back when the game first launched, and early dev communications hinted at the feature being just around the corner. However, at some point they changed their minds about this, and while I can't find the exact quote anymore (I just found a link to an old episode of the Bad Feeling Podcast that is no longer online), I seem to remember that the devs were basically saying that it turned out to be too complicated/too much effort and wasn't worth it. Please do correct me if you got an actual quote for what was said back then. Either way, this was a long time ago when the game still had a lot more servers, so I'm thinking there's a chance it might be more feasible now than it was back then?

Other options include things like simply reducing the number of available queues, for example by re-merging the warzone and arena queues, or merging the lowbie and midbie PvP brackets. And yes, I know that all of these would cause other issues in turn, which is why I'm not picking one option and claiming that this one would definitely be the best and solve everything. All I'm saying is that I think this is a serious problem and there are a number of ways the devs could go about addressing it. I'd just like them to do something.

2. A legacy- or account-wide friends list

Before the current number one on the list became top of mind for me, this used to be my number one feature request for SWTOR for over a decade. Think I'm exaggerating? Go and read me complaining about "my useless friends list" back in 2014. It's actually quite astounding to think just how many parts of the UI the devs have revamped and updated over the years, but that stupid window is still exactly the same as it was at launch.

This game is all about alts, so we need the option to (consensually!) become legacy- or account-wide friends with someone, maybe with an additional option to hide your online status even from your friends when you feel like laying low some days. As it is, we continue to make do by using external apps like Discord to stay in touch, but we shouldn't have to.

3. Support for manual group finding

This is another drum that I've been beating for at least half a decade - see here. Being able to queue up for automatically formed groups for flashpoints and PvP is fine and dandy, but sometimes you need players for something else and there are tools to support manual group formation for that in other games, but not in SWTOR. Why does forming an ops group with pugs still involve barking "LFM" in fleet general chat in 2025? Hell, we had more support for this back in 2012 when you could flag yourself as LFG in /who while providing more details in the comment field. Nowadays we don't even have that.

4. An updated companion UI

OK, so far everything I've listed has been about social features because those are near and dear to my heart, but I do have other interests as well. The "companions and contacts" window (bound to N by default) was added with Knights of the Fallen Empire and it does have some nice features, like the little text summaries that tell you more about your relationship with each companion as well as their likes and dislikes. The "travel to contact" button is also pretty neat when it works.

That said, after a decade of the devs constantly adding more companions and contacts... it's just a mess. Whenever I want to check my influence level with a companion, I always open the crew skill window instead because at least in there they are sorted from highest influence to lowest. I'm not convinced that splitting companions into different categories based on which part of the story you acquired them in was ever a good idea, but it's only gotten worse over time with inconsistent categorisation and weird duplication bugs, all of which can make it very hard to find the specific companion you're trying to summon at any given moment.

For all the sometimes seemingly random UI changes we've seen over the past couple of years, this is one window I really wish they'd get around to revamping. Mainly I think that the companions should just all be in one big list, but with the ability to sort and filter them different ways, including alphabetically and by influence level.

5. Where's that crafting update?

Remember when the devs said there'd be a crew skills update coming at some point? I think it was before Legacy of the Sith, wasn't it? Either way it's been so long since we've heard anything about that, I find it hard to remember the details.

As someone who enjoys crafting I'd love for it to finally get some love again. It's not completely useless now, and I don't think they need to fully overhaul how everything works, but some crafting skills are definitely less relevant than others and it's just been ages since they even added anything to it other than the latest set of new augments.

I'm not sure what exactly I'm wishing for with this one to be honest, other than that I hope there are no monkey paws involved, because in other MMOs I've looked forward to a crafting revamp more than once, and even thought that what the devs did in each instance looked pretty good at first... just to then still end up disappointed after a while, missing the old systems. I don't want that to happen to SWTOR... but I also feel like crew skills are definitely overdue for some love.

Do you agree with my priorities here or would yours be completely different? Feel free to share your own thoughts in the comments!

Lessons Learned from Training Bessi

As of about a week ago, I'm the proud owner of a permanent basilisk droid companion! Like I said in my last post about B3-S1, I was actually surprised by how enjoyable I ended up finding the process, when I was originally very much against the idea of being given a reason to do the same old daily zones yet again for the umpteenth time.

However, there are definitely a few things I learned along the way that I kind of wish I had known sooner. Heck, this one sentence from my previous post contains two misconceptions in one: "[T]here are four different currencies involved and so far I've always reached the weekly cap for all of them within only two hours of gameplay, at which point it's back to the stable for Bessi as she can't make any more progress until the next week." Since I want other people to be able to avoid the mistakes I made, let me break it down for you:

1. Bessi's time is not precious

In that previous post, I made it sound like it was really easy to hit the weekly cap on all the Bessi-related currencies within only two hours, but that was on a stealther and knowing my way around. I almost took a certain pride in making efficient use of my "Bessi-time" because I figured it was the most precious resource in the whole endeavour. Can't make any progress with Bessi if you're not allowed to have her out, can you?

This turned out to be very wrong for two reasons: First off, the memory chips you need to spend to activate Bessi for an hour are extremely easy to get. You get several for free from the terminal in Lane's lab every week, and the collected research containers also have a random chance of containing extra memory chips. So I soon found myself bumping up against the real limiting factors: training modules and prototype data.

The latter isn't that hard to get but is required in higher and higher numbers as you go up in levels, and also serves as currency for buying training modules for specific planets from the vendor. Training modules aren't exactly rare per se either, but since it's random what modules you'll get granted for free and they can send you to 14 different planets, it's possible for module RNG a.k.a. "just not getting enough of the one you actually need" to be a real blocker.

Oh, and guess what gives you two free training modules every time? Feeding Bessi a memory chip! So I went from trying to be super efficient with her time in the early levels and treating memory chips as extremely precious, to actively feeding her the things all day without even using Bessi for anything (you can use up more memory chips before the timer for the last one has actually run out by dismissing Bessi in Lane's Lab and then initiating the "conversation" with her while she's lying in her dedicated spot).

2. You don't have to stop after you've maxed out your currencies for the week

The other misconception I expressed in that earlier quote was that maxing out my Bessi-related currencies for the week meant that I was done and that there was nothing else left to do. In reality, you can keep doing training modules for as long as you have any. The collected research you get as a reward is a container, so you can simply stash those in your cargo bay to immediately have a leg up on your weekly progress for the next reset. You don't have to worry about accidentally wasting them either, as the game won't even let you open them if you're already maxed out on all the currencies contained within.

Do take care though with which training modules you use up every week, because...

3. It pays off to know which training modules are used at which level

I'm usually someone who prefers exploring things for myself, only resorting to guides when I get stuck, but with Bessi, having at least a little bit of knowledge in advance definitely pays off. Specifically, what you should know is that at the higher levels, you'll have to complete training modules in specific daily areas to progress. These are:

Level 5: Black Hole, CZ-198, Iokath
Level 6: Onderon, Oricon, Ruhnuk
Level 8: Kessan's Landing, Ossus, Yavin IV
Level 9: Makeb, Manaan, Section X

Mek-Sha and Rishi are not required for any specific levels.

What this means is that when you pick which training modules to do in a given week, keep in mind what's coming up next and don't use up the ones you're about to need at the next level! I don't remember the exact details, but I think I did a bunch of Black Hole and CZ-198 modules at level four because hey! They are really easy daily areas! And then I levelled up and groaned when I saw that I'd just used up what was required for the next level, when I could have done level four with any old module.

4. You don't get credit for everything you should get credit for

Maybe that'll be fixed one day, but as it stands, there are some slight bugs with the training module missions. That you need to actually have Bessi out and in the role she's training for when you complete a mission is logical enough, but other restrictions... not so much. For example I was initially under the impression that the bonus missions that ask you to do a heroic don't give you anything, because they only seem to grant you your reward if the heroic is completed before the main mission (as opposed to at the same time). So if your main objective says to complete two missions, and you do a normal daily first and a heroic second, the heroic doesn't count for the bonus in my experience, meaning you need to make sure to always do any heroics first if you want to get credit for the bonus. The collected research you get from these bonus missions is actually quite good as it contains lots of prototype data plus a little bit of several of the other types.

Oh, and Makeb heroics are just totally screwed up in terms of credit. I found this forum post helpful for pointing out several of the missions from the terminal that don't count towards training Bessi. GSI missions don't work either in case you're wondering.

5. Bonus tip:

Not something "I wish I'd known" because I did find out about it in time, but at level 10 you're asked to have Bessi use her abilities in every role 500 times. That is a lot. By the time I had done everything else required at that level, I still needed about 300 more ability uses in each role. Fortunately, for tank and dps, you can just sic Bessi on a training dummy and go AFK for a while. For her to practice healing, I opted to engage a champion mob on Nar Shaddaa and let him punch me in the face for a while. This requires a little bit of attention, but not that much and at least it's kind of amusing (even if I had to do it several times over, because even with me practically doing no dps to him, Bessi's piddly heal-dps would eventually kill him).

Playing as a Male Character

Last week, after more than twelve years of playing Star Wars: The Old Republic almost daily, I completed a class story on a male character for the first time. The question of why it took me this long is kind of fascinating to me.

I've played video games with male protagonists in the past without giving it a second thought, but something about MMOs makes them different somehow. I've never shied away from creating male characters there either (one of the very first alts I created back when I started playing WoW in 2006 was a human male warlock) but for some reason I always struggled to get as invested in them as I was in my female characters.

I do know that I'm at least not entirely alone in this - Nick Yee from Quantic Foundry did an interesting survey about gender preferences in gaming a few years ago, which found that a large majority of women prefer to play female characters, but only less than half of the surveyed men preferred playing male characters. In fact, almost a third of men also preferred playing female characters.

Anecdotally, my own experience has been that people have basically two modes of engaging with their characters in an MMO: by viewing them as an extension of themselves, an avatar or personal representation, or by viewing them as toys to play with, dolls to dress up, action figures that they can make jump around. This isn't to say that people aren't capable of doing both, but I think that "by default" you tend to lean either one way or the other when you start a game.

My personal observation at least has been that people who prefer playing characters that match their real life gender tend to view them more as representations of themselves, while those who'll happily mix and match view them more as objects to be played around with and with whom they don't necessarily identify. Though why women would be so much more prone to the former than the latter is honestly a mystery to me.

Either way, my strong preference for female characters in MMOs wasn't something to which I gave a huge amount of thought in the past... but of course SWTOR has a lot of "gendered" content in the original class stories, such as flirt options and whole romances that are only accessible to you if your character is the right gender. After more than a decade of exploring the game with dozens of female alts, I was really starting to feel that I was missing out by denying myself access to those optional story bits designed for male characters.

I actually created my very first male character in TOR back in 2012: Zilek, my Jedi consular on what is now the Satele Shan server. I know this because I mentioned his creation in this post from October 2012. As I anticipated back then, I partially played through the starting zone and then didn't do anything with him again for ages.

As far as I can tell from screenshots, I decided to check in on him again for reasons I can no longer remember around May 2019. What I do remember is that I almost instantly realised that I suddenly hated the way he looked (I'd originally given him shoulder-length black hair and that complexion option with the lip liner), so I gave him a makeover to make him more visually appealing. That helped, but somehow the quest cut scenes still bothered me. For some irrational reason I cannot quite fathom, it felt strange to see him talk and have a male voice coming out of "my" character. It just felt wrong. So I bought him an outfit with a mask - something I usually never do - but in this instance it weirdly helped to make him more playable, as if it made it easier to pretend he was secretly a girl or something?! If that sounds kind of insane to you, I didn't think any better of myself for feeling that way.

I levelled him for a few weeks, but then forgot about him again for the next three years. It wasn't until I started doing Galactic Seasons on multiple servers that I began to give him attention more regularly and got him to max level, though I still haven't finished his class story.

As I got more into the idea of levelling a male character of each class, I made more of my new alts on the other servers male. They are all still relatively low level and not very advanced, but they exist and get play time, even if sporadically. At some point I realised that the only permutation I was still missing entirely was a male Sith warrior... so I went ahead and created one on my home server Darth Malgus. This was also around the time I was having a blast PvPing as a Juggernaut on Shae Vizla, so my newest warrior's purpose became to both do lowbie PvP while levelling and go through the warrior class story as a male character for the first time.

And... I actually succeeded! The questing really picked up once I outlevelled the lowbie bracket, as I wasn't keen to start midbie PvP at the very bottom of that pile and focused on progressing the story over queueing for arenas for the next ten levels or so.

I actually had a lot of fun with the story as well, and I didn't even have the urge to hide my character's face this time. I think what helped was that with this one, I had an idea for a "character" from the beginning and didn't even pretend that I was using him to represent my real self at any point. But it required a kind of actual "work" from me at first, as I had to think about what his personality was and how he would react to certain situations. There were some choices where I had to pause and think for a really long time to remind myself that I didn't want to go with whatever my gut feeling was, but what this character would do in that situation. For how challenging I found that at times, it was also a new kind of fun to be honest, and he quickly became one of my new favourites, as I connected to him in a different way to all my other alts.

I went in with a plan to romance one of the warrior's female love interests (seeing that kind of stuff was part of the whole point of making a male character, after all) and found myself surprisingly torn by which route to go down. I initially didn't think he was going to be interested in Vette, but she can be so charming... with Jaesa, I wasn't sure whether I was going to make her light or dark side, as he wasn't clearly one or the other himself, but I eventually ended up with her dark side version.

Now, dark side Jaesa has always been one of my least favourite companions, and I've been baffled by why she's so popular with some people. After playing through her romance, I can at least kind of see why - she may be psychotically violent, but she's also a stereotypically bad girl that falls head over heels for the player character and pursues him aggressively - I can see that being appealing. It's just that if you're playing a female character, like I always have, you're only left with the conversations where she's being absolutely psychotic and nothing else.

I thought that since I'd flirted with both Vette and Jaesa, there would be some sort of conversation that would force me to choose between them at some point, but I don't know if I just did things in the wrong order but I never saw anything like it. The most I got was Jaesa making a reference to my character having a thing with the Twi'lek but she never seemed to take all that much issue with it. Vette on the other hand never even mentioned Jaesa and asked to get married after a single kiss, which was just an obvious "whoa, no". Ultimately my warrior ended up agreeing to marry Jaesa in the most assholish way possible, which I thought was both disturbing and funny in equal amounts.

I kind of like the idea of continuing to play him to see some of the expansion content as a male character as well (even if I have no particular urge to flirt with Lord Cytharat, who knows what might happen) but realistically my enthusiasm for that kind of thing tends to fizzle out once I hit the level cap at the latest - we'll see how it goes.

Flying Robots, Account-Wide Surprises, Decoration Sale

One thing I keep thinking about in regards to my blogging is that I used to be much better at making shorter, more random posts. I do still love writing long and thoughtful treatises on all kinds of topics, but sometimes it's also nice to just... talk about a funny thing I saw for a few paragraphs? It's always really interesting to look back on those posts years later, plus I would guess that they make for an easier entry point for new readers as well.

So without further ado... some random thoughts on a Friday:

Flying Robots

You know how your class companions will sometimes want to chat with you on your ship or in a cantina? The conversations that can be held in a cantina can also take place in a stronghold. The other day I accidentally clicked on a talkative M1-4X while in my Copero Villa on an alt and the view went absolutely wild. I only took a few screenshots of my faithful droid companion floating in space (see below) but there were other crazy views, such as an extreme close-up of his shoulder, a giant rock wall stretching into infinity, and a view of my character from below with nothing but sky above her.

I was like "surely they didn't forget to test the companion conversation feature in this stronghold" and indeed, when I tried to have a conversation with another companion later, the cut scene took place at the entrance normally, with the kinds of views you'd expect. I wonder if M1-4X is buggy in a unique way or whether it was just a random glitch.

Account-Wide Surprises

The introduction of Bessi came with a change to the way daily areas work, as the patch notes stated that each one would now be accessible to all characters within your legacy as long as at least one of them had unlocked the area. The other day while using the activity finder on one of my secondary servers, I was shocked and surprised to see that apparently those patch notes had been slightly incorrect: the new unlock is not legacy-wide, but account-wide. Meaning that my alternative legacies on the other servers, where none of my characters have progressed through a lot of content, now have access to all the daily areas in the game.

I'm not quite sure how I feel about this yet. On the one hand, I've kind of liked having to re-earn certain things on the other servers, so this feels a bit like cheating. On the other hand though, it's going to make certain weekly objectives so much easier when the next Galactic Season comes around. (Doing the weekly on Ossus once is so much faster than doing the Oricon weekly twice for example.)

Decoration Sale

After the big summer mount sale ended, the sale section in the Cartel Market transitioned straight into another big sale, this time for decorations, though I haven't seen any official announcement or even much community conversation about it. I guess because decorating is a bit more of a niche hobby compared to mounts, which are something everyone uses?

I considered making another "tips" post about it but didn't really have that much to say that was different. Stuff like "check the price on the GTN before committing to spending real money" applies to decorations just as much as mounts. But since at least one person mentioned finding it helpful that I gave the mount sale a shout-out last time, I wanted to bring up the decorations sale at least briefly as well.

Since there's been no official word about this particular sale, I don't know for how much longer it'll be going on, but I would expect the "stock" to switch over again on Tuesday the 30th. Personally I went for the Copero utility bundle to match the new stronghold, since it's available for 50% off in the sale for the first time. Also, ever since I found out about the fact that many "light" decorations don't actually emit light, I've felt quite vexed by it and there are several bundles in the sale that contain either standing or hanging lights that actually do illuminate a room. Look up the Corporate Retreat, Distant Worlds, Restored Jedi Enclave and Security Bureau decoration bundles (though again, check the GTN for the items you want first!) or see Swtorista's full list of proper lighting decorations here.

7.5.1 Dev Livestream Notes

So there was a dev livestream today - you'll be excused if you're surprised to hear this, as for some reason the SWTOR team decided not to announce it anywhere... except on Twitter. I thought I was being bitterly hyperbolic in my last post with the whole "why do you think only Twitter users are worthy of knowing about what's happening with the game" line, figuring that they were still going to announce it somewhere else eventually, but they really didn't. What a bizarre marketing decision, especially seeing how they apparently want us to spend more time on Twitch...

Which is me segueing into the fact that the first item announced during the livestream was that they now have Twitch integration, and that once you've connected your account and patch 7.5.1 launches, you'll have 30 days to earn a purple speeder by watching four hours of SWTOR streams.

I hope this appeals... to the kids... or something? Sorry, I'm that old fogey that doesn't really "get" streaming and mostly finds it boring. To me, watching four hours of SWTOR livestreaming in a single month will be quite a big ask, but I guess I know Swtorista's schedule so I might be able to get there with some effort. I went ahead and linked my accounts, which seemed to be successful, but when I go into my SWTOR account now it still says that there's no linked Twitch account. There's already a post on the forum noting that there are issues. I guess that's why they announced the feature before it actually matters, so they have time to iron out any kinks before the actual eligibility period starts.

The stream's main focus was the next Galactic Season, which will be called "The Greatest Bounty" and whose theme will be bounty hunting. Interestingly, the Bounty Hunting event that is currently tied to the Death Mark conquest and only live about once a month will be active throughout the entire season. Even more interestingly, they'll bring back the Dark vs. Light bosses as targets to hunt for seasons objectives.

Amusingly, all the devs on the stream got the bosses' origins confused, as they talked about how these were supposedly part of the original DvL event from eight years ago. This is not true though - the DvL world bosses used to spawn based on the dark vs. light "world state" that was added in Knights of the Eternal Throne and removed with Legacy of the Sith. I hunted them all down back in 2020, and while it made for a fun guild activity for a while, it was also kind of a pain in some ways. It sounds like the issues with how easily they were to accidentally despawn will no longer be a thing, but we'll see what the difficulty tuning will be like - back then it was pretty brutal to be honest and not really pug friendly. (In the linked post I quoted a guildie as saying that he'd rather be kicked in the nuts for half an hour than ever fight any of these bosses again.) Still, I generally approve of these encounters being repurposed like this.

There was no mention of a central season reward like the past companions or the stronghold from the current season, so I'm not sure if it'll just be a more general reward track like in GS5? We will get a recoloured version of the Loth kitty apparently. We also weren't given a launch date, though Musco said that they're targeting "late August", so it sounds like we'll have about a month's break between seasons this time around. I just hope they don't repeat the whole blueprint gathering thing...

As promised previously, there'll also be two new date night missions, this time for Aric Jorgan and for Vette. As these are class companions, it was clarified that you won't be able to do these while just playing through the class story - you'll need to actually have reunited with your love interest in KotFE and locked in the romance before the date nights become available. I currently don't have access to either of these, so I can't get excited about them just yet, but I guess two more of these are another reason to work on getting those alts through the expansions.

There were some previews of new decoration rewards from the Feast of Prosperity and some new Cartel Market items. We'll finally get an Imperial trooper armour, which is something people have been wanting for a long time apparently, and there'll be two new weapon tunings which make either embers or flower petals float around you, which I've got to admit looked kind of amusing.

In terms of gear, there isn't going to be a new tier of gear or anything, but they are making some changes to make it even easier to get upgrades in the existing system. For example the various weekly missions will give you a choice between a gear box or just a flat amount of currency that will be much higher than just taking the gear and dissembling it (which is the only thing we can do right now if we don't need the actual item). All the ops weeklies will be back on the terminals every week instead of being on a four week rotation - I should be happy about that but I'll also kind of miss the way this made it easy to rotate different operations on social night without having to really think about it. You'll also be able to trade in gear boxes for higher-quality gear boxes, all the way up to Rakata... which does sound good in theory but also like it could be kind of clunky, depending on how many boxes you need to save up in your cargo hold before you can trade them for anything. We'll see.

Finally, there were some very brief teaser comments about 7.6, which we can expect closer towards the end of the year. Apparently this time the story will take us back to existing planets, where "an entirely new type of content" will await. *insert curiously raised eyebrow here* Even more importantly for those of us interested in group content though, there'll be a new lair boss a.k.a. a single boss operation. Again, I just want to be happy but unfortunately I don't have the best track record with lair bosses. I like the event-based ones like the Xenoanalyst and the Eyeless, but I've always hated the Colossal Monolith, and Golden Fury and the Hive Queen are at best kinda boring. I want it to be good though, honest!

Anyway... with that I've actually touched at least briefly on everything that was said in the stream I think! Still, as usual I recommend other places like Today in TOR for a more comprehensive and detailed round-up.

Adventuring With Bessi

There's one major feature of patch 7.5 that I still haven't written about here yet: Bessi the Basilisk Droid! To be honest, I did the introductory quest line during the first week and then decided to nope right out of the whole system for the first month - it was all dailies and I was already doing the new spring event on ALL the characters; there's only so much daily-running I can take. However, I always intended to get back to Bessi eventually, so for the past few weeks I've been taking her out on adventures every week.

When Bessi and her new "venture" were first announced, my reaction could basically be summed up in three bullet points:

• Good: a companion with a meaningful story and gameplay behind it!
• Bad: another incentive to do the same old daily areas yet again!
• Confusing: why do we need a new system for this?

I feel like seeing the system in action only really gave me a partial answer to the last question. It has its own snazzy UI of course, but at its core it's still just a bunch of quests and achievements? My best guess is that the whole thing is legacy-wide in a way that the current achievement system wouldn't quite have been able to support or something...

As a system, I'm honestly feeling a bit ambivalent about it, but it might be that the devs are still working out some kinks. For example I saw people complain a lot about mission RNG from level five onwards (before I'd gotten there myself) and this was addressed pretty quickly with a new option to unlock specific missions via currency on a vendor.

For me, where I'm at right now, there are mainly two things that still seem a little unrefined to me: one is that even though the system was advertised as legacy-wide, all the training module missions are character-bound, which makes it kind of unappealing to ever go on an alt, as you'll keep earning new missions on the same character, and switching to an alt would require you to pay extra to unlock training missions on a different character, when what you really want to do is save your precious currency for actual advancement.

The other thing is that it's just... a bit confusing, but in a way that I find hard to articulate. I was actually somewhat reminded of the way I felt about the 7.0 gearing system when Legacy of the Sith came out, which is to say, I kinda got what I needed to do, but if you asked me to explain how it all works, I'd just draw a blank. With Bessi in specific, I can always see the checklist of tasks in the venture window, but I find that I have to keep referring back to it all the time, because I just can't quite keep track and the flow never feels entirely organic to me. I pretty much always complete one task at a time and then have to go "OK, now what".

Bessi herself is incredibly cute though. She's basically a robot dog with a giant, multi-barrelled gun for a face, which sounds bizarre but works somehow. Everything about her design walks a fine line between threatening and adorable. I particularly like her idle sound, which made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up the first time I heard it because she growls a bit like the T-Rex from the original Jurassic Park, only slightly more robotic. But then you watch her wag her tail while she casts heals on you and you just can't help going "aw"; it's pretty amazing honestly.

Also, and it almost pains me a little to say this, but the daily gameplay loop turned out to be more fun than I expected. It's a bit different in that you have to "rent" Bessi for an hour at a time, so you have an incentive to really dedicate that time slot to nothing but her (logging out pauses the timer so you can take breaks if you want, but my point is you may not want to go off and run a flashpoint halfway through or something).

More interestingly though, we're not being asked to do the weekly mission in each daily area like on pretty much every other occasion, but instead Bessi's training modules require you to do just two daily or heroic missions in a specific daily zone at a time, which makes you think about things like which ones to pick for good synergy and can result in a lot of planet-hopping in a relatively short time. It's just... different.

The one thing that's surprised me is how extremely time-gated the system is. Obviously there was always going to be a limit in terms of how much progress you're allowed to make in a single week, but there are four different currencies involved and so far I've always reached the weekly cap for all of them within only two hours of gameplay, at which point it's back to the stable for Bessi as she can't make any more progress until the next week. Considering how the resource investment for each level is also increasing over time, the devs clearly weren't kidding when they said that unlocking Bessi's full potential was going to be something that takes a level of real time commitment that not everyone will be willing to make to this system.

How are you getting on with Bessi and what do you think of the new venture system so far?

7.5 Dev Stream Highlights

Yesterday it was time for another SWTOR dev stream, hurrah! As usual, this is not the place to find all the details about everything that was said, but rather a summary of what I thought were the most important points, with my own opinions sprinkled on top. If you're looking for something more comprehensive and less editorial, let me point you towards one of the sites below instead:

• Swtorista
• Today in TOR
• Vulkk

Now, on to my own thoughts...

7.5 Story "Desperate Defiance" on Hutta

We got a little more detail about the next story update coming with 7.5, without really getting into spoilers. As previously established, it will take place on Hutta where we'll be interacting with a number of new characters. My favourite of these was a Hutt called Yusinduu with a cool new look.

Again, without really going into spoilers, they said that Sa'har will follow up on what was said at the end of the 7.4 story, and apparently how we respond to her will have an impact on her development going forward - curious to see what that means.

My only slight disappointment was hearing that the new area on Hutta won't contain a new daily area or anything. It's not so much that I'm particularly dying to have a daily area in every patch, but it kind of sounds like there's literally nothing there other than whatever you do for the main storyline, which sounds kind of wasteful to me if true. We'll see I guess.

Graphical Updates for Hutta

They'll use the addition of the new area on Hutta as an opportunity to also give the planet as a whole a graphical update, which sounded good to me. I mentioned it in the past when they made similar changes on a smaller scale on Tython and Korriban.

The only thing that threw me for a bit of a loop was how utterly different the skybox looked in the footage with the updated graphics. Hutta's sky is currently dominated by yellow clouds that cause the whole planet to be basked in a yellow-ish hue, while the updated version seems to feature a uniform grey cloud cover that looked like it strongly changes the vibe. I don't know how I feel about that yet. If you like the yellow, go and take some screenshots while it lasts I guess!

Below you can see before and after shots of the sky over Jiguuna that I took in the live game and on the PTS. I'll admit the change didn't feel as drastic in game as it looks in the screenshots and the new version is definitely much crisper and more detailed.

I'm curious whether this update will also affect the Karagga's Palace operation, since it is also set on Hutta so might be sharing some assets (but I can't be bothered to check that out on the PTS).

Dantooine Spring Event 

We currently have Nar Shaddaa Night Life in summer (which will start on the 9th of July this year by the way), the Feast of Prosperity in autumn and Life Day in winter, so there was a gap in the calendar that the SWTOR team wanted to fill with this new event. It's going to be full of chill activities like growing crops, dancing around the Star Wars equivalent of a May pole, hunting for eggs (random Easter vibes?), looking after animals, baking and eating pies, and finally... fishing. Yes, after more than twelve years, SWTOR finally gets its own version of fishing!

I don't know, I can't claim to think that this was something that was desperately needed, but I've enjoyed it in other MMOs that have it as an activity, even when it worked in very different ways. The appropriately Star Wars twist on it is that you basically make a little probe droid do the work for you, the notion of which amuses me greatly.

Yes, I actually logged into the PTS to check this out.

I think this sounds like a lot of wholesome fun and I look forward to experiencing it in full once the event goes live.

Our Own Little Basilisk Companion

Another thing that will happen in 7.5 is that Lane Vizla finally manages to fix that little basilisk from Ruhnuk and it will become our companion - a proper one that fights and everything, not just a non-combat pet. It'll be called B3-S1 or "Bessie" for short. However, there'll be a twist, as we'll have to train the little bugger to truly make it ours, which will involve something called "ventures" and will require you to take Bessie out to do dailies over the course of a longer period of time. I have to admit my initial reaction to this were somewhat mixed feelings.

On the one hand: new companion that we actually have to work for and build a relationship with! Yes! I'm 100% on board with that concept, and we haven't really seen anything like this since the release of HK-51.

However, from the way it was described, I'm not sure why we need a new "feature" with a new UI just for this instead of it simply being a quest chain or tied to an achievement, because it doesn't sound that dramatically different from anything already in the game. In fact, it sounds a lot like yet another way of making us go back to old daily areas, which makes me somewhat less happy. Also, I'm waiting for clarification on whether there's going to be an option to just unlock Bessie for your alts via the legacy system after you've jumped through all the required hoops the first time.

PvP Season 6

This was a bit of a weird one. First off, they announced that they'll be changing the launch timing of PvP seasons and have them more regularly start alongside the big patches. I'm in favour of that in so far as it should avoid some of the weird overlap issues that have been occurring with Galactic Seasons sometimes, assuming that those will continue to go live on the x.1 patches between the major ones.

However, then the devs also said that they wanted to make PvP seasons longer to give people more time to complete them, which sounded fine enough to me, but then they also want to add extra levels and make each level require more points... someone on the forums immediately did the maths and it sounds like you will still need to play pretty much just as many matches each week as before, only for more weeks, which doesn't really sound like an improvement.

Also, they talked about adding warzone medpacks and adrenals as rewards for the extra levels, which made every PvPer go "what?" - you already get more of these through normal gameplay than you could possibly use (because of their internal cooldown, you literally earn them faster than you can click them), and every character that does PvP already has hundreds if not thousands of these. That just seemed... odd. I hope they'll review that particular plan based on people's feedback.

What Now?

There isn't an official launch date for 7.5 yet, but we're probably looking at a late May/early June release.

The Public Test Server is up and you can check out the graphics updates, the spring event and some of the "venture" stuff there if you like (no story content though).

The reward code they gave out during the stream this time was "MalgusWhen", which grants a Darth Malgus in-game poster decoration - if you don't already have it, because unfortunately this one's a repeat of a reward they handed out previously. If, like me, you already had it, you can still enter the code and it will say that you successfully claimed it, but you'll get nothing. It's valid until May 16th.

Speaking of things that are valid until May 16th - in order to celebrate Star Wars Day, there's also some other goodies available. Logging in between now and then will grant you another floating cube droid non-combat pet, there's double XP going on, a Cartel Market sale, and a 50% off Collections sale. Enjoy!

Date Night with Theron and Arcann

Not at the same time, you silly person! The decision trees in this game are complex enough without adding threesomes to the mix.

As mentioned previously, I currently only have access to two out of the four "date night" missions that were released with 7.4.1, but I did want to take some notes on the ones I could do.

To make sure nobody develops any unreasonable expectations, each one of these is only about five minutes long, but they are fully voiced and directed, with multiple conversation choices. Oddly, the thing that surprised me the most was their method of acquisition, as they first appear in your Alliance alerts, but then the alert tells you to go to your personal starship and only there do you pick up the actual repeatable mission from a data pad. I wonder whether that means that future date nights for class-specific companions will be available before you hit KotFE, or whether this was just some technical workaround that was required since Alliance alerts can't be made repeatable or something like that.

Now for the spoiler-y part... Theron first:

The date with Theron takes you to the Slugfall cantina on Mek-Sha and the general theme is that he's too distracted by his work and not paying enough attention to you, something he wants to work on. I had to smile at the scene where Theron and your character are about to kiss when his data pad interrupts with a beep - that felt very real somehow. I was kind of surprised by the bit where said data pad just ends up being thrown over the railing... I hope that got checked up on later; I'd hate for some random on Mek-Sha to become privy to a bunch of Alliance secrets...

For Arcann, you meet up in the Odessen Wilds and I was initially a bit confused as I couldn't see a quest marker on the map. However, I didn't have to move very far in to run into him. Arcann's idea of a date night is to have a fight with training sabers, which is... in-character, but also kind of weird in a way considering that he surely can't have great memories of the last time you and him battled like that.

Either way, I thought it worked quite well for my Jedi knight, though I had my doubts about how convincing a mock saber battle would be if you're a tech user. After looking that variant of the mission up on YouTube, I'm still not entirely convinced (the sparring still looks a bit too pro for someone who usually wields a pistol I think), but it does have a couple of cute dialogue changes.

Either way, the fight finishes with a smooch, and all I could think of was that the two of you should have tumbled into the high grass afterwards, but I guess that might've been considered too suggestive, heh.

After playing through these, you get a letter from your love the next day as well. I don't know yet if that part also gets repeated if you replay the mission.

Personally I think these are a nice incentive to romance different companions on alts, though I wonder if this particular addition is also upsetting to completionists, since the new date night alerts also have achievements associated with them, which might require a considerable number of alts to cover everything as time goes on. If you're getting a new character levelled up in order to get involved with a companion, you can't use too many story skips either as the default options that get chosen for you in that case never result in any romances.

7.4.1 Dev Stream Highlights & Thoughts

Last night we were treated to SWTOR's first dev stream of 2024, centred around patch 7.4.1. This was actually unusual, as the pattern in the recent past has been to only have livestreams in the run-up to a major patch, not for the minor ones. Interestingly, Jackie noted right at the beginning that they are planning to do more of this kind of thing going forward, which is nice in terms of communication, though I think at least in the short-term, it also confused some players who don't necessarily pay super close attention to how the game's patch cycle has been shaking out in the recent past.

What I mean by that is that I saw more than a couple of comments from people who seemed to simply equal "dev stream" with "next major update" and who then expressed disappointment that the stream didn't show off any new major additions. To be clear, everyone, 7.5 is still coming and will have more in it! In fact, they did tease a little bit about that, but more on that closer to the end of this post. This stream simply talked about the launch of the next Galactic Season, something that wouldn't have received its own stream in the past.

Galactic Season 6 & Other Bits

We haven't been given a date for Galactic Season 6's launch yet, but they stated that they're targeting a March release, which makes me expect that it'll come out in three to four weeks. They're continuing in a similar vein to Season 5, with some lightweight story missions and no new companion. Instead, this season's big reward will be a new stronghold on Copero of all places, and the seasonal quest givers will meet you inside it. You'll unlock basic access right away, with more rooms being added via the subscriber reward track, and the three final rooms apparently requiring Cartel Coins to unlock. This seemed to stir some controversy, much to my surprise, considering that the seasons track usually also contains some CC anyway, so I'd expect it to finance those final rooms more or less automatically.

Hearing about the return to Copero was a pleasant surprise, and I like that they're continuing to experiment with different rewards. From the screenshots, there's maybe a small risk that the Copero stronghold might end up feeling a little similar to Rishi, what with the beach front property with palm trees and all, but it's definitely different enough to still be interesting. I'm also happy that we'll be getting another seasonal storyline.

We also learned that PvP Season 5 will start in two weeks, and that character transfers to the Shae Vizla server will open up with patch 7.4.1, but I'll talk more about that in a different post. There was also the usual promotion of new Cartel Market stuff, though none of it vowed me like the original reveal of the shiny new dyes did last time. Maybe the Gothic Master armour set for one of my Sith warriors...

Date Night's Here!

The big and unexpected reveal of the stream was the release of "date nights" coming with 7.4.1. Now, these have some history already, as they were first data-mined about a year ago and people have been going nuts about the idea ever since. I even saw someone ask on the official forums how to get the mission to go on a date with Arcann, just to be told that this content wasn't actually in the game. This is why I always say not to put too much stock into data-mining!

However, they really are coming with 7.4.1: Alliance alerts that let you hang out with your romanced companion for a bit. Why did they promote this as a new feature instead of simply a bunch of new alerts? Because they will apparently be weekly repeatable, which I thought is quite neat. I remember reading a comment somewhere once where someone bemoaned that once the story was done, you could never ever talk to your companions again, even if one of them was officially your spouse. That person said that they wished that they could at least have some repeatable conversations like at the campfire in Dragon Age. And this sounds pretty close!

Before you get too excited though, we only get four to begin with: Lana, Koth, Theron and Arcann. The devs' desire is to eventually include something for all romanceable companions, but considering just how many of them there are, even the most optimistic timescale I've seen quoted would require more than five years to get to those last few companions.

Personally, I'm not a huge romance fanatic (my main never romanced anyone in my twelve years of playing for example), but I have dabbled in it on different alts, and I do like the idea of adding a bit more depth to companion relationships this way. I've never romanced Lana or Koth myself, but maybe this will give me an incentive to do so! More reasons to get characters to the other side of KotFE and KotET are always welcome.

Finally, in regards to 7.5, they confirmed that it will take place on Hutta and that you could indeed tell so from the current loading screen. The update will be called "Desperate Defiance" and will also feature the final part of the Lane Vizla storyline as well as a new spring-themed world event. That last part was actually the most intriguing to me because based on previous releases, I wouldn't have expected 7.5 to land before June. However, that's almost summer and would be very late to launch a spring-themed event, which makes you wonder whether this patch might actually launch earlier, and if so, what else that might mean for the game's patch cadence in the future. Most curious!

Freebies & Links

As usual, there's a free stronghold deco you can claim, using the code LotSKrovos (not case-sensitive). Just don't get tripped up when trying to claim it, as the old link to redeem codes from the main user interface appears to go to dead page right now. Make sure to log in, go to your new account page, and scroll down to the "redeem code" button there instead.

Also, not exactly a freebie, but they also announced a major Cartel Market sale for the armour and decoration categories running until the end of February. There are some good deals to be had there if either of those things interest you. Swtorista has some recommendations and screenshots of everything, while Kal offers a full written list of everything included in the sale, which is handy if you just wanna do a quick Ctrl+F to check whether something specific is reduced.

Finally, if you want to see or read more details about the stream for yourself, you can watch the Twitch VOD, the YouTube upload, or read detailed written breakdowns on the official website, at Swtorista, Vulkk or Today in TOR.

Bad Romance

I actually finished the Sith warrior class story on Shae Vizla! For as long as I've had alts on other servers, this is the first time I've actually completed a class story on a server other than Darth Malgus, and while it may be silly, I'm kind of proud of myself. I also realised that it had been a really long time since my last full Sith warrior playthrough in general... six or seven years, based on some comments I made on this blog.

Something I hadn't done in even longer was romancing Quinn. I wrote a post about the different base game romances for female characters last year in which I mentioned that I quite enjoyed the dynamic with him, but I've got to confess that this was all based on memories from over a decade ago at this point. I thought it would be fun to finally go through that particular storyline again with my newest Pureblood. Boy, was it a confusing experience.

To be clear, it's not that I completely changed my mind about Quinn or anything, but I basically hadn't considered that the way companion conversations work had changed in the meantime, and what effect this would have on the experience.

To refresh everyone's memories, at launch the class companion stories weren't tied to main story progress but rather to that particular companion's influence (then affection) level with you. I don't remember when exactly I went through most of Quinn's conversations, whether it was earlier or later, but I do recall that I was generally very bad at maxing out companion affection (I made a whole post on that subject back in 2014), so I probably didn't see at least half of his storyline until after completing the overall class story. Either way, I have no memory of how this interacted with his "big twist", but I figure it probably can't have been that big of a deal or I would've remembered it.

The point is, with Knights of the Fallen Empire, companion conversations were changed to unlock automatically after completing certain steps in your class story. I was very much in favour of this change, since it meant I actually did them at a sensible pace now instead of oscillating between basically ignoring my companions and going on gift-giving binges to get them to talk to me. I'm not sure how I expected this to affect the Quinn romance, but I know that what I actually got, wasn't it.

I was initially quite excited and keen to get the ball rolling, so I always made sure to talk to Quinn before any other companions, but he seemed coyer than I remembered, and it felt like it took forever for things to heat up between him and my warrior. I kept waiting for the big confession of love, but it just didn't come.

Eventually we got to the end of Voss and then the visit to the Imperial ship where... "the thing" happens. I couldn't help but think that surely it would've been more impactful if we'd already been closer beforehand, but I still chose a conversation option that said something like "we're breaking up". I was reminded of just how incredibly clunky the bit where you end up sparing him for "reasons" feels.

Then we got back onto the ship and I went to talk to him again to see what the next conversation was and... it was the big confession of love. My jaw just kind of dropped. Like, we literally got close to killing each other five minutes ago. Timing!? And I'd chosen the conversation option that said we were done, too!

I tried to justify it in my head with something like that the emotional turmoil of all that just brought their real feelings to the surface even stronger or something like that, and I allowed the romance to continue, but it still just felt weird.

It's kind of funny to me that even replaying content I've done before while trying to achieve the exact same outcome can result in such a dramatically different experience. Maybe the game has changed more over the years than I usually give it credit for.

Seeing How the Other Side Lives

I know that the way I play SWTOR puts me into a small minority relative to the overall player base. Doing PvP, doing operations, doing Galactic Seasons on all servers... most players don't do those things. Still, I tend to think that having at least dabbled in pretty much every part of the game, I should be able to "get" what drives most players. While the story is not necessarily my main focus nowadays for example, I've played and enjoyed it, so I can completely understand why someone else's play experience may be centred around it.

Spending time in more casual guilds on other servers during seasons has been rather eye-opening in that regard, which is to say that I've been quite surprised by some of the things people talk and seemingly care about. Here are three of the biggest items that caught me off-guard:

1. Companion power

I feel a little confused every time I see someone talk about what the "best" companion is. Most of them are identical in terms of their abilities, and the few who have a bit of an edge in one area or another still aren't massively different. Since every companion can play every role nowadays, the thing that matters the most is whether you like their look and voice lines, not how well they can "parse".

But people care a lot about min-maxing their companion performance. I always thought the Commander's Companion, a consumable that you can buy on the Cartel Market and that instantly raises your influence with one companion to fifty, was kind of a dumb item. Who would spend real money on that when there are multiple ways to raise your companion influence organically? Apparently the answer is: a lot of people.

And not just that, but apparently those same players consider it pretty much mandatory to have all of their companions maxed out, which honestly kind of blew my mind. I've been playing this game since launch and not one of my characters has all their companions at maximum influence (though my main is the closest simply from years of running crew skill missions). Some don't have a level fifty companion at all. Because from my point of view... it's just not needed?

There are a few use cases for maxing out companion influence, such as if you're heavily into crafting and want to maximise those crits, or if you're working on one of the game's extremely tough solo challenges. There's a reason my Sage, on whom I did KotFE on master mode back in the day, has exactly two level fifty companions: Lana and Senya (because I felt the need to max out their influence while working on tough chapter bosses).

However, in PvP and group content (where I spend a lot of my time), companions are irrelevant, and most other solo PvE content is so easy that your companion's exact influence level makes no noticeable difference (at least to me). Seriously, if I quest with a companion that's under level ten, I may notice that they "feel a bit weak" so to speak, but above twenty or so they are more than powerful enough for pretty much anything, meaning I don't really notice further increases in power level.

Maybe this is a remnant of my experience playing at launch, when companions were much weaker than they are now and gear affected their output, so it made sense to try and squeeze every little bit of extra performance out of them. Compared to that, they still feel OP to me in their current form regardless of influence level, but others will have a different perspective.

2. Running heroics

I used to love heroics when the game first came out and they were genuinely challenging open world group content. When they were turned into just another type of daily in Fallen Empire, I was not impressed. I'm not much of a daily runner at the best of times, and now there were even more of them, just with mobs that took longer to kill. I got pushback for this opinion even back then, so I knew that others felt differently.

Even so, I've been kind of flabbergasted by the number of people I see for whom running heroics is a regular part of their routine every day. I don't know whether it's just been particularly pronounced on Shae Vizla because people see them as a good way of making credits, but I could absolutely not play that way and it's kind of weirdly fascinating to me that so many players seem to actually enjoy this kind of grind.

3. World bosses

I've always quite liked world bosses, but my general experience has been that they're fun to do once for the achievement, and then maybe another couple of times for one-time missions. After that they just become kind of unrewarding to revisit repeatedly in my opinion (unless one is an objective for Galactic Seasons of the Feast of Prosperity of course). If you're already bothering to put a group together to do some sort of group content, why not do something that pays more than a few credits and a couple of Conquest commendations?

So I was quite surprised by the amount of world boss hunting I've seen going on and the sheer enthusiasm some people have for it. When Heroes of the Republic did Nightmare Pilgrim for example, people were pretty much counting down the minutes to the event for at least half an hour before it was actually meant to start. Now, I did learn that while you're levelling, killing world bosses gives pretty good XP, so some people use it as a form of power levelling - can't really argue with that. Likewise, if you're a new guild, world boss events are a way of being inclusive of characters at lower levels.

However, at max level I'm honestly still not entirely sure why people seem to do them as much as they do. My best theory is that players who mostly like to play by themselves see them as a low-pressure way of socialising, where you don't need a specific group composition, there's rarely more than one boss mechanic to worry about and you don't necessarily have to talk. Heck, with guild ship summons the whole thing can pretty much be reduced to "accept summon when it comes, whack whatever's in front of you until it's dead, leave". But maybe that's just what some people are looking for to feel connected to their guild and if they're too shy or time-constrained to invest time in activities like flashpoints or operations? I'd never really considered world bosses filling that specific niche before.

Have you ever come across an activity or way of playing the game that utterly surprised you with how popular it was with other players?

Romance Review: Base Game Guys for Gals

A couple of months ago (wow, this has been sitting in my drafts for a while!), Intisar wrote a blog post in defence of the romances with Doc and Corso, after they'd been panned pretty hard in one of Swtorista's livestreams. I had thoughts on this that I wanted to share in reply, but I figured that I might as well do so in a blog post of my own. It just took longer than expected to get it out...

I'll open by saying that I'm far from the most knowledgeable person when it comes to the in-game romances. Unlike many players, I'm not tempted to hit absolutely every flirt option I see, and in general the concept of romancing an NPC in a video game has less appeal to me nowadays than it might have had maybe fifteen years ago. I've also just been really inept at virtual romance in the past. My first post about companion romances on this blog talked about this at some length, including mention of my akward attempts at romance in Dragon Age. However, that doesn't mean that I don't have opinions on the stuff I have seen, and I thought I might as well compile them all in a single post.

This will only talk about romanceable companions by the way - flirting with random NPCs you encounter along the way can still be fun and memorable, but it just doesn't quite have the same weight in my opinion. I'll also limit myself to the base game companions, and more specifically to those available to female player characters, because almost all my characters are female. It's only more recently that I've dabbled a bit in also trying to level a couple of male characters, but none of them have made it far enough in the story to see their major romances. Something to explore over the next decade I guess. Anyway, here's what I've got to say now:

Republic

Trooper - Aric Jorgan

My main is a trooper and she's never kissed anyone. As I mentioned in the post linked two paragraphs ago, I wasn't instantly sold on Jorgan, and by the time he kind of started to grow on me and I might've considered a romance, I had missed my chance. So all she's done is flirt relentlessly with Jonas Balkar, and I could see something developing with Rass Ordo depending on how things go with him in the future... we'll see.

Anyway, on the subject of Aric: I obviously made alts later and have romanced him since then, though it's been a while since I played through those conversations, and I've got to admit they haven't been particularly memorable. In this post from 2016 I wrote that Jorgan kind of acts like a clichéd action hero in the sense that he likes to let the tough guy hang out most of the time, only confessing his feelings under certain amounts of pressure. It's hard to picture him in a proper committed relationship where he'd actually have to act like a normal person most of the time. And yeah, I don't really have much more to add to that. I kind of want to get my Vanguard through Fallen Empire at some point, to see whether the reunion with Aric in chapter eleven adds any more depth to the relationship.

Smuggler - Corso Riggs

Ah, the frequently maligned Corso. I'll come out right away and say that I like him. Honestly, even if you don't want to romance him, taking him along everywhere and watching him squirm by intentionally pushing all his buttons is hilarious. However, even as a romance he's got some things going for him. Like Intisar says, he's the kind of guy who'll always have your back no matter what's going on. He's kind of old-fashioned in his protectiveness and ideas about loyalty... and yes, this is where the problem with the sexism comes in.

I can't really blame anyone for being put off by this, but to me it ultimately wasn't that big a deal because unlike many sexist ideas in real life, Corso's sexism is utterly toothless. He'll always pipe up about how he thinks that a lady shouldn't do this or that... but ultimately he never tries to stop you, ignoring his objections doesn't diminish his affection for you, and if you push back on any of his silly complaints, he never has a good comeback. His ideas about ladies don't come from some deep conviction, but rather from a place of being a young bumpkin growing up on a backwater planet who just repeats what he's been told growing up, which ultimately just means that he's kind of naive, which I don't find that big of a deal personally. Plus he does show some growth over time.

Jedi Knight - Doc

Next we have Doc, the other guy Intisar went to bat for, and I agree with him, though for different reasons. I get why people might find him unappealing if they're looking for a character who'll be their one true love - but I always loved Doc for offering a more casual romance option. Doc flirts with every woman he meets from the moment you first encounter him, so you know exactly what kind of guy he is. And that can still be fun! There's something attractive about a man who finds something nice to say about absolutely every woman he meets, as long as you don't let yourself get dragged in too deep.

Ultimately, Doc's brave, easygoing and optimistic, and some days that's just the kind of pick-me-up you need after a hard day of saving the galaxy. I think he might also be the only companion who's actually happy if you turn down his marriage proposal. I just think he's a fantastic buddy with benefits.

Jedi Consular - Lieutenant Iresso

My first impressions of the consular romance were not very positive (again I refer you to the old blog post linked at the beginning), as I apparently flirted with both Tharan and Felix without meaning to and it all got very weird. I still don't really care for flirting with Tharan, but Lieutenant Iresso was really charming when I entered a relationship with him intentionally on an alt consular. He's probably got the most mature of all companion romances, with no major tension or drama, just two adults that really like each other and slide into being more than friends really easily.

Empire

Sith Warrior - Malavai Quinn

Quinn is another companion that is hated by many, though he didn't do badly on Swtorista's romance tier list. His betrayal in the main class story makes many people's dislike understandable I think, though if you can look past that, he's got another pretty unique experience to offer. I actually never forgave him on my own Sith warrior - she didn't hold a grudge on Iokath but also came to realise that she was kind of over him and that she preferred casually shacking up with Lieutenant Pierce.

Either way, in the earlier part of the class story, Quinn is pretty delightful to romance as he's basically the male equivalent of a blushing schoolgirl. He's super turned on by the Sith warrior's power and confidence but doesn't quite know how to deal with it at first, which makes for many a fun opportunity to make him squirm. It's an entertaining dynamic that you don't see this way round in media very often - more commonly it's the strong man whose appealing qualities make the woman blush.

Sith Inquisitor - Andronikos Revel

Andronikos is the classic "bad boy". He even gifts you a knife at one point! I remember the thing I enjoyed the most about romancing him was that he starts out very chill and views the relationship as pretty casual. I'll never forget how much I cracked up when I flirted with a guy on Alderaan and Andronikos' reaction was to approve and tell me that he was gonna go off to entertain himself with some girl from house staff in the meantime. He does get more possessive later on from what I remember, but it's still an interesting dynamic. He's easily the fiercest of the male love interests.

Imperial Agent - Vector Hyllus

Vector is the one romance that worked for me from the beginning and that I've never changed my mind about. I find it hard to make a female agent without romancing him. I just love how he's this calm, dedicated geek, and how the early flirtations with him are very low-key and playful. His love is deep but he doesn't want to make any drama about it. What's not to love?

Bounty Hunter - Torian Cadera

Torian is superficially attractive, but I've got to admit I never found his romance terribly compelling. I'll always remember the various conversations where he just says something to you in Mando'a with no subtitles and I was simply like: "Huh?" How am I supposed to judge whether that's romantic or not? His voice actor also uses a pretty flat affect most of the time, which to me comes across as Torian being "too cool to care", which I in turn don't care for myself.

On replaying his romace more recently I found it a bit more appealing, as I think it actually works better if your own bounty hunter isn't too weighed down by morals and approaches things with a colder "just in it for the thrill/money" kind of attitude. (My first hunter who romanced Torian was very light side and e.g. letting a potential target go for "moral" reasons didn't generally sit well with him.)

Overall Verdict

All in all, I've got to say I rank the base game romances for female characters pretty highly - even if they don't all appeal to me personally, I think it's really impressive what a wide range of love interests the writers managed to come up with for these: from shy to boisterous, from loyal to promiscuous, from goodie-two-shoes to bad boy, they offer quite a wide variety of experiences.

In fact, just writing this has made me want to do some romancing on alts just to see the ones again that I haven't played through in a while...