Flashpoints: Why Are We Here?

I've been having fun with the new season so far and will probably talk about that at some point, but the removal of cut scenes and group conversations from the group finder continues to weigh heavily on my mind. While my initial reaction was skewing towards slightly negative, I was telling myself that this is probably one of those cases where I'm just a weird outlier for liking something (group conversations in pug flashpoints) that many people don't like, and that I'll see the benefits of this change soon enough. I still remember when the Czerka flashpoints first came out back in 2013, I was actually somewhat disappointed at first that they were so streamlined without any interactive cut scenes, but I got over that pretty quickly.

One of the seasons objectives this week was to run either the Black Talon or the Esseles on veteran mode via the group finder, and with me doing Galactic Seasons on all servers I had plenty of opportunity to see the new change in action. For the most part, the experience was... fine. I'm not going to pretend that I would have had so much more fun if I'd gotten the full cut scene experience six times instead of the new fade to black thing. Primarily, it was all just kind of weird, with a lot of running back and forth with no discernible purpose when you don't actually have the story cut scenes to tell you what is happening.

There was one run that really annoyed me though. I got into an Esseles on a level 80 healer, and the other three members of the group were a level 80 dps, a level 10 and a level 14. I don't know if the two lowbies were new players or just alts, but either way they were subject to certain limitations at their low level, such as slower speed and lacking strong AoE abilities or defensives. Yet the level 80 was constantly mounting up and driving ahead, aggroing absolutely everything to pull it into a corner at the end, while the rest of us slowly jogged after them on foot. (I would've been able to keep up more but I felt it was my duty to protect the lowbies, who would've died several times if I hadn't healed them.)

The 80 repeatedly told them off for fighting things and said they should just mount up as well. I got the impression that at least one of them got a bit flustered by that and tried to overcompensate by mounting up and rushing ahead even of the level 80 at one point, just to then be told off because not everyone had made it up the elevator yet when we were put into combat as a result of that (which was technically correct but also must've been confusing in terms of mixed messages).

I got really annoyed with that level 80's attitude but didn't say anything because frankly I was quite busy just keeping up with their constant running myself, as well as just keeping everyone else alive. I simply did what I could to support the lowbies, such as when one of them veered off towards the bonus boss while the 80 was just trying to go straight to the end. I just kept hoping that neither of the little guys were genuinely new players because if I had been a newbie in that situation, I would have been so put off from running flashpoints ever again.

Now, to be clear, all of this technically has nothing to do with the cut scene change, because people could act like that while the group conversations were still a thing. However, at least the cut scenes would put the brakes on things a little bit. They were a reminder that this flashpoint wasn't designed to be rushed like that. And I feel that the removal of the cut scenes does the opposite now, vindicating people like that level 80 in the sense that yes, the devs agree with you that flashpoints are something to get over and done with as quickly as possible. I feel like my opinion was validated by a thread on the SWTOR subreddit posted this week about how this kind of behaviour seemed to be worse than ever since the patch. In a comment thread there, someone who commented that "games are meant to be fun" also received the reply: "It's a season objective. Literally not meant to be fun. Just a way to progress."

I just kept thinking to myself: What are we doing here? Why are we optimising content for people who don't like it? And I realised that I'm worried about SWTOR flashpoints going down the way of World of Warcraft dungeons.

WoW was my first MMO as well as my introduction to doing group content with random players, and I loved it. The first time I did the Deadmines? Amazing. I got yelled at for ninja-looting a chest because I didn't know any better, but I apologised, learned from it and we moved on. For about three or four years, dungeons were easily one of my favourite things to do in the game. However, somewhere along the line, things changed. Blizzard wanted players to run dungeons in greater numbers and more often, so they became increasingly incentivised for endless replay, and people's attitudes changed accordingly.

I still play WoW almost twenty years later, but I rarely do dungeons in its modern incarnation now. Every now and then some reward will lure me into queueing up for a pug dungeon again, just for me to instantly be reminded of why I no longer find them fun. Everything is just an insane rush to the end to pick up the reward and it's a casual or new player's absolute nightmare.

When I started playing SWTOR, I instantly fell in love with the game's flashpoints too. The Esseles and Black Talon are absolutely amazing experiences that have no real equivalent in other games when you play through them in a group for the first time and as intended (which is to say, actually paying attention to the story and listening to the group conversations). They are also clearly not intended to be re-run on a daily basis. Sure, they can be fun to re-play every now and then, to see what different conversation choices do and so on, but it's clearly not something you're supposed to do all the time. The game won't stop you from running it multiple times a day if you want to, but I think it's fair to say that you were effectively "doing it wrong" in that case and couldn't really complain if it wasn't super fun. The idea with SWTOR flashpoints was that they were still meant to be a bit of an adventure every time you entered one, something you can only really consume in moderation.

With this change... I don't really know anymore. I can even defend the removal of cut scenes as a temporary measure for the Galactic Season, mostly because it benefits me personally, but people like me, who do Galactic Seasons on every server, can hardly make up a significant chunk of the player base. Clearly the intent is to get more players into flashpoints that haven't done them before, but I'm not sure this whole exercise is going to show them anything appealing enough to want to come back. Endless running along corridors with no rhyme or reason about what is going on? What's appealing about that?

I also saw someone comment somewhere that Final Fantasy XIV used to have a similar problem with new players having a bad experience in the group finder due to issues with cut scene skipping, and Square Enix's solution to that was to make the cut scenes unskippable for everyone and increase the reward payout to make sure veterans were being suitably compensated for the fact that the run was taking longer to accommodate the newbies. Now, I don't play FFXIV myself, so I can't tell you how well that worked out for everyone, but I think it shows that "whelp, we've got to cater to the people who are in a hurry" is not an inevitability. SWTOR and FF have a lot in common in terms of their focus on story, so it's actually kind of odd to me now to see the SWTOR devs choose speed-running over story in this instance.

At this point, after thinking about it some more, I feel like instead of removing cut scenes all over the place they should've gone back and reconsidered what flashpoints are all about and why people are funnelled into them the way they are. Why do people ask to skip cut scenes? Because they're in a flashpoint they don't really want to be in. Why are they in this flashpoint? Because we give extra rewards for queueing for a random flashpoint. Why do we give rewards for that? So people who want to run specific flashpoints can get groups for them. But why would people run the Esseles in a group these days when there is a solo mode available anyway? Maybe the devs should've just taken it out of the group finder like they did Kuat and Colicoid War Games. Leaving it in but taking out everything that actually made it unique and insteresting just feels like extremely muddled game design to me. It just doesn't make sense in my head.

SWTOR Classic - an Attempt at a Realistic Assessment

The idea of a classic version of Star Wars: The Old Republic is something I talked about on Ivano's podcast last year, and ever since then I've been thinking about writing about it in more detail on the blog too. There are mainly two reasons for this: One is that I honestly thought I'd already written something about the subject ages ago but when I dug through my archives to check, all I found was a post called "Would You Want To Go Back?" from 2017, when SWTOR was only five years old - so not quite the same thing. The other reason is that I'm a big fan of World of Warcraft Classic - I was hugely excited by its initial announcement, followed its development with interest, and it eventually got me to resubscribe to World of Warcraft again in 2019, years after I'd written the game off as no longer interesting to me.

So, SWTOR Classic: Would it be a good idea? How could it work?

Let me start off by saying that in a world of unlimited time and resources, I think a classic version of SWTOR, presumably based on one of the later patches before the first expansion, would be a fun thing to explore. The thing I'd personally be the most curious about would be how hard the levelling content and heroics would turn out to be, since people often complain about how faceroll easy the game is these days and how things were sooo much harder back in the day.

As someone who was around back then, I have no doubt that this is at least partially true, but looking at WoW's example, a lot of those memories may also be coloured by the fact that we were all new to the game back then and didn't know how to play (yet). When WoW Classic came out, people who had played on private servers beforehand were all very shocked by how easy the "real" classic version of the game was, as private server owners had massively overtuned some of the content to align with their memories of how tough they remembered the game to be. This turned out to not match reality at all, and I wouldn't be surprised if this was true for SWTOR as well.

That said, I'm kind of afraid that's where the appeal would already end. With WoW Classic, a big draw for players was that Blizzard had decided to literally destroy the original version of the world and all its quests in the Cataclysm expansion, only six years after the game's release, meaning that content and whole zones that millions of people remembered fondly from the game's early years were no longer accessible. SWTOR never underwent anything like that - there are some side missions that were shortened or culled in 2015's Knights of the Fallen Empire expansion, but that's not even remotely close in scope. This game has always been about its fully voiced storylines; both devs and players recognised that as its greatest asset, and accordingly these things have been looked after and maintained faithfully over the years, which means that they can be played in the live game just as well in 2025 as you they could in 2011 (arguably better, because the game launched with its fair share of bugs even in the class stories, and there were a lot fewer quality of life features back then, especially in regards to travel).

"But the gameplay was so different," some of you will say, in response to which I would press X to doubt. Yes, we had old-school talent trees and no level scaling, but again, all things considered I would still argue that even the gameplay hasn't changed that dramatically over the last decade. I would again make the comparison to World of Warcraft, where I loaded up my max-level holy paladin in both Classic and retail (the modern version of the game). Ignoring things like spell ranks, passives, and the fact that spells may have retained the same name but work very differently twenty years later, I counted their abilities and while the Classic pally had 39, the retail character had 35. Only 15 of those were shared between the two game modes. The Classic character had 24 spells that no longer existed in retail, and the retail character had 20 new ones. For comparison, if I look at the screenshot I took of Shintar the trooper in SWTOR when she first hit the level cap in February 2012 and look at her action bars now, there's remarkably little difference. Yes, a few abilities were removed and a few new ones added with expansions, but comparatively, the Commando's core toolkit has changed remarkably little over the course of over a decade.

Okay, so we've established that there wouldn't be a lot of actually different content to revisit in a potential SWTOR Classic other than certain details, but let's consider effort vs. reward. Surely simply rolling the game back to an older version wouldn't take that much effort compared to something like building a whole new patch worth of new story? Ehhh... it's not that simple!

I'm no developer myself, but from what experience I do have dealing with these kinds of things, it's not that straightforward. While developers always take backups of things before changing the game in a major way, they won't necessarily keep absolutely everything forever. When the idea of WoW Classic was first being seriously considered, even Blizzard admitted that it wasn't as simple as pulling an old copy of the game out of a hat and that a fair bit of actual rebuilding would be required. When they eventually committed to the project, it actually required a fair bit of work, some of which they explained in this interesting dev blog from the time. And even with a dedicated team working on that project, it still took almost two years for WoW Classic to actually be released.

Aside from the potential difficulties involved in untangling SWTOR's old spaghetti code, there's also the matter of resources. We don't know the exact numbers, but the WoW dev team is supposedly made up of several hundred developers, with something like thirty dedicated to Classic in specific. Comparatively the SWTOR dev team has a number presumed to be a little larger than that of the WoW Classic team to take care of the entirety of SWTOR as it is. Even assuming that it could be done, would you really want them to stop work on the live game for two years to build a SWTOR Classic client? I know I wouldn't!

The final argument I can think of at this point is that some people might point at classic modes in other MMOs and say that Blizzard were kind of being perfectionists in building Classic, and that it's quite possible to cobble together something less perfect and accurate with less time and fewer resources, akin to Everquest's progression servers or the way Rift had its "prime" server. Neither of these aim(ed) to faithfully reproduce the experience of the game's early days, but count(ed) on evoking nostalgia by simply restricting the content people have access to as well as applying some other old-school limitations. The problem when applying this notion to SWTOR is that as per what I wrote earlier in this post, the game's old key content is still all there and relevant, and the only things that would make the idea of a classic server worthwhile at all are precisely the little details like gameplay differences, so this approach just seems like a dead end to me.

To summarise, I don't think we'll ever see see a SWTOR classic mode as there's comparatively little content and gameplay that would really be different to the current live game. This means that to make it an experience that's actually noticeably different and truly "classic", a lot of dev work would be required to faithfully rebuild old systems (assuming they have all the required backups to begin with), all for something that would probably be appreciated by only a very small minority of players (such as PvPers that want to relive their glory days with a particularly powerful build from 2012).

I understand the appeal of nostalgia, but I think Broadsword is better off having the devs continue to make the live game the best it can be.

Also, a tip for any readers who might miss the levelling content being harder: Try re-rolling on a server on which you don't have a legacy and be surprised by how much weaker you are without all those stat bonuses from your legacy built up over the course of a decade. And if your healer companion still makes you feel too OP, try challenging yourself by questing without your companion for a bit. You'll find that past the starter planets, it's not all quite as easy as you might think.

Mid-Season Doldrums

It feels a bit funny to talk about mid-season when Galactic Season 7 has only been live for one and a half months and we know that it's supposed to last another four and a half months. However, I am level 69 out of 100 on Darth Malgus, so even with the bonus achievements in mind, it does feel like I'm reasonably close to the halfway point, which feels like a good time to talk about how things have been going so far.

In a nutshell, while I thought that everything about GS7 sounded solid on paper, I haven't been enjoying myself as much as I would've hoped. But let's start with the good and then go down from there.

What's going well

I do love that the weekly objective for the DvL bosses means that there's one guaranteed large group objective every week, because this helps to fill my guild's social nights. You could argue that it's not ideal if people only show up to tick their weekly boxes and don't want to hang around to actually be social afterwards, but from my perspective as a guild officer, I'd rather have people who are perhaps not that into the game right now show up at least briefly once a week to say hi than not show up at all. It's good for guild cohesion, basically.

What's going so-so

My plans to impose stricter limits on my investment in seasons on other servers have worked out well so far in the sense that I've been able to stick to them without suddenly having the urge to binge. However, it also hasn't increased the fun as much as I had hoped. When you're only aiming for four easy weekly objectives each week, this basically means that I do a bounty contract on every server (because that's the easiest/fastest one by far), get 200k Conquest points somehow, and the rest is usually some kind of combination of mission-related objectives. However, depending on the nature of said objectives it can still be oddly time-consuming and a bit samey to be doing them on all servers.

I'm still aiming to do the 25k Conquest points per day for the daily objective on each server at the moment as well, but I'm starting to wonder whether I shouldn't be cutting down on that too. With the final removal of any kind of seasons-related currency there just doesn't seem as much of a point to it (when previously the extra currency you'd get from the daily objectives certainly added up) as the one hundred levels themselves can be achieved extremely easily without that. It's still worth logging in at least four times a week for the free season points from the login rewards, but beyond that, I think I need to reconsider this one as well.

What's not going so well

When I gave the notion of Bounty Contract Week being live all season a thumbs-up, this came with the assumption that everything related to that event would be available too, including Conquest objectives. The latter has not been the case however, and I can only guess that these are still strictly tied to the Death Mark Conquest event, which has not come around so far this season and I'm not sure it will (since Bounty Contract Week is usually its main draw). As someone who's quite motivated by Conquest, this has been disappointing to me.

More importantly however, I'm just not that into seasons at the moment. I'm kind of reminded of how I had to cut back on my investment in seasons a bit during GS4 (after burning myself out a little during GS3) and there might be a bit of that at work again this time, but it's also the first time that I find myself really straining against the way seasons try to keep you engaged at all times.

What I mean by that is that things like login rewards and daily objectives are not a big deal while you're having fun anyway - they just provide a bit of extra reward and direction. However, when your interests shift and you kind of want to do other things for a while, these same incentives can start to feel like a bit of a ball and chain, as they demand more attention than you perhaps really want to give the game at that particular moment. Worst case, by the time the chain finally snaps, you'll actively resent the way it held you back until then and you'll actually feel negatively about going back to the game. I vaguely recall having feelings like that in regards to ESO's extremely valuable login rewards and all the various incentives that Neverwinter used to give me to keep me logging in multiple times a day. I actually talked about this a bit when login rewards were first introduced to SWTOR back in 2020.

Now, those login rewards were actually pretty mild, ultimately, but seasons are definitely doing that thing where they really push you to keep coming back and playing in order not to miss out on the rewards. They've become such an integral part of the game that it's wild to think that they were only added three and a half years ago.

The reason I'm really straining against this at the moment is that I'm having a lot of fun with the latest WoW expansion right now. And to be clear, by itself, that's not a dig against SWTOR in any way. While I've been continuously subscribed to the game since 2011, I've always played other games on the side and I've always gone through periods of being more and less invested in it. When WoW Classic came out back in 2019 for example, I was all over that and not very interested in SWTOR at all for several months, especially as the latter was also suffering from a period of pre-expansion doldrums at the time. The point is: that was okay. The game didn't have any FOMO mechanics back then that made me feel like I'd be punished for not logging in and not playing for a few days.

Nowadays however, things are different. I may feel like spending more time in WoW, but SWTOR "demands" that I log in daily to earn my Conquest points and do my seasons objectives every week or else I miss out. And yes, I know it's not that strict and it's not as if you can't take a break and still earn all the rewards. And I don't actually have to do anything. However, the point is that the game is a lot more demanding of your time than it used to be and I'm just finding myself nostalgic for the old days when that wasn't the case. Seasons are just the most obvious reminder of that.

Getting KotFE Flashbacks in the New WoW Expansion

So World of Warcraft has a new expansion out, and Mr Commando and I have been playing it for the past few days. Why am I writing about that on my SWTOR blog? Because new WoW expansions have a weird way of reminding me of The Old Republic, that's why!

Two years ago I wrote a post about how I keep noticing familiar voices from SWTOR in other media, and I cited the then-new WoW expansion Dragonflight as an example, as it featured the female trooper as a dragon and Senya as a centaur. This new expansion is even worse though, because not only does it feature some familiar voices, but the residents of the new land you travel to call you "Outlander".

What I thought was the ultimate flashback moment arrived when I made it to the second zone and there's this cut scene of a pompous rock dwarf leader making an appearance, and he starts his speech by yelling "Outlanders!". That really took me back right there, as the voice also seemed familiar and I could've sworn that I had the exact same guy yell "Outlander!" at me before in one of the Knights expansions.

I couldn't quite place my finger on it though, and while a guildie had some suggestions as to who the voice actor might be, that still didn't answer my question of which character in KotFE or KotET he reminded me of. It wasn't until the next morning as I was about to get on a train when it suddenly came to me: the leader of the Heralds of Zildrog! I immediately pulled up a YouTube video of the encounter and yep, there was that familiar voice. I guess it makes sense that this would fire up recognition in my brain, considering that he voices what's effectively a conceited cult leader in both instances.

I still can't say with 100% certainty that it's the same guy since I can't find full voice credits for The War Within at this point, but assuming that it's indeed the same voice actor, the Exalted in KotFE is credited as Fred Tatasciore, who was also the new voice for Tanno Vik and apparently... Doctor Oggurobb? Huh!

Anyway, that moment was a particular stand-out but there have been others. Darin De Paul (Valkorion) is as prolific as ever and lends his voice to more than a few random rock dwarves. And just as I was starting to wonder whether they hadn't managed to include Jennifer Hale anywhere this time, she popped up as the voice of a random blacksmith. It's just something that tickles me. Have you encountered familiar voices elsewhere lately?

I will be writing more about the WoW expansion on my WoW blog by the way. Just in case you're interested (and/or didn't know that was a thing).

Never Knowing What Comes Next

When the news about the Broadsword move first broke and everyone was worried and confused, I did something I usually never do: I went and watched some SWTOR streamers. I just had this urge for some reassurance from the community, to be reminded that there were other people out there who cared and that we were all in this together. It worked surprisingly well!

Somehow I ended up on the channel of Kat, one of my competitors from the Galactic Championship, and we got onto the subject of SWTOR's content release cadence. I actually don't remember what exactly she said about the subject, but I do remember this one thought that stuck with me as a result of that chat: that in some ways, even with all the uncertainty of the Broadsword move, not much is changing for SWTOR players in the sense that we rarely know what's coming next anyway.

I mean, whatever you may think of World of Warcraft for example, it's undeniable that Blizzard has been churning out new content for it at an incredibly predictable rate for more than fifteen years now. You basically get a new expansion every two years, with each one being announced about a year in advance. This generates a nice hype cycle where an expansion only really has to keep people truly enthralled for about a year. Then you announce the next one, and as the old one winds down, people get engaged by the hype for the new one instead.

The content of each expansion is also very predictably structured, with each expansion consisting of three major patches that will contain a new raid and a new dungeon season each. There has been the occasional exception to this rule, such as with Warlords and Draenor and Shadowlands, but these then immediately generated complaints precisely because people have been conditioned to expect more by years of routine.

Then you look at a game like SWTOR, and while it's had a fair amount of content added over the years, it's always been all over the place in terms of direction and with limited communication. I think the most advance notice we ever got of new content was with Makeb, which was released in April 2013 after being announced at E3 in June the previous year. Ever since then, it's basically been lots of surprises with relatively little notice given beforehand. Even Knights of the Fallen Empire, which I think was the expansion with the most pre-launch hype around it, was only announced in June for an October launch. I guess the gap between the Legacy of the Sith announcement and its eventual launch was a bit longer than that, but only because it got delayed.

Basically, the SWTOR devs have generally kept their cards close to their chest and have refused to develop any kind of truly predictable content cadence. At one point it was all story and no group content, but then group content eventually came back. I also remember there was a time after KotET where they wanted to stick to just having ongoing content patches without calling anything an "expansion", but then they changed their minds about that again, presumably because people were actively clamouring for something they could call an expansion.

At the point of me writing this, patch 7.3 has been out for a bit less than two months, and we have no real idea what's coming next, other than Keith mentioning on the forums that 7.4 is being worked on and should arrive before the end of the year.

To be honest, I haven't always minded this. A static content cadence like WoW's often comes with a sense of FOMO and a feeling of planned obsolescence, which can be pretty off-putting. There is something liberating about not knowing that my gear will need upgrading again in exactly x months and about being genuinely surprised by every patch announcement.

On the other hand though, there's also something to be said for being reliable when you want people to pay you a subscription. With a game like WoW, you always know that if the current patch isn't to your taste, there's going to be a new one that'll introduce something different soon. If you're into an activity like raiding, you can count on being catered to at regular intervals, so even if you unsub due to feeling "done" with the current tier, chances are good you'll remember to check back in later.

For SWTOR, things have been a lot more muddled, and in a way I can't even fault people for not necessarily having faith that the next patch will interest them, or perhaps even having doubts whether it will ever come at all, considering how little we've been given to work with in the more recent past. I sometimes see people talk about "the next expansion" and all I keep thinking is: Why do you even think there'll be one? That's not meant to be me dooming about the Broadsword move either, I'm just thinking of the fact that the game's leadership wanted to discard the expansion concept once before, and since Legacy of the Sith hasn't exactly gone too rosy, I wouldn't be surprised if they decided to do so again.

I've been trying to figure out whether SWTOR is unique in the MMO space in terms of being this inconsistent and secretive about its content updates. Most of the larger western MMOs, such as Final Fantasy XIV and Elder Scrolls Online, seem to be on a pretty regular cadence with their patches and DLCs, with players having a good idea of what's coming next well in advance. But you don't even need to be one of the big hitters to be consistent: both the Everquests for example still churn out yearly expansions like clockwork. (I seem to remember reading that they did go through a phase where they wanted to give up on that concept but I don't think it lasted very long.)

The only major long-running MMO I'm aware of that I think can match SWTOR in terms of the sheer chaos of its vision over the years is probably Guild Wars 2, which has also changed direction in terms of how it wants to release content and just what that content should be multiple times over the years.

I don't really know where exactly I'm going with this post... I guess the bottom line is that my own personal hope in regards to the Broadsword move is that it will allow the game to develop a bit more consistency in terms of its releases and how they are communicated. Of course, that assumes that all the wild swings in the past had something to do with Bioware's leadership, which is something we don't really know.

If you're reading this and are someone who's spent significant amounts of time playing other MMOs (especially ones I haven't already mentioned here), I'd love to hear your own thoughts on how you feel those MMOs handle their expansion/DLC cadence and how that affects your relationship with those games.

Why the Broadsword Move Could Be Good for SWTOR and Bad for Bioware

As a follow-up to my previous post, I wanted to talk a bit more about how the move to Broadsword could be a good thing for SWTOR. To be clear, we haven't had any more official information, and I think that there are a lot of questions to which we won't really get reliable answers until the deal has actually gone through and we see what happens in practice. However, it seems that the more common public narrative has been primarily negative, focusing on the possibility of the game going into maintenance mode, and I've seen some people express genuine confusion about how SWTOR leaving Bioware could be anything but a bad thing.

Especially when reading reports on larger gaming sites, the general vibe behind the narrative seems to be the same old hostility towards SWTOR. Oh look, there's that failed WoW killer failing again. Now it's doing so badly that EA doesn't even want it taking up any of Bioware's precious time anymore, so they're sending it out to pasture.

The thing that few people seem to consider is: What has Bioware done lately, other than maintain SWTOR? The last time they released a new game was in early 2019, when they released Anthem, and we all know how that turned out. (Though fun fact: while researching this, I found out that the game is actually still playable. From the way that Anthem's failure was reported on, I thought the servers had been fully shut down back in 2021.) Since then there's been nothing, and while there's been much talk about new Dragon Age and Mass Effect games being in development, there isn't a release date for either yet. In the meantime, Respawn Entertainment (another EA studio) shipped both Jedi: Fallen Order and its sequel Jedi: Survivor...

Before Anthem, Bioware's last game was Mass Effect: Andromeda, which released to rather mixed reviews and sold below expectations. The last time they actually released a game that was an unequivocal success was Dragon Age: Inquisition back in 2014, almost a decade ago. Since then there've been multiple exposés about what a mess they've been making of the development of their more recent titles.

How can a triple-A studio keep going for so long with so little output? Something tells me it's not from the sales of Garrus body pillows. It couldn't have anything to do with the underappreciated live-service game they are also running and which provides a continuous revenue stream while the people supposedly making the big, important titles faff around indecisively, could it?

EA's official statement in response to the IGN article said that "BioWare will focus its resources on single-player games such as Dragon Age and Mass Effect" and most people seemed to read that as SWTOR having been an annoying distraction for the studio. There's another way to read it though, and that is as EA putting its foot down that if Bioware wants to be a single-player game studio, they need to actually make some single-player games, not just dither for years while relying on SWTOR to balance their books.

In that version, EA is actually doing SWTOR a favour of sorts by moving it to another studio that actually knows and cares about MMOs, whether that's intentional or not. And interestingly, former SWTOR devs have been popping up on Twitter to say pretty much that. Damion Schubert, who was lead designer for the game during its early years, asserts that it still makes good money, and that EA just isn't that interested in investing in it because their focus is on mega-titles like FIFA, but that it could absolutely thrive under a smaller studio. He also immediately stated that this was "bad news for Bioware".

Chris Schmidt, who worked on SWTOR for over a decade, tweeted a lengthy thread in which he also talks about how unappreciated SWTOR has been as a property on Bioware's end, despite of bringing in "mountains of income" that served to build up other franchises. So he sees the move to Broadsword as an opportunity for the SWTOR team (which was already quite removed from the rest of Bioware as it was) to move on to an environment where their work will be understood and appreciated, giving the game a chance to shine and presumably also reap the rewards for good work instead of simply having them rolled into the reporting for a bigger studio that isn't actually doing so well.

Now, all of this is coming from ex-devs - the current ones might feel differently for all we know, and even if they don't, a lot of things would have to go right in a very specific way for things to work out as Damion and Chris propose. So I'm not saying this is definitely or even likely to happen - but it is currently one of many possibilities, and it's worth noting. Especially as I do tend to lend a bit more weight to the words of actual devs who worked on the game than to those of random internet pundits who think that this must be the end for SWTOR just because they didn't like the last expansion.

Interestingly, after I finished the first draft of this post, Keith took to the forums a second time to follow-up on his previous post by saying: "Whoa whoa everyone... I was hoping me telling you about the upcoming releases would help you understand this is a new beginning, not the end." That wording indicates to me that he views this as a positive development as well (though I guess the proof will be in the pudding in terms of whether he's one of the ones to make the transition himself).

Naturally, as long-time fan of the game I prefer to be optimistic as well, but I hope that this post shows that this view doesn't come entirely out of thin air. We all have to wait to see what actually happens, and there's no benefit in spending the next few months dooming. In the meantime, we've got 7.3 to look forward to next week (which, incidentally, means that my prediction of a mid-June release was spot on) and I'm excited to play it (especially as I have two days off right after the day of the patch, which wasn't planned at all but should work out extra nicely).

SWTOR to Move from Bioware to Broadsword?!

Late last night I was presented with the stunning news that EA is planning to move development of Star Wars: The Old Republic from Bioware to Broadsword Online. At the time it still seemed like an unconfirmed rumour, but the IGN article has since been updated with an official statement from EA, and Keith Kanneg has acknowledged it on the SWTOR forums, though he also added that they're not in a position to answer any questions at the moment.

Needless to say, this was pretty shocking news to the community, though it's clear as mud what this change will actually mean for SWTOR's future.

On the one hand, Broadsword was formed specifically to maintain Ultima Online and Dark Age of Camelot, two MMOs that are more than twice SWTOR's age, and moving to a studio that is actually focused on the MMO business could be a good thing for SWTOR, as opposed to it always being the unloved step-child at Bioware. It's well known that the dev team was repeatedly kneecapped there when resources were pulled off the game to help work on one of Bioware's proprietary IPs instead (*COUGH*Anthem*COUGH*). Most of the current team is supposed to make the move, and Broadsword founder Rob Denton apparently worked on SWTOR in its early days.

On the other hand, saying that "more than half" of the core development team is meant to move to Broadsword is a nice way of saying that they're planning to cut the development team by almost half, and we don't really know how good Broadsword are at their job. Even if they are invested and passionate, UO and DAoC are very different games from SWTOR, with its distinctively Bioware-flavoured focus on voiced story content and companions.

The first thing I did when I heard this news was try to find out just how much development UO and DAoC are getting under Broadsword, and what I found was some very mixed messaging. For example this PC Gamer article from last year happily proclaims that "Ultima Online is one of the oldest PC games still being updated today, and it's a fantastic thing to behold even if you aren't an invested player yourself" and Bree from MassivelyOP even claimed in this comment section that UO is still getting expansions. However, googling for "Ultima Online expansions" surfaces nothing since 2015's "Time of Legends", and their patch notes from the last few years all seem to be about bug fixes and small updates to seasonal events (what I'd call maintenance mode). Things look even worse for DAoC, whose last official set of patch notes was posted in October 2021 (though I don't know whether that really means that nothing has been done or whether they've just been slack with updating their website).

Then again, apparently Broadsword is currently really small, with only about a dozen developers working on both games combined, while SWTOR is meant to retain 40+ - surely they'll still be able to do more than just maintenance mode with that? In fact, if you look at it like that, Broadsword quintupling its head count with SWTOR's acquisition would mean that the SWTOR team is effectively taking them over in terms of everyday realities, not the other way round, with the game basically becoming their new flagship title overnight, massively overshadowing the older games.

Ultimately we've got a lot of questions and no real answers. I doubt that even the SWTOR team can really tell what's going to happen right now, because the ones making the decisions at the top always think that they're doing the right thing, without necessarily having any clue about the realities on the ground. All that remains is for us to wait and see, and to wish the SWTOR team good luck with the transition.

Some links on the subject:

• Original IGN article
• MassivelyOP
• Swtorista
  
• XamXam's take at MMO Bits
• Intisar at This Week in Aurebesh
  
• Calphy at Galactic Antics 
  
• Damion Schubert (lead designer in SWTOR's early years) chiming in on Twitter
• Chris Schmidt (ex-SWTOR dev and design director) on Twitter
  
• Kid Lee (former SWTOR content creator)'s commentary on YouTube
• Bhagpuss at Inventory Full
• Redbeard at Parallel Context 
  
• Discussion on the SWTOR subreddit

Should SWTOR Innovate More?

Something I've long appreciated about SWTOR is that for most of its ten-year run so far, the devs have been sticking to what's known to work. They know that most of the players are mainly here for a story in which we get to make decisions that flesh out our characters and in which we can build relationships with NPCs, with some group PvE and PvP in a shared world on the side to keep us busy between story releases.

On the rare occasions when they've tried to deviate too much from that formula, such as during the "Knights of" expansions, I was not a happy bunny, but looking at the bigger picture, fortunately there hasn't been too much of that sort of thing, especially when you compare it with the (former?) market leader World of Warcraft and the way that's been trying to make every single expansion about some exciting and totally new feature for many years now.

That said, after several years of playing it very safe with new content additions, Bioware is finally looking to make some more daring changes with Legacy of the Sith, and I can't help but wonder whether they haven't already missed a trick or two.

Actually, the very first time that thought occurred to me was after the launch of Final Fantasy XIV's Shadowbringers expansion two years ago. I've never played FFXIV myself, but something that intrigued me about the reports of people who did was the addition of a new feature called the Trust system. From what I understand, this allows you to run certain story instances that are designed for group gameplay with NPCs instead of actual players, and the NPCs are all characters that you know from the story. When I first read about that, one of the first thoughts that came to my mind was something like: SWTOR really should have thought of that first!

This isn't to say that I feel SWTOR desperately needs a feature like that right now. I strongly disliked the introduction of the GSI helper droid for solo modes back in the day, but I've been quite content with the way Bioware has handled more recent flashpoint releases by simply scaling the content so that story/solo mode is easily doable with your one or two companions.

My point is more that companions have been one of SWTOR's distinguishing features since launch, and back in 2011 just having them was one of the game's genuine innovations. Sure, other games had combat pets or mercenary NPCs à la Everquest, but no other MMO had them be fully fleshed-out, permanent companions with their own stories. It was a trend that other games felt the need to catch up with by adding their own spin on combat companions over the years, but in that same time frame, SWTOR itself hasn't really done much with the feature at all. The last major changes came with KotFE, when companion abilities were homogenised, affection was replaced with influence, all companions became capable of playing any trinity role, and more. However, since then, all that's happened is that we got more new companions and... that's it.

And that really seems a shame considering SWTOR's focus. To get back to the idea of being able to bring multiple companions into combat at once like in FFXIV's Trusts, one of the original trooper missions has you storming an enemy ship with your whole squad going in guns blazing, and everyone I ever talked to about that mission said that it was really cool and that they'd love to see the game provide more of that, yet Bioware never did. Again, I'm not saying that being able to run group content with a group of companions is exactly what we need... but considering the large stable of them that we have nowadays and how core they are to SWTOR's gameplay, you'd really think that Bioware would have come up with something new for them to do or contribute to by now.

You could say something similar about crew skills. I mean, crafting in SWTOR was hardly revolutionary even at launch, but the idea that your companions were doing all the work for you was kind of novel. This was around the time when a number of MMOs came out with companion apps on the phone, and players opined that it would be neat if they could manage crew skill missions from their phones as well - but that never happened. And neither did anything else, other than that new crew skill levels were added over time and some details about crafting progression were tweaked. It used to be that different companions had bonuses to different crew skills (remember when Elara Dorne had a bonus to both bioanalysis and biochemistry for example), but that was also taken out.

Looking at the way Bioware is overhauling a lot of UI elements with Legacy of the Sith, and considering that the crew skill window is one of the oldest, almost completely untouched UI elements in the game, I wouldn't be surprised if doing something with that was somewhere on their to-do list as well. I'm both excited for and scared of the day that will happen, as I'm not a fan of the companion window they introduced in KotFE, and crew skills is the only place where I can currently see my companions sorted by influence, so I'd hate to lose that.

But at the same time, I can't help but think that Bioware could do so much more with the crew skill system. Having played a bit of retail WoW on the side over the past year, I finally had a chance to have a look at the frequently derided "mission table" there and its various permutations throughout the last few expansions, and while you can say that they're all essentially phone mini games, I actually found myself quite engrossed by at least a couple of them. I also couldn't help but think how much more interesting it was that my in-game "companions" for these systems had different strengths, weaknesses and abilities, as opposed to SWTOR's companions - for all the depth they have as characters - being all the same when it comes to crew skills aside from potentially differing influence levels.

Again, I'm not saying that SWTOR needs to copy WoW and that crew skills should become an auto battler - in fact, that sounds like a pretty terrible idea when I put it like that. But my point is that the idea of having companions do your crafting/work for you was something that was originally unique to SWTOR, yet nothing has been done with that over the last ten years, while other games actually ran with the idea and even experimented with various ways of making it more interesting.

So I'm not saying that I think the Bioware team needs to come up with drastically new ways to play the game - I think Galactic Starfighter showed well enough that e.g. adding a first-person space shooter to an old-school tab target MMO with an RP focus is not a recipe for success. However, just looking at the areas in which SWTOR excelled at launch and which have remained a focus throughout the years, it feels like things have become a bit stagnant, with no real attempts to improve or expand on many existing core systems since around Knights of the Fallen Empire.

I think the combat changes coming with Legacy of the Sith are their most daring step in that direction that we've seen in a long time. So I do hope that these work out well, and that in the years to come we can perhaps see a similar amount of thought be put into other parts of the game that could do with a bit of freshening up, such as companions and crew skills.

Grumbling About Login Rewards

Yesterday the PTS server for 6.2 went up (gosh, it's kind of painful to think that Onslaught has been out for over a year and we're still on 6.1...) and with it a bunch of posts on the PTS forum asking players for feedback on specific new features. One of those features were... "daily login rewards".

Based on the reactions I've seen, most people seem to be 100% on board with getting free stuff just for logging in, but my own gut reaction was more akin to Michael Scott's upon realising that Toby is back in The Office. I am not a fan of daily login rewards at all, and here is why.

Basically, having experienced these kinds of systems in different MMOs, my reaction to them can be summed up like this:

If I'm super casual about the game, just sort of exploring it with little commitment, I don't really care about them because I'm not invested enough to really want to maximise my personal character gains. Depending on the nature of the rewards, they can make for a nice surprise every so often (or annoying inventory clutter the rest of the time), but they don't really make me want to log in more often.

If I'm super hardcore about the game, I log in every day anyway because I actually want to play, and the rewards are likely to not be of great use to me, so once again I don't really care.

If I'm somewhere in the middle however, which is to say somewhat invested in the game but not necessarily driven to log in every single day, log-in rewards are a road to resentment and burnout, as I'll feel compelled to collect them every day to maximise my gains, but at the same time don't really feel like playing every day, making the whole thing feel like a chore. Worst case I end up spending weeks or even months doing nothing but logging in to collect my freebies, until I get so sick and tired of the whole thing that I don't really want to play anymore at all.

Basically, the best-case scenario is that I'm neutral towards the rewards and don't care.

One of the things I've long loved about SWTOR is that in this day of more and more MMOs feeling the need to add "retention mechanics" like this, it has remained surprisingly chill. Yes, there are daily and weekly quests, but there is little compulsion to actually do anything every single day. The game just wants you to have fun on your own terms, and if that involves not logging in for a few days that's okay too. I really don't want it to turn into the kind of game that values engagement metrics over whether players are actually enjoying the game and having fun.

Now, this post was actually going to be a whole lot rantier (yes, really), but then a dev posted an update on the forum thread about the login rewards to explain more about how the system is supposed to work, and it seems they want to avoid the sort of "must log in every day" compulsion that other games are going for.

Assuming I'm understanding everything he said correctly, there won't be any exclusive, time-limited rewards, but instead it's going to be more of an ongoing loyalty system that rotates through a total of 112 generic rewards or so every day you log in, and once you reach the end, the cycle starts all over again. So while logging in more often will give you more stuff faster, you're not actually missing anything if you skip a few days for whatever reason, merely delaying it.

I'll admit that's... probably the least annoying implementation of this kind of system they could have gone for, so thanks for that. I just still kinda wish it wasn't going to be a thing at all.

From Gamble to Grind

Looking back at this blog's archives, I seem to write about the Nar Shaddaa Nightlife event about once every three years. It's not one of my favourites, as people's weird flexing about who can manage to lose the most credits in the shortest amount of time always weirds me out, and I just don't consider watching my character stand at a console clicking things to be particularly riveting gameplay.

Still, it's been three years now since Bioware introduced casino chips as world drops to encourage greater participation, and ever since then I've at least tried to make use of the free chips the game keeps giving me - I say tried because I remember two years ago I meant to use them all up just before the event ended, but got the time wrong so that I actually showed up too late. Last year I think something similar happened, except then it occurred when I finally wanted to see the prize vendors about what to buy with my certificates. The fact that I can barely even remember what happened kind of speaks for itself really.

This year though, Bioware added a new, third slot machine called the Emperor's Grace, and a lot of the chips that drop from content were the type to use on this new machine. It was bugged initially, but the last patch fixed it, so I thought I'd stop by quickly to use up the seven or eight chips I'd earned through drops so far. I figured it was going to be a quick affair, and it being the newest and shiniest machine, the prizes had to be good, right? That's one of the big appeals of gambling: the chance to win big with minimal effort.

I therefore felt a mix of delight and horror when I realised that the most common prize for a win at the Emperor's Grace machine actually consists of fifty tokens a pop for the Kingpin's Bounty machines - which meant that within minutes I had racked up several hundred of the things.

I briefly felt excited by the sheer monetary value of my winnings - at the vendor, one Kingpin's Bounty chip costs 75,000 credits, meaning that I had won more than 50 million credits worth of casino chips. Unfortunately you can't sell them back to the vendor at that price though.

Now, even without knowing the exact drop rates of the prizes coming from the Kingpin's Bounty machines, it's pretty obvious that having several hundreds of complementary tokens to spend on them is bound to result in a nice payout. Even if you don't win one of the rare "special" prizes, the more common certificates that can be traded for all kinds of decorations and cosmetics are pretty damn useful as well.

However, considering that each spin's most common outcome is to simply give you your chip back, getting rid of literally hundreds of the things takes absolute ages, and it was with this realisation that the feeling of dread set in.

I mean, this isn't even gambling anymore. There's zero financial investment required from my side, not even in virtual currency, because the game's just given me hundreds of tokens for free. There's no question about whether I'll even get anything from playing either - with so many chips, I'm guaranteed to receive a good number of prizes. However, we're not talking about a quick game of chance for a potentially big win anymore - instead I'd have to spend literal hours at the slots just clicking away to be able to claim my rewards. It's basically the worst sort of grind.

And while I don't mind some grinds, I'm not sure I'll be able to make myself go through with this one. Maybe if I an opportunity arises to watch something sufficiently engaging on my second monitor for long enough, but I don't know. I kind of find myself thinking: "If you just want to give me free stuff, Bioware, why can't you just give me the stuff? Why are you asking me to stupidly click on slot machines for hours first?"

It's a silly question of course, but in a way it was still enlightening that I found my thoughts even going down that road. I've noticed that in many modern MMOs, people complain a lot about randomness in all aspects of their games. And I've often considered that a bit weird, remembering my early days in WoW and recalling my delight at many random drops, and just generally not minding the randomness too much most of the time.

However, the thing back then was that I wasn't expecting to get every possible drop. The odds of many items dropping compared to how often you would realistically run the content were such that you knew that you were never going to get everything you'd potentially like, and everything you did get was therefore perceived as a treat.

The thing is, with content having become more and more accessible and infinitely repeatable to keep people busy, you're much more likely to hit a sort of "saturation point" where you've got everything you want/need and once you know that the game is designed to give you everything over time, you're essentially just grinding out the time to that saturation point. I guess at that point it's not that big of a jump to ask why you can't just cut to the chase, especially if the activities on offer don't provide a lot of inherent enjoyment.

I'm not really sure where I'm going with this. Just... damn slot machines.

Funk

Recently a commenter expressed worry about the game's (and presumably my own) well-being, based on my recent (relative) silence on the blog. I'll admit it: I'm in a bit of a funk.

It may not be obvious, but the regularity with which I've been putting out posts on here has been a fragile thing for a while, as I've had less and less time to both play and write over the years, first going from working part time to full time, and then adding a long commute to my job every morning. There've been many times when my posting frequency wavered, such as when I was ill or went on holiday for a while, but I always managed to get back on track.

This past month however, I've been hit by what you could call a perfect storm:

First off, I'm in one of those phases where I'm not super excited about playing SWTOR. This isn't really unusual by itself as I always have my ups and downs with the game and times when I want to play more or less. It does also tend to reduce my desire to write about it, but usually I've been able to compensate.

However, this time about a month ago also saw the launch of WoW Classic, a game that I was very much looking forward to and which to be honest has me more excited than anything MMO-related has managed since 2011 (when SWTOR launched). So not only have I been feeling a bit down on SWTOR, all my free time has gone into thinking about, playing, and writing about another game with the sort of enthusiasm I only get to experience about once a decade. (If you are at all interested, those posts have gone onto my old WoW blog.)

Part of me has been feeling a little guilty about letting my routine on here slide because of this, but ultimately it's all meant to be fun for me, so I should be able to do what I feel like, damn it! Mind you though, even as I say this, that nagging little voice at the back of my head has been insistent enough that I felt the need to at least sort of explain myself in this post.

So where am I with SWTOR at the moment? I don't really see myself going anywhere. I'm still excited about the expansion and love all my characters. However, I do feel like I'm in a bit of a holding pattern until Onslaught's launch.

Four months ago I was excited about getting ready for the expansion, but while I achieved some of the goals I set myself surprisingly quickly, others haven't really gone anywhere. I was really hoping to kill Dread Master Brontes on master mode for example, but that doesn't look like it's going to happen now (I might go into more detail about that in a separate post), so now the main things I keep thinking about is that I should be spending all those character-bound currencies before they go away, but there isn't really anything I want to buy with them so I'm not particularly enthused about that either.

Not even my beloved guild of nearly eight years has been motivating me to log in lately, for a variety of reasons. No big drama, just the sort of thing that makes you think: "I'd rather not deal with that right now if I don't have to".

I'm still logging in and doing things on a smaller scale though. For example I'm still selling off small amounts of old crafting mats from my legacy cargo hold day after day to increase my credit count, though I'm not sure for what purpose exactly as I already have more money than I know what to do with. This week the Pirate Incursion event also made another unexpectedly quick return, which means that I'm working on more pacifist adventures, yay!

However, that level of engagement isn't really enough to inspire a blog post every three to five days right now, which used to be my target. I'll have to decide on a new routine that works a bit better for where I am right now - maybe posting once a week? (I'm not one of those people for whom it works well to just write whenever they feel like it.) We'll see.

Anyway, none of this is indicative of any problems with the game from my point of view. Even though I discovered that I wasn't born to be a PTS tester, I do try to keep an eye on the dev tracker, where Eric and Dan keep posting really insightful updates about what's happening on there and respond to people's feedback. I also finally went back and read some of the more recent news articles posted on the official website, such as about the making of Onderon and Mek-Sha or "Behind The Scenes Of World Design", which were all really interesting and made me all the more interested in the expansion.

How about you all tell me what's been keeping you engaged and interested as of late?

Lessons Learned from ESO

When I decided to patch up ESO on new year's eve for a laugh, I didn't expect that to turn into six months of subscription time for Zenimax, but that's what happened. That said, I did just allow my subscription to run out again, as my play time decreased significantly over the past two months and I'd really rather focus on other games as my "secondaries" over the summer. (Hellooo, WoW Classic!)

While I'm very much someone who focuses on a single game and is happy to call it home, I do think that it's good to dip your toes into the wider MMO waters at least every now and then, as it can expand your horizons in terms of what's possible but also helps to crystallise just what it is that you love about your "home" MMO.

Here are the main things I learned while playing ESO:

I really like an "explorable" world

Until my husband decided to get in on the game too and "forced" me to make some actual progress with my questing, I was extremely slow to get anything done in ESO as I found it very hard to focus on any given task. I would leave town to get back to where I last stopped questing and immediately be distracted by a gathering node, a fishing pool or a random chest, and before you knew it I had wandered off into a completely different direction. And I loved it!

Some of my favourite ESO memories simply have me thinking back to those days of wandering around aimlessly and marvelling at the beautiful trees in Auridon. Without wanting to change the game into something it isn't, this does make me wish that SWTOR rewarded random exploration like that a bit more too.

Combat matters more to me than I expected

I love old-fashioned hotbar combat and am not a fan of action combat at all, but I don't completely hate the latter, as I've spent years playing Neverwinter and having a pretty good time. However, until ESO I'd never really thought about why that is, or what makes the difference between tolerable and tedious for me when it comes to playing with a limited action set.

I'm still not entirely sure to be honest, but I do know that while I don't completely hate ESO's combat either, I noticed that it tended to get tiresome pretty quickly for me. The best way I could think of describing it is that it feels like all the abilities were conceived to be part of a classic hotbar system and were then simply mashed into an action combat framework without much adjustment.

What I mean by that is that in Neverwinter, as an example of action combat that I like, all the abilities on my limited action bar feel very impactful, usually serve very different purposes, and most of them have cooldowns. It feels good to execute them in the right order, watch the flashy animations, and top things off with a powerful ultimate.

In ESO, a lot of abilities actually feel pretty samey, and except for your ultimate nothing has a cooldown, with your only constraint being resources. In a game with classic hotbar combat, I'd be quite happy to have several abilities that do similar things, because I can have them all on my bar and choose the one that is best for any given situation, plus there are often cooldowns to juggle. In ESO you just find one thing that does a lot of damage and then spam it.

I tried to get a bit of variation in my rotation by going for several damage over time abilities, but the default UI makes it a pain to track them, and ever since the Elsweyr patch the game has stopped showing them to me completely (and yes, before anyone asks, the respective UI option is turned on - buffs and debuffs just flash up for half a second when I cast them and then disappear). It's all just not very fun. And it's surprising how off-putting that can be when seeing the next bit of the story involves slogging your way through a bunch of mobs to the other end of a cave for example.

Just give me classes, I hate skill systems

Again, this is something I'd long felt on a gut level. I never saw the appeal in Rift's much praised soul system for example. But playing ESO really drove the point home. People say that the freedom of picking and choosing your own skills is fun, but to me it's like someone handing me a bunch of cardboard and some markers to give me the "freedom" to build my own board game. That is not the fun part, and since I'm not an expert on game design, the result is unlikely to be particularly balanced or enjoyable to play.

That said, I also don't like looking up guides on how to build my character to be viable, so it's simply a lose-lose proposition from my point of view. I originally hoped that it wasn't going to be an issue in levelling/easier content, but you do start to notice a bad build dragging you down after a while when you watch the speed with which other people around you kill things.

Finally, while ESO technically has classes, they are not very distinct as the vast majority of skills are cross-class, most notably all the weapon skills. So you can be a Sorcerer wielding a staff, or a Templar wielding a staff, or a Warden wielding a staff... you get the idea. Apart from a few signature abilities such as certain pet summons, I generally can't even tell what class the characters around me are because they all appear so samey.

Character identity is also really important to me

I now have two level 50 characters in ESO, a Templar and a Sorcerer. Even though I intentionally made different choices while levelling them, the problem described above has made it difficult for me to feel like they have distinct identities, and in fact I largely lost the enthusiasm to create a third character because it feels pointless making more alts if the experience isn't going to lead to anything that I'm not already getting from my first two characters.

This was made worse by the questing. I've mentioned before that ESO's questing is very much plot-, not character-driven, which means there is some interesting stuff going on, but you're just a blank slate being steered around by more powerful personalities and doing what you're told to advance the plot. (Kind of similar to the way KotFE & KotET feel at times actually...) Moving from one quest giver to the next, you'll be recognised as a hero one moment and get mistaken for a servant the next, depending on what's convenient for the story being told.

Unfortunately that even extends to the factions. I originally thought that the game would surely foster a lot of faction pride, what with the three-way PvP zone being a big focus, but if that's the case then it's clearly limited to that game mode.

The PvE content actually starts out really strong, with each faction having its own dedicated levelling path that introduces you to its different cultures, which is very interesting and did help me form an attachment to my faction at the beginning... but then you're given a quest to do the story of the other two factions too, because why let good content go to waste reasons, and the DLC content doesn't give a damn about any previous loyalties, happily sending you to slaughter soldiers of your own faction without as much as acknowledging that this might not be something a character of your background might want to do.

I actually found that worse than if there had never been any concern for factions at all. If I'm just some random adventurer, who cares, I can be a sellsword for hire by anyone. But to build me up as the Saviour of the Dominion for example, just to then send me off to kill soldiers of that same Dominion with abandon raised my hackles.

Anyway, all that might sound very critical of ESO, and it does explain how the game fell short of my expectations in several ways. However, I wouldn't have paid for a subscription for six months if I hadn't had any fun, and I'm still planning to go back to see more of the story eventually.

The whole experience really drove home for me though that I'm a very picky customer when it comes to MMORPGs, to the point that even a well-made game that does a lot of things right can fail to be "sticky" for me if it doesn't manage to hit certain notes that are important to me on a personal level.

Good Quest, Bad Quest

I'm still playing Elder Scrolls Online on the side, though my enthusiasm for it has been waning as of late, and I think that I'll want to give it an extended break soon in order to come back to it at a later date. I'm at the point where I've completed about two thirds of the game's base content (personal story, Aldmeri Dominion and Daggerfall Covenant), so there is lots still to discover if I fancy it.

Since, like SWTOR, ESO has a reputation for offering a high-quality questing experience, I've found myself making a lot of direct comparisons between the two, as well as thinking about what makes for a good quest in general.

I think that MMO players are not the most discerning customers when it comes to quests. We'll say that we consider them good or boring, but rarely go into any detail about what exactly makes them so. I've been trying to split out different aspects of the quest experience to better come to grips with what I like or don't like about the way each game I've played handles them.

Presentation

I think this is something that matters a lot to people these days but is rarely openly stated as such. The old-school way of simply having a box of text tell you what's going on has very much fallen out of favour, and these days players expect to at the very least hear some voice-overs and see the occasional cut scene, but if you can make it even flashier then that's all the better. This is one area where SWTOR really shines, what with the little interactive cut scenes at the beginning and end of most missions, and to be honest I think that those are responsible for a good chunk of the praise that the game's questing has received.

Writing

A lot of different things can potentially fall under this umbrella, but since I want to give most of them their own sections, I'll only really consider actual skill with words here. And in that regard... most MMOs are honestly okay but not outstanding. SWTOR has some good lines here and there, but let's not pretend that most of it is particularly deep. The tone mostly stays true to the genre, which is fairly straightforward and sometimes clichéd. Secret World is the only MMO I've played that I can think of that stood out a bit from the rest here, even if the delivery was sometimes weird due to the endless monologuing characters liked to engage in.

Plot

Now this varies a lot depending on quest type. Your average side quest simply doesn't have much to say beyond "go over there and do a thing". Longer chains can try to weave in twists and surprises, like you find in some of SWTOR's class stories.

Something I found interesting in ESO is that it tries very hard to infuse even the shortest side quest with a slightly longer plot, presumably to keep things more engaging. In some ways I find this admirable, but it becomes a bit of a trope of its own after a while, to the point where you expect things to never be what they seem to be at first. The biggest surprise I remember feeling while doing the quests I've completed so far was when our characters were tasked with rescuing a certain elf lady and it turned out that this was indeed all we had to do. We kept joking about how a member of the search party was surely a traitor, or maybe she was secretly a werewolf or what have you - because that's how these things always go - but no, we just saved her and that was that. Who'd have thought it.

Characters

This is another thing that I'd like to single out because I think it's possible to have a good plot and solid writing but boring characters and vice versa (even if they are often connected). Are the people that give you quests and that you interact with during your adventures unique and memorable individuals? I'm not expecting to always remember their names, but something about them should make them memorable as characters.

I think most MMO non-player characters are pretty forgettable, but I think this is at least in part a numbers problem. If you stick to fewer characters and have them make repeat appearances, they'll be more memorable by default, as opposed to when someone new is introduced to relay every single mission. Again, I think this is something that SWTOR does pretty well, and ESO to some extent, though the latter stumbles a bit in my eyes due to the sheer amount of characters/quests it likes to throw at you in every zone (at least in the base game, not sure if it changes later). This is exacerbated by the same small handful of voice actors voicing a mind-boggling number of different NPCs, which causes a lot of them to meld into one giant mishmash after a while. (Also, as a SWTOR player it hasn't helped that they seem to have used a lot of the same voice actors as SWTOR. So every other quest I'd go: "Hey, it's the female Jedi knight / Kaliyo / Baron Deathmark / Theron Shan again!") In SWTOR this sort of repetition is mainly a problem when side quest givers speak Huttese and regurgitate the same handful of voice lines over and over.

Gameplay

Let's not forget that quests are ultimately always about doing something, so it matters what you are being asked to do. There's the classic "kill ten rats" here, as well as "collect five bear asses". Sometimes you also get to click on stuff on the ground or walls, or are simply asked to walk from A to B and talk to someone.

This is something that I've often seen criticised about SWTOR - that people feel drawn in by the high production values used in the presentation of each quest, and then they look at their log and it's basically just another instruction to kill ten rats. I guess I can sort of understand that, but at the same time I don't really mind. As far as basic gameplay is concerned, I'm happy to stick to what works and what everyone's familiar with. When games decide to do something completely different here, such as Secret World with its investigation missions, the result is usually something that a minority will absolutely love but that to most people feels like a bit of a chore since it's not what they signed up for. (I previously wrote a similar post talking about this problem in regards to SWTOR's - much simpler - puzzle quests.)

What was interesting about ESO here is that one of the lead designers clearly hated "kill ten rats" type quests with a passion, so you're never ever asked to kill x mobs. Collect quests have also been so rare that I think I can count the ones I was given on the fingers of one hand. Instead, the vast majority of quests in ESO ask you to either kill a named mob or to talk to someone. It's an interesting design choice in my eyes, though it does get a bit weird at times how you're constantly sent into areas that are crawling with zombies/ghosts/bandits or whatever but everyone's always extremely blasé about this (because if they acknowledged the mobs as a threat, they'd probably realistically ask you to take some out on the way, but the game's core design doc clearly forbids this kind of thing).

World Building

Finally, something that you can't really judge based on an individual quest but which I still considered relevant on the subject matter: whether the things featured in different missions come together to paint a picture of the virtual world as a coherent whole. This is something I actually found quite amazing about SWTOR's launch content because of how all the storylines on both Republic and Empire side sort of wove together to form a tapestry of the state of the galaxy. (Except Quesh. Quesh makes no sense.)

ESO and Secret World do a good job at this too, and to some extent Vanilla WoW. (People like to say that Vanilla WoW's questing was bad, but if you looked at the big picture assembled by the quests I always thought it was quite interesting.)

Unfortunately, the trend towards linear personal stories is pretty much in direct opposition to this. So KotFE and KotET had some really interesting characters for example, but they left you mostly in the dark about what's been going on in the galaxy at large. Likewise ESO's "personal story" has very little connection to the vibrant world portrayed in the rest of the game, aside from featuring the same common foe.

In Conclusion

I think for overall quest presentation, SWTOR is still best in class on the market. More and more games also include things like high-quality cut scenes, but not to the same extent or as consistently. I also really love how vibrant and interesting the galaxy far, far away is built up to be during the time period of the base game, and the many interesting and memorable characters featured in the stories. The quality of the plot varies, and the gameplay is run-off-the-mill, but I'm fine with that because it's a style I enjoy.