Modern SWTOR Part II: the game in 2024

The last time I thought about returning to SWTOR was when Legacy of the Sith came out.  The new cinematic had me hoping that it would be an expansion at least on par with Onslaught.  However, reports from when it came out almost immediately put me off of that idea, with the new content clocking in at about two hours per faction, and not even a new daily area to engage with after that (at least at launch). The development team behind the game claimed that the rest of a proper expansion would be released piecemeal over the course of the following months.  But without so much as a calendar of expected release dates, I was more than a bit skeptical.  The move of the game from Bioware to Broadsword, which has not done the greatest job with Dark Age of Camelot, moved me from skeptical to downright pessimistic. However, as it turned out I was largely wrong.

Eight days fifteen hours and thirty minutes:  that's how long it took me to do a level one to the end of the current storyline run, which for me was about half a year of my really limited spare time.  To try and keep my level closer to what each planet was designed for, and to give myself some time to enjoy each new gear set I got together, I purposefully skipped all XP bonuses.  However, I did do every solo quest I came across, including "exploration missions,"  which have the special icon shown above. These are side quests that used to be necessary to hit the cap in the launch era game.  However, in the modern game they are eminently skippable.  You could ignore all of them and still be over leveled for most planets when you get there.  I love doing them because they send me to areas of each planet I wouldn't likely explore otherwise.  I guess I could simply wander around at random and see everything that way, but I find exploring an area more engaging if I'm there for a reason.

The team has indeed released a proper expansion's worth of content since the launch of LoTS.  If you count everything released since February 2022 as one big expansion, it has more new planets and daily areas than anything released since the launch game.  It just took them two solid years to put out all that content.  Does a set of new zones still count as a single expansion if you release it in four to six month intervals for 2+ years?  Hard to say, but the fact remains that there is now a lot of solid content remaining after you finish the old base game. 

At some point while I was away they added galactic seasons, where you work your way towards long term goals by playing.  This season came with two armor sets, a couple of new vehicles, and a new stronghold.  While there were quests I could have done to speed my progress, I was able to get to the end of the track largely by doing whatever I felt like. I still have four out the eight class stories completely untouched on my new server.  However, I can imagine that this system would give me something worth doing on my schedule if I were done with that and stuck at the cap. I like the system a lot so far, but I also have the impression that season six was one of the better ones.

Based on my current play time, it takes about four solid days to play through the old base game.  This includes skipping all the group content, but doing all the optional exploration quests.  By the time I reached the end of the latest content added with Desperate Defiance, I had clocked in 8 days 15 hours and 30 minutes of playtime.  That is a heck of a lot of Star Wars to get through, and apart from the stuff that came out around 2016-2017 I enjoyed every bit of it.  You also don't need to do that middle part of the game anymore, because at some point Bioware added the ability to skip straight from Ziost to Ossus.*  Ossus is where I feel like the game picks up again after the old pre-Knights of the Fallen Empire content, and even after Ossus there is a lot to do now. 

Flying into the republic fleet to learn some new crafting recipes.  This star fleet functions somewhat like a capital city in most MMOs.  My ship is the smaller one in the middle.  Each class gets its own unique ship that functions as a portable headquarters, and is needed for most travel between planets.  

SWTOR stands as a fairly unique offering in the modern MMO landscape.  The science fiction meets fantasy setting of Star Wars in general sets it apart of course, with 90% of MMOs being pure fantasy and most of the rest being pure science fiction. I have always enjoyed the setting of Star Wars in general, and SWTOR is set during my favorite era.  In "modern" Star Wars there are only ever two sith at a time, and there are often only a handful of trained jedi (as few as two depending on the timeframe).  This kind of warps the entire setting around a few key figures, and sometimes makes it seem as if something that doesn't happen anywhere near Luke, Vader or one of the other incredibly rare force users is kind of irrelevant.  It also makes it hard to believe that you would be playing a jedi or a sith.  It would be like playing "A president of the united states" or "A Emperor of Rome."  It hardly makes any sense.  

Crafting is in a good overall place in the modern game, at least while levelling.  It's dead easy to make level appropriate blue gear most of the way up, and relatively easy to make purple gear.  Blue quality gear that you craft can be deconstructed for a 60% chance to learn the recipe for a purple quality item.  These crafted purples are higher quality than anything else you are likely to run across while levelling.  That said, by level 75 the crafting really tapers off, with gear from various NPC vendors completely eclipsing gear that's easy to craft.  You can in theory craft gear just as good, but the time and resources that would be needed to do it are utterly absurd.  

In contrast, during the Old Republic Era, you are tripping over force users.  It allows stories set anywhere and everywhere to leverage the "space wizards meets Firefly" feel of the movies without creating logical dissonance.  It also makes it seem a lot more realistic that, for example, my smuggler would be willing to take on a sith or my imperial agent would take on a jedi.  While certainly powerful, force users aren't gods walking.  During the Old Republic era, if you don't know how to deal with a force user you won't be in a profession that involves serious amounts of combat for very long.  In the modern movie era, meeting a jedi would be like meeting an wizard as powerful as Merlin in real life.  "Wait, magic is real? How in the hell do you even fight that?"  I also like that no-one knows or cares about the Skywalker name.  The idea of an ordained chosen one that makes everyone else in the galaxy largely irrelevant offends my egalitarian streak.**  All in all, I feel like the Old Republic era leverages the most distinct aspects of the Star Wars IP with much less of the continuity baggage that can sometimes trip up fiction set in the Skywalker era.

The new stronghold everyone got for free this season is in Copero, a pretty planet largely inhabited by the chiss (the same race as Admiral Thrawn from the Star Wars TV shows Rebels and Asoka if that means anything to you).  Since I was playing up a chiss agent, this suited me quite well. 

Mechanically, I also find the game really enjoyable.  It's one of the few MMOs I can think of that does level scaling well.  Instead of the enemies scaling along with you, which makes levelling seem completely pointless, you have a level cap and a soft stat cap that changes depending on the planet you are on.  If you go to a low level planet with a high level character, you will get scaled down but still feel more powerful because you have more abilities and stronger attack rotations.  At the same time, you never "gray out" any enemies and become an immortal godling that certain enemies cannot challenge in any way.  You can always get killed if you play badly enough.

One of the things I really like about SWTOR is that the combat generally focuses on groups of mobs rather than trying to pull one at a time.  The strategy you use with a big group of weak mobs, like here, will be different from what you use against various group combinations that include silvers (roughly twice as strong as a normal mob) or golds (around 1.5 times as strong as a silver) mobs.  It gives the combat, even while out questing solo, more variety than in most MMOs.

A major change since the last time I played is that you can use a much wider variety of skillsets on characters now.  Choice of combat style has been largely separated from choice of class, and thus class narrative, allowing you to mix and match freely for whatever combination you like.  For example, if you want your jedi to be a secret sith that sprays force lightning everywhere when no-one is looking, you can do it.  If you think your bounty hunter would specialize in taking foes down with a sniper rifle you can do that too.  If you refuse to play any character that can't kick opponents in the nuts, you can now play four different class stories using smuggler combat styles.  At the same time, if you are a purist the original combat styles work pretty much like they always have.  You can still play up an agent that plays exactly like you remember from the 2010s if you want to.  

My favorite mini-game in SWTOR is Star Fighter, a PvP system that plays a lot like MechWarrior Online or World of Tanks among games I'm familiar with.  Teams fight to hold bases or engage in deathmatches.  As you play you earn points that can be used to upgrade one of sixteen or so starships.  Ships are split into four classes, dogfighters, interceptors, gunners and bombers, each of which plays very differently.  My favorite class is the bomber (one of my four is shown above), which has high defense and specializes in taking and defending bases.  However, in matches with no objectives to defend, they tend to be pretty useless, so I have had to build out some fighters and interceptors.  I suck quite badly with gunships, and so haven't bothered to build any ships of that class up.  

The game has also added  mechanics for player engagement stolen from Android games. Despite how terrible that sounds, they work surprisingly well.  First, there are now daily login rewards, like pretty much every MMO these days.  In SWTOR they are nice little bonuses, but nothing so amazing you will be upset if you can't log for a few days.  However, the bigger addition is seasonal reward tracks that each run for a few months and allow you to work towards bigger rewards at your own pace.  The last PvE track that I worked through yielded two sets of cosmetic armor,*** two new mounts and unlocked rooms in a pretty new house (stronghold) as I worked through it.  Each day you will move the track along just by playing.  Though you can go out of your way and progress it more quickly by doing specific missions, I maxed out the last one just by doing whatever I felt like each day.  There is a similar parallel track to work your way through by doing PvP matches.  I have made no progress on the latter because I rarely enjoy PvP.   However, I like that there are different reward tracks catering to different playstyles.  Now maybe if there was a track for crafting stims or dancing near mailboxes everyone would be happy . . .  

What the game is generally known for among MMOs is dialogue trees, one example of which is shown at the bottom of this screenshot, that slightly alter the storyline as you play.  Some of them lead to fairly significant changes like characters dying off or being saved, or in one case an entire planet perhaps getting destroyed (though it will get locked into a "just about to blow up, finish what you need to do" state in that case).  However, for the most part they are largely cosmetic changes to the storyline, with characters you interact with reacting differently depending on whether you are a saint, a complete asshole, or something in between. That isn't to say that the choices don't alter the feel of the narrative significantly.  I put real thought into the personality of most characters I play, and even get a bit upset if there are no dialogue options in one of these trees that does a good job reflecting "what my character would say." That's light years beyond the roleplaying options in most MMOs, which tend to occur completely in your head if at all.****  

If there is any overriding theme of the modern game it's player choice.  How long it takes you to run up to the cap is really up to you.  On my playthroughs I do every quest I come across that isn't for groups, including the optional "exploration missions," but not generally bonus missions (extra missions for players that want to revisit a planet later, some time after completing the main story there).  If you stopped to do all the group content and bonus missions, I imagine you could double my playtime.  On the other hand, if you stick strictly to only what's needed to hit the appropriate level for each new planet, I'm sure you could at least half it.  Crafting is in a similar place.  It's there and useful, you can pretty easily be using level appropriate purple gear all the way up if you engage with it.  However, you also very clearly don't really need gear that good.  You will be hitting your soft stat caps even with gear from quests on every planet unless you really rush things and do no optional content at all.  

Though the income of the game is much reduced from the days when it was hovering just outside the big five, with the move to Broadsword it does seem that a large proportion of the income the game brings in is finally being reinvested instead of frittered away on other games. Overall, I'd say SWTOR is in a better place than it has been in years.

Regardless, for me the biggest selling point is that there is a very long "Star Warsy" narrative on offer with a lot of variety depending on the choices you make as you go, and very little overlap between the Imperial and Republic perspectives.  Other MMOs with similarly compelling narratives, such as FFIV and Secret World, generally only have one story to play through for everyone.  All in all, I would say SWTOR is in the best place that it's been in years.   Mechanically, it's maybe not quite to the heights of the launch-to-Revan era game to my tastes, but damn close.  Further, if playing through a Star Wars story is a selling point for you, the game that starts after you hit the end of the launch era game is now finally just as expansive as the game to that point.

*Though I often still play through the parts you can skip, because the game defaults to certain story choices when you choose the skip option.  Those often don't fit what my character would have done.  If they ever add the ability to tell the game what choices you would have made going through those chapters, I might never play them again.

**One of the things I really liked about the Last Jedi is that it ended implying that the force was for everyone.  One of the things I found really execrable about the Rise of Skywalker was that they completely undid that, and made the story about a "chosen one" again.

***Well at least that's how I use it.  You can in theory gather up a bunch of mods and give them any stats you like, though I am a bit skeptical that anyone would ever bother. 

****Makeb, shown in the screenshot above, was the first planet released that allowed you to have gay flings with NPCs.  In the old base game, flirt interactions were gender locked and strictly hetero.  In more modern content, you can eventually make out with pretty much anyone you spend enough time with.  Of course even that freedom pales before the freedom some really modern games offer.