Turn Turn Turn

Happy May the 4th! Personally I don’t need an excuse to celebrate Star Wars, but it’s always nice to get a tiny Astromech droid in the mail and check out the latest news from a galaxy far, far away. If you are actually reading this on the 4th, then you will be able to check out a special livestream event featuring a bunch of SWTOR‘s official content creators. We will be venturing into the Dread Fortress operation on its most deadly difficulty, Nightmare! You’ll be able to tune to the show on several different twitch channels, and if you have a moment, I hope you’ll stop by and say “Hello there!” There will be giveaways, mayhem and hopefully some defeated bosses!

SWTOR is primarily known for its story, but it also features a wide variety of operations for raiders of all skill levels. SWTOR‘s story mode ops are extremely accessible for brand new and inexperienced players; the intermediate Hard Modes are a fun challenge for veterans on a casual schedule; and at the Nightmare level, seasoned players looking to test their skills can face some of the greatest challenges and earn some of the rarest rewards the game has to offer.

Over the years, SWTOR has done an excellent job telling stories through group content, and I highly recommend teaming up with friends and guild-mates to check them out. Tonight’s stream will be an excellent showcase for one of SWTOR‘s most beloved operations and will feature some of the best players in the game. And I’ll be there too. Hopefully facing the right direction some of the time!

To Everything There Is A Season

Game update 6.3 “Dark Descent” launched with two new additions to Star Wars: The Old Republic both of which bear discussing: Galactic Seasons and the Secrets of the Enclave flashpoint, but I think it’s worth splitting the topics up over two posts.

Let’s start with Galactic Seasons, SWTOR’s take on the battlepass. Seasons is a system that directs players to do activities in the game and rewards them with a variety of cosmetics: a new companion, mounts, weapons, armor and, if they stick with it long enough, a new Stronghold to decorate.

Galactic Seasons is my first experience with a battlepass system, so I don’t really have any prior frame of reference. But my first impression after a week is that it’s fine. Is it a cash grab by EA, or a way for Bioware to give players more value for their subscription? Probably a bit of both.

I don’t have any particular issues with the Cartel Market. However, for a while now the gear awarded from flashpoints, operations and reputation tracks has not competed aesthetically with what we can buy from the Cartel Market. This is surely not an accident. However, an important part of the MMO experience is finding and earning rewards through gameplay, and I think SWTOR may have swung too far towards focusing those rewards on the Cartel Market and away from what players, especially casual players, can earn in the game.

Galactic Seasons does move this balance back towards gameplay a bit. There are a fair amount of unique rewards to be found by players willing to participate in Seasons. For example, the mount subscribers pick up from the very first level of progress through the Season is quite cool. Indeed some of the best rewards are front-loaded, and players can earn some fun stuff without going too deep into the system.

If there is anything that Galactic Seasons reminds me of in SWTOR’s history, it’s the Dark vs. Light event from 2016. Like Seasons, the Dark vs. Light event was all about getting players to do stuff in the game and passing out rewards to those who participate.

I would encourage folks to treat Seasons the same way. It’s a marathon, not a sprint. You don’t need to complete it in one day or one week or even one month. Look at the rewards and decide which ones you want, and pace yourself to get them. Take your time, and do what you want to do. It’s also fair that you may not be interested in all the objectives you get during a given day or week. If you don’t like PVP or grinding mobs; that’s cool. Take the day off, take the week off. We have some ability to change the objectives we really don’t want, but I don’t mind that Galactic Seasons encourages us to venture outside our comfort zone a bit. Last week, I found an excuse to revisit Galactic Starfighter after years away. I was terrible, no doubt, but I can’t deny doing a fist pump when I scored a kill during the match.

Starting next month, Seasons will have a mechanism allowing players to pay credits to catch up their progress if they’ve fallen behind. It will almost certainly not be cheap, but if you’ve got the credits, stuff like this is what they’re here for.

Are there problems with Galactic Seasons? Absolutely. Players can skip the grind completely simply by paying Cartel Coins. I know battlepasses in other games tend to have pay-to-skip options, but I think it’s a little hinky that SWTOR has one on top of the monthly subscription. However, it’s not my place to tell anyone how to spend their money, and I can’t fault players who don’t have the time to invest in the system or the credits to burn, but still want to check out some of the unique prizes.

As I see it, there are two key questions to ask about Galactic Seasons: First, is it mandatory? No. Not at all. To be brutally honest, I think many of the rewards are neat, but they’re not that neat. A character based on that alien with twenty seconds of screen time in one movie is not exactly an iconic addition to our existing roster of companions.

I might be wrong, but that’s probably fine. I think Bioware might be better off aiming for “neat” rather than “OMG I MUST HAVE THAT.” Could the rewards be neater? Yeah, I think so. The first of the two armor sets is dull, and I’m not sure we needed three different colored versions of the same creature mount. As much as I enjoy decorating, I wish the signature reward of the season packed a bit more punch than the fleet strongholds. Overall, I do believe some of the rewards are genuinely neat, but I don’t think anyone ought to feel disappointed if they miss out on them.

The second and most important question to ask of Galactic Seasons is this: Is it content? To me the answer is no. It’s something to do between actual content releases. That’s all. Every SWTOR player knows that it can be a long wait between story updates, and Galactic Seasons is a framework doling out tasks and rewards to players. Between major updates, active players traditionally self-direct themselves by choosing to play class or expansion stories, competing in PVP, clearing operations, completing achievements, etc. Galactic Seasons seems to me to be another option for players.

However, SWTOR already has two other systems for rewarding players for playing the game: Renown and Conquest, and I think Seasons doesn’t quite mesh well with them. Solo players will likely find that most objectives align with existing Conquest goals, but players focused on group activities, especially PVP and progression operations, will have to go further out of their way to complete most Galactic Seasons objectives.

I wish players had a little more leeway when it comes to the random objectives. I know Onslaught’s play-your-way philosophy leads to people grinding the fastest, easiest content, but I lead weekly guild events, and depending on the week’s Conquest theme, we might run the daily operation or hunt world bosses, but since players might have different Daily or Weekly Galactic Seasons objectives, I am put in the frustrating position of selecting to run content that rewards people unequally. This is not fair or fun for people who find themselves the odd ones out because of bad luck with objectives.

Ultimately, if Galactic Seasons doesn’t interest you, that’s fine. You can opt in or out as much as you like. Once again, it looks like players who have been subscribed at any point during Onslaught will continue to have access to the expansion’s future story updates. If you subbed for one month back in October 2019, you can still hop on and see how the war is going and find out what Malgus is up to. That content is waiting for you, no charge.