Testing the Open World Difficulty Toggle on the PTS

Yesterday Eric Musco did a let's play stream to talk more about the new overland difficulty toggle coming with 8.0. I wasn't able to watch it live, but I did watch the recording today. Most of it is him just doing laps on Hutta and answering questions from the chat, but it did make me keen to log into the updated PTS to see the new open world difficulty toggle for myself. (Though one interesting reveal that came up during the stream was that after almost fifteen years, they'll finally raise the legacy level cap from 50 to 60 - just after I hid the legacy experience bar from my UI since I'd maxed it out on all servers, hah.)

Anyway, since we were asked to provide feedback on how the difficulty feels on the first two planets in this round, I rolled up a new Commando and jumped straight into the master difficulty setting. To recap, the difficulty toggle increases your damage taken and decreases your experience gains and your healing received. It doesn't affect your damage output, item or credit rewards, or the health of mobs around you.

I did the first few quests and it was certainly noticeable that I remained at level one for much longer than I usually would, but mob difficulty didn't seem too bad at first. Sure, they did more damage to me than normal (which is a very low bar to clear on the starter planets) but I can't say I felt particularly in danger.

However, as I moved from quest to quest and my experience bar barely moved, I noticed the levels of the mobs around me quickly getting ahead of me, which is something that hadn't happened to me in a very long time, and their damage also became more noticeable. In Taloran Village I suffered my first death when a stray Hammer Shot pulled a second group at the same time as I accidentally body-pulled an extra silver mob on top of that. On normal story difficulty that wouldn't have been a problem, but here I died. Different, for sure.

As an aside, the way I'm questing on the PTS is the complete inverse of how I usually level in the live game. Usually, I watch all the cut scenes - even though I've seen them all before - because I want to immerse myself in the RP aspect of it all and am always hoping to encounter the occasional piece of dialogue that I either haven't heard before or at the very least haven't encountered in so long that it's as good as new to me. The combat in-between is not terrible, but relatively mindless, as everything just gets swept away with little effort.

On the PTS, I space-bar through everything because I don't want to spend time on the RP aspect, I don't want to get too invested in characters that will just get wiped anyway, and I'm paying more attention to the gameplay because that's the focus of the testing.

That said, something funny happened as I continued to work my way through all the Ord Mantell missions (both the class storyline and all the side quests): I actually got really into the gameplay. While I had virtually no buttons to press (back in the day I approached something close to a full action bar by the end of the first planet, while I basically had to blast my way through the entirety of Ord Mantell with nothing but Explosive Round this time), the increased difficulty and reduced XP really transformed the experience.

Because XP gains were so stingy that I was falling behind even while doing every single optional mission including all the bonuses, I started to feel a genuine hunger for XP like I haven't felt in this game for over a decade. I kept looking for more dynamic encounters to do just so I could go up one more level. I longed to level up and gain a new ability (even if that last one didn't really end up being fulfilled in any meaningful way during this particular adventure). I actually put med packs on my bar and got excited about gear upgrades

While the moment-to-moment button pressing was not challenging or complex at this level, everything hitting so much harder meant that I had to take care when moving around so I wouldn't accidentally over-pull, and when dealing with multi-mob groups, it was vital to quickly focus down the easy targets to reduce the amount of incoming damage. It reminded me a bit of WoW Classic to be honest.

And then I got to the Separatist volcano base. I remembered that place being quite threatening back in the day, and the trooper class mission in there was possibly the most difficult quest I ever encountered while levelling (I actually talked about it in this post from February 2012.)

Needless to say, I was very curious to see what the experience was going to be like on this new master difficulty, and it did not disappoint. Me at level 7 vs. groups of three mobs each - all level 9-10 and several of them including a strong mob as well - was an absolute disaster. The first time I would've died, the game bugged out and suddenly teleported me back to Fort Garnik, but I travelled right back into the volcano to get back into the fray. 

I managed to down a few pulls near the phase entrance by quickly nuking a single mob and then running out before his two buddies could kill me, but further in I would usually die before being able to flee, so that it became a slow zerg of kill one, die, revive, kill another, die, revive, kill the last one of the pack. I could've tried to go out and gain some more XP before trying again I suppose, but I was too stubborn for that - and I did succeed in the end. It was so satisfying! Mr Commando told me that I was weird for being so delighted by dying over and over again, but it was genuinely fun to me.

I did manage to complete the rest of the base without dying after that, though some fights were very close affairs (as in, me finishing with something like 10 HP left). Once I got my companion, I also went back to do the heroics, which were also very doable, though I had to take some care here too. However, the champion mob for the Savrip dynamic encounter just flattened me and Jorgan in a blink.

I finished the planet at only level 9, and I'm actually weirdly excited to dive back in and do the Esseles and go to Coruscant. It's funny because there's a part of me that is telling me I shouldn't get too into this because it's only the PTS and I don't want to burn myself out before it all goes live, but all I can say is that the difficulty toggle made for a really fun, nostalgic experience for me. I wouldn't want to be required to level every single character like that I suppose, but nobody has to.

The point is that outside of ventures, you can toggle the difficulty up and down at any given moment as it pleases you. I keep seeing people get confused by that and ask questions like "but doesn't that mean you can cheese the difficulty by doing x, y and z" but the point is that there is no special reward for this. The reward is that it's more fun. The ventures are somewhat different, and in those you won't be able to turn the difficulty down once you've committed to it. But outside of that, there is no cheese - there is only choosing what's fun for you.

8.0 Is Called "Masters of the Force"

I was just thinking the other day that it's a bit odd that the devs have given us this much information about 8.0 at this point, but we still don't know the expansion's name. Traditionally, the name would be among the first things you'd want to tell people. When Knights of the Eternal Throne was first announced, we in fact had nothing but a name and a splash screen at first.

And then Broadsword posted a news article this Thursday that summarised everything they'd revealed about the expansion so far while also finally telling us its name: Masters of the Force. There's also a dedicated landing page for it.

I'm not sure how much to read into this name, because to be honest, SWTOR expansion names have traditionally not been super informative in regards to what that expansion's story is about. Like, who are the Knights of the Fallen Empire in KotFE? So I'm not going to spend too much time speculating just who the Masters of the Force are - but let's just say, with where Legacy Reborn ended, it makes sense that who can master the Force is going to be a central question in upcoming story content.

They did also add that the (launch?) storyline is going to be called "Galaxy in Chaos", which, again, also makes sense. Plus it's official confirmation that there will be a new bunch of story content in 8.0. It's funny because for all the things I was unsure of in regards to 8.0 early on, the fact that we'll be getting a continuation of the current storyline is the one thing that was never in question for me. The devs just weren't talking about it this early on because of spoilers. But apparently there were some people on the forums who thought that because the new story hadn't been explicitly mentioned yet, it wasn't going to happen. Huh!

Anyway, it's really nice to be able to put a name to the new "era" now instead of just always calling it 8.0. I happily went back and added the new tag to all my previous posts about the subject.

The one thing I'm currently not so sure about is the acronym, because "Mot(he)F", to me, sounds like someone cutting themselves off before yelling out a swear, but I expect that may just be one of those first impressions that won't stick. I don't think many players remember how we used to call Knights of the Fallen Empire "the coffee expansion" or how people used to cringe about the fact that "KotET" in German describes someone having a bowel movement.

(Oh, and on a related note, Broadsword also released a mini pet code you can redeem until the end of the year for an ugly little gladiopodling pet: GETRDY4MOTF - you're welcome!)

Goofing Off on the PTS

Immediately after Thursday's dev stream, the 8.0 PTS went up, and I've actually been hyped to play on it. I didn't used to be someone who cared about public testing, but I've done more and more of it over the last two expansions and have become a bit of a convert to be honest. SWTOR is just not that big of an MMO anymore, and every little contribution to make it better helps. The success of XR-53 in particular has really helped to motivate me, because that fight felt so much better tuned than any other operations boss Broadsword released in almost a decade. I couldn't help but feel like the more extensive PTS testing really helped - not anything I personally did, mind you, but just having a broader selection of players trying out the fight and providing data and feedback.

In this first iteration of the PTS, there isn't much to test yet - primarily it's just the first boss of the upcoming new operation. Accordingly, the way it's set up, you're expected to just create a level one character, take the "Odessen Transport Service" just outside your starter phase* to be transported to Odessen, and then use a terminal there to get auto-levelled to 85, at which point you can grab some gear from nearby vendors, and the entrance to the operation is right there as well. (In fact, it's so close to the edge of the platform that if you run at it without being in an ops group, you have just a brief second of seeing the "you need to be in an ops group to enter" notification before falling to your death, which I thought was a hilarious troll.)

I haven't tried the new boss yet, but I'm planning to check it out this week - with a full guild group no less. This is the first time I've managed to get buy-in for going on the PTS from my whole ops team, which is another reason I'm excited.

However, until then, being an unnaturally boosted level 85 character is... a bit restrictive. You have no legacy, no ship and no companions. You don't have access to any of your unlocks from the regular servers, including species and hairdos. Not to mention that you look like a bit of a dork running around in the same not great-looking default armour set as everyone else.

Cartel Coin purchases are disabled on the PTS (for good reason), but unfortunately that includes several pop-ups that merely include a CC buyout option, such as the one to increase your inventory space or unlock additional outfit slots. Not much one can do about that, unfortunately, but at least some of the other restrictions can be worked around.

If, like me, you're someone who has earned loads of loyalty rewards and the like over the years, you might be able to grab a companion and/or a better outfit from your mailbox. I don't recommend trying to empty your mail entirely, due to the aforementioned bag space limitations, but if you can pick out just a couple of useful items, it's quite handy. 

Otherwise you can travel to the fleet and see the adaptive armour vendor in the supplies section for an alternative outfit. The selection there isn't amazing, but at least you'll be able to cheaply grab a coherent look that matches your origin story. The only way to get a companion outside your mailbox is to actually play through the class story on your starter planet. I'm not usually someone who ever space-bars through conversations, but I speed-ran my Sage through Tython for once and it was actually pretty quick.

Completing the starter planet will also unlock your legacy, and if you then make it through Coruscant on top of that, you can get your ship too. A quicker, alternative way to unlocking your legacy and ship, as well as the option for a second combat style - but no companions - is to start Knights of the Fallen Empire from the chapters menu. You don't actually have to play through it, just accept all the various prompts that ask if you're sure that you want to skip ahead and boom, there's your legacy and ship.

Why go through all this hassle for a test character? They'll probably be wiped/reset at some point anyway, right? Well, why not? Breaking out of the default constraints of the test environment is a different kind of gameplay challenge, and I bet I'll feel better testing the boss later this week when I actually get to wear an outfit I like! It also allows for additional exploration which incidentally might reveal more about features that aren't officially ready for testing yet.

For example ventures/difficulty modes are not yet ready for testing, but after completing my Tython story (on the standard difficulty, because nothing else is available), I found a surprise "challenge reward" box in my inventory which contained a "Regenerating Freeze Bombs" unlock that I was unable to use yet but which is probably an unintended preview of the kind of stuff that will be coming with the ventures. I also saw someone mention on the forums that they saw a Z axis in their stronghold options? Be still, my heart!

Oh yeah, all strongholds are free to open and expand on the PTS as well, unless they require special tokens. So go nuts and grab that free teleport as well while you're out there.

Now let's see what we can get up to next week when our PTS guild's ability to do Conquest unlocks... 

* If you're a newborn Jedi on Tython and can't find the teleport, it's right next to the first taxi droid on the raised platform where you first land. For some reason the probe droid really blends into the background there and is easy to overlook - I ran right past it at first, and talked to at least three other people that evening who had the same problem. When I made a trooper for comparison, it was much more obvious to find the droid there, as it was waiting right outside the crashed walker. 

A More Classic Experience in Our Future

Today was the day of the long-awaited dev stream giving us the first details about 8.0. The devs didn't mention anything about the story or what to expect on Ryloth yet, but there were some very interesting announcements about mechanical features.

Musco started by talking about some (not super exciting to me, but nonetheless very welcome) quality of life improvements, such as fitted gear being added to collections, toys becoming abilities so they no longer take up bag space, and interactable decorations becoming persistent (so the game will remember what state you left them in).

He also surprised me by announcing something I never thought I'd hear any MMO dev promote as a good thing: that they'll be slowing down levelling a little. Now, he didn't use those exact words - and probably for good reason - but it's effectively what he described, giving the current negative example of new players immediately overlevelling their surroundings massively after only three quests. So I don't think the goal is to make things massively slower, but to rein in those early levels in particular. He did say that they'd give us more details later about which sources of XP would be adjusted exactly. 

That said, this is a nice segue into the biggest new feature they announced: adjustable overland difficulty. (I was doing an ops on my main screen while watching the livestream on my second monitor and I may have excitedly yelled "open world difficulty options" at my guildies over voice, shortly before wiping us on Izax veteran mode.) As a simple toggle, you'll be able to adjust the difficulty of mobs for you personally by upgrading from story to veteran or master at any time, which will increase your damage taken, reduce your healing received, and decrease your XP gains.

Now, this was never a feature I personally clamoured for, but I'm aware that it's something other MMOs have and that I've seen players ask for more than a few times. The reason I wasn't that invested into the idea personally is that I don't think the current difficulty is terrible - shortly after 4.0 it was a joke, yes, but they did retune things a bit around Onslaught and since then I think it's been okay-ish. Yes, low level planets are still easy to steamroll, but if you actually do higher-level content and don't always have your companion set to heal, you can still find some danger in places.

Plus, let's be honest - if we take veteran and master mode chapters as examples of Broadsword's tuning for additional solo challenge, they are not great. They can be challenging alright, but in rather un-fun ways.

So by itself, this kind of sounded... interesting, and nice for those who really want it I guess, but not necessarily that big a deal to me personally. However, there was more!

While you can dial your personal difficulty up and down at any time, there'll also be a new venture focused around it, challenging you to create new characters of all eight base classes and level them through veteran or master mode world difficulty (these characters will be locked into their chosen difficulty and unable to change), fulfil certain goals along the way and earn rewards in the process.

As an old-timer I had immediate flashbacks to the Dark vs. Light event from over a decade ago now, which asked us to level new alts of all eight origin stories as well as complete certain milestones on at least one of them (such as making it through all the "Knights of" chapters).

I actually found myself thinking only the other day how Galactic Seasons kind of fill a similar role nowadays as the DvL event back then by making us re-do old content for rewards, but that they never care about levelling and story, and how it would maybe be nice to have something like that again some day as a one-time thing. The nice thing about this being implemented in the form of a venture is that there's no time limit on it, and the fact that you have to effectively level up in "challenge mode" will actually make the experience somewhat different from a gameplay perspective too.

It's also worth noting that it was stated that veteran difficulty is aiming to make the gameplay more reminiscent of the "classic" experience - my post from last year about the notion of SWTOR Classic and why I don't think it'll ever happen has turned into one of the more popular posts on the blog, and there's been some chatter in the comments about how one could create something at least approximating the classic experience in the game as it is now. Commenter Thander's suggestion from back then actually sounds remarkably similar to what was announced! So one can hope that this feature might also appeal to some lapsed players who would be interested in returning if only they could choose to have a bit more challenge in their everyday gameplay.

We'll see how successful the devs will be in terms of getting the tuning right, but the difficulty toggle will be available to try out on the PTS in a later phase, so we all better check it out then and let them know what we think.

In the meantime, if you want to read more details about what else was announced on the stream, including things like new rewards from Galactic Season 11 and the Feast of Prosperity, check out one of these stream summaries from the usual suspects:

• Official website 
• Swtorista
• Today in TOR
• Vulkk

Legacy Reborn's Potential Gameplay Implications

I'm really keen to do a full review of Legacy Reborn's story, but I think I'll need a few more playthroughs for that, so in the meantime I'd like to talk about another topic related to 7.9's story update. I originally meant to post this after the review, but it's much easier to write so I'll do it first.

Note that this will still contain spoilers for Legacy Reborn's ending, so don't read on if that's something you want to avoid!

So the story ends with Malgus activating Heta Kol's machine to call out to the galaxy's Force users whether we like it or not, which will surely have a major impact on 8.0's primary narrative. However, as someone with a trooper main there was a detail in the final cut scene that I found very interesting: our previously purely tech using classes are affected by the machine's call as well and suddenly feel the Force, which is reflected in our character reflexively holding back a rock that's about to fall down on our heads.

I didn't manage to take a screenshot on my main, but here's the equivalent moment on my agent alt. 

Now, I didn't think that was too big a deal initially - while I've always been adamant that I don't want my main to be a Force user and disliked the way KotFE treated all player characters largely as if they were, that storyline did also leave us with every character displaying at least a bit of Force sensitivity in the story, as evidenced by things like the extra action button in KotFE chapter 12 that lets you tame an animal companion for part of your journey, or the way you reflexively shield yourself against Arcann's attacks in the final confrontation with him at the end of chapter 16.

I don't think it's ever been made explicitly clear whether that was just Valkorion using his powers while he was possessing us or whether he left us with a degree of "residual" Force sensitivity anyway even after being expelled. Either way, our character holding back a rock was definitely a step up in power levels (lifting rocks isn't easy, just ask Flingeld) but still, it's not like we're suddenly all Jedi or Sith now. I do trust the devs enough that I'm pretty sure we won't suddenly be shoehorned into that in 8.0, though I can imagine our sudden enhanced abilities coming up in conversation.

I did find myself wondering how having a stronger sense of the Force would affect my character's combat abilities, concluding that she'd still be using her weapon primarily but could maybe learn a few Force tricks to help her out along the way. And she would just be one of many in the same predicament.

Which then got me thinking about combat styles! We know that we're never going to get a new origin story, but since 7.0 split classes into origin stories and combat styles, a new combat style seemed a lot more doable. Most of the time I've seen people talk about how they'd like to have a tech class with a blade, similar to how some companions already work (e.g. Tanno Vik or Broonmark), but I realised that Legacy Reborn instead feels like the perfect setup for a tech combat style with some Force abilities.

The great thing about that would be that unlike giving tech users a blade, it would still be fully compatible with the existing story cut scenes since you'd still have the same weapon, the Force abilities would just be an extra thing to use outside cut scenes.

There would be some kinks to work out - they'd have to make it possible to change combat styles for one thing, as currently you can only add a second one but then you're stuck, and many players probably already have two. Plus from a story point of view it would be weird for a new character to be a Force-using smuggler on Ord Mantell I guess, so maybe there'd need to be some kind of restriction on when you can start using this new combat style? Then again, it's probably no weirder than Jedi shooting lightning on Tython, which is also allowed now, so...

I don't know whether I'm just building castles in the sky thinking about this, but it just seems like such an obvious idea once you think about it, I'm surprised I haven't seen anyone else bring it up yet. I'm very curious to hear what else the devs officially announce for 8.0 now that 7.9's cat is out of the bag so to speak. 

We'll Be Going to Ryloth in 8.0!

Yesterday was dev stream day once again - I'm usually awaiting these with baited breath, but as alluded to in my last post, I actually feel like I'm a bit behind story-wise right now, so my reaction this time was more something along the lines of, "What, it's already that time again?"

That's not to say that I didn't still enjoy the stream. We got a bit more of a preview of 7.9's story update, which is expected to go live at the end of May. As expected, it will feature the big showdown of all the different factions that's been building up to for a long time now. We'll even get to play as some of those other characters to mix things up - they had a preview of someone running around as Lana and a short clip of someone fighting as Malgus. We'll see how that goes! The HK-55 bonus chapter came out almost ten years ago now, and then they never did anything with the idea of playing as another character ever again. I enjoyed it at the time, but on replays it got a bit tedious, though I'm not sure whether that had anything to do with the mechanics or was just due to the chapter format itself. Either way, playing as all these other characters should at the very least be novel.

They were also talking a bit about 7.9.1 already, which they justified by saying that there won't be a dedicated stream for that patch. To be fair though, we already knew that it'll be the start of Galactic Season 11 and that it'll be more or less the same as Galactic Season 10, only with Fen Zeil and Amity instead of Altuur and PH4-LNX. About the only piece of real news was that the DvL bosses won't be returning for that season... yay, I guess?

In technical news, we were once again reassured that the DirectX 12 work is still continuing and that they are hoping to have an alpha for people to test later in the year. There was also an article on the official site about a month ago that talked a bit about the nitty gritty of the work involved in this, which I thought was quite interesting. I hadn't realised that in many ways this update seemingly requires them to rebuild the game's visuals from the ground up.

However, by far the most exciting part of the stream (to me anyway) was the additional information about 8.0. We still know only broad strokes, but honestly, at this point every morsel of information is exciting to me:

• The level cap will indeed increase by five levels (to 85) like in previous expansions.
• The new planet will be Ryloth, the home world of the Twi'leks, and it will come with dynamic encounters.
• There'll be a new operation with three bosses that will launch with story and veteran mode.
• The way we gear up will change again, but they want it to be an evolution of the current system, not a complete do-over like we've had in previous expansions, and it should be more organic to figure out in game, without necessarily needing a guide.
• There'll be new abilities and changes to class balance.
• The story will take a new direction but won't be completely disconnected from what's going on right now, which is why they can't go into it until we've had a chance to play through 7.9.

Ryloth as seen in season 1 of Clone Wars. 

They expect to have an 8.0 PTS up in summer, where we'll get to test a lot of the new stuff, and there'll be more reveals to come. The list of new features above is not exhaustive - as established in the last dev stream, they just don't want to spill all the beans at once.

The Ryloth reveal personally excited me the most (as you can tell from this post's title), I guess because for once it's a planet I actually already know, from the Clone Wars TV show. I'm not sure it'll end up being the most visually interesting - it's kind of rocky, so they might be able to re-use some assets from Ruhnuk - but it's the home world of the Twi'leks and I love Twi'leks, so that's a win by itself.

I still don't know how soon I'll manage to get more characters fully caught up to where I want them to be. Being excited doesn't change the fact that I've got a lot going on right now, but the news are definitely encouraging to me personally. For more details on what else was said on the stream, feel free to peruse one of the links below:

• VOD on Twich or YouTube
• Written summary on the official website
• Swtorista
• Today in TOR
• Vulkk

Delayed 7.8.1 Dev Livestream Reaction

Soo... there was a dev livestream over a week ago now! I did actually watch it live on my second monitor at the time, while doing an operation with my guildies, and I remember thinking "I've got to get back to this and write a post about it maybe tomorrow or on Friday" - and then things got a bit crazy.

I still wanted to jot down some thoughts on it though, even if it's belated. We know now that the patch will already drop this Tuesday, so I figured I've got to get in there before it'll be no longer relevant.

As had already been mentioned previously, the patch will be called Master's Enigma, and based on the little preview they showed without getting too spoilery, it looks like we're not yet done with Darth Nul's legacy, as she didn't just have that sanctum on Elom but apparently also a starship somewhere. We'll see how that goes!

As an aside, people always complain about there being too much time between story updates, but I've got to admit that this one time they've sped it up I'm actually sitting here thinking "wow, another story update so soon". I've only played through Galactic Threads on a few characters so far, so it feels like I've still got lots of catching up to do. Is it just me?

Anyway, the stream obviously covered a bunch of different topics related to the patch as usual, such as Spring Abundance returning with a new pet reward, the date nights with Kira and Torian, and the newest Cartel Market additions. As usual, I won't go into all of that here. There's a written summary on the official website, and Swtorista, Today in TOR and Vulkk all have their own posts as well. For me, there are just two subjects I really wanted to comment on:

Galactic Season 10 & 11

Keith informed us in his end-of-year Producer's Letter that "[the next] season will work a little differently than previous seasons" and as someone who's a bit of a connoisseur of seasons at this point, I was very curious to find out what that meant.

I'd had some conversations with friends in which we speculated about different possibilities and "bringing back old rewards" was one of those, so finding out that Season 10 will - in terms of rewards - be a mash-up of Seasons 1 and 3 with just a few new rewards added was not exactly a shock. (Season 11 will do the same thing with Season 2 and 4.)

It's not something that's personally exciting to me as someone who already completed all those seasons the first time around, but at the same time I'm actually surprisingly sanguine about it. I could easily imagine others who already have all those rewards being bitter about it ("Not only do they use seasons to recycle old content, now the seasons themselves are recycled too!" - something like that) but personally I actually really don't mind.

I know that I'm in a pretty hardcore minority, and I've seen my fair share of comments and questions from newer players who were interested in one of the companions or armour sets from earlier seasons and were disappointed that there was no way to get them anymore, so I understand that there was demand to bring them back. I'm happy those people get their chance now! Also, I didn't start doing seasons on the other servers until Season 2 (and the Shae Vizla server obviously didn't even exist until Season 5), so I'll have some fun earning some of the older rewards for a second time over there. (Technically I have all of it already unlocked in collections, but this is more fun.)

Also, there was some talk about 8.0 being in development alongside everything else that's happening, so it seemed reasonable to me to infer that putting a little less resource into the next two seasons will free up a bit of extra time for more focus on 8.0, which seems fair enough to me.

Speaking of 8.0...

We still don't know a lot more about what 8.0 will contain, but Eric and Keith dedicated a whole segment of the stream to talking about what their plans for it are in terms of releasing more information over time, which I thought was extremely interesting.

First off, they don't want to tell us too much just yet because the Legacy of the Sith story has two more patches to go and they want to give it a chance to play out in full without spoiling anything or even taking too much attention away from it, which I think is very fair and fits with the devs' commitment to treating the game's story as the most important thing, which is one of the main things I love about SWTOR.

However, they also said that they are planning to release more information in bits and pieces over time, to introduce new features and let us test them on the PTS as they reach a playable state, and I thought that was an interesting and novel approach. Usually expansion announcements are these big, attention-grabbing info dumps, so to know that an expansion is coming without much else, and that additional information will be released piecemeal over the course of a whole year is quite different. It's also a relatively long time to know about it in advance, as traditionally, SWTOR expansions have tended to be announced only two to four months before their launch date.

I'm very curious to see how this will play out in terms of expectations and hype, because on a purely theoretical level, I can think of ways in which this could go either very well or very badly. I'm hoping for the best outcome of course - just saying. Either way, I really appreciate the devs' attempt at being transparent about what's coming, when so much of Legacy of the Sith has been living from one patch to the next, without the slightest clue of what was going to be happening in six months.

One thing Keith and Eric did say about 8.0's content (it was even on the slides) was that they were planning to "create new content, gameplay, and systems that appeal to group, solo, and story players" and that they are aiming to "celebrate the breadth and depth of SWTOR to power new content and systems", which I understood to mean that they won't just be plopping a new planet and five more levels on top of what we have now, but that at least some of the new stuff will be integrated into existing planets and systems, perhaps similarly to how dynamic encounters added something new to do on classic planets. One Keith quote in particular that stood out to me was: "We're going back to old content and do something with it so it feels like new content." Could it be that they'll finally do something with flashpoints again? No, I mustn't daydream too much about specific things I'd like to see, because it's almost never what we expect. Regardless, I look forward to the journey of finding out.