Ventures Livestream Been & Gone

We've had the next Masters of the Force focused livestream from Broadsword and this time it was focused on the upcoming levelling ventures. I mentioned in my post about their last livestream that I was interested in the new system, but I'm more than happy with the base difficulty toggle being added.

I couldn't catch the stream live, but I did watch a vod some days later, and I think it ended up being mostly what I expected. Whereas the difficulty toggles seem very much for people that just want a harder difficulty because they don't like how easy the game has become, this venture system seems more designed for people looking for a temporary challenge that adds rewards, something that can be completed and/or earned, and that's fine by me.

I can definitely see myself making venture characters, as it does lock you into those harder difficulties, and even adds some restrictions like only being able to use your two original advanced class options, which I assume was to avoid everyone rolling stealth classes to skip all the mobs and most of the challenge. I suppose this is due to ventures being reward focused, so Broadsword has to put a lot more effort into how players will try and cheese or break the difficulty that is intended. I would like to see more info on the rewards provided, as they didn't really go into detail there, there's a lot of potential for what they could use.

 

 

They did show off some of the bonuses you get when playing a venture. You can find special glowing mobs out while levelling who can drop special items like powerful grenades, or items that give you ambient challenges or temporary buffs. The system did lose me a bit here, as a lot of this sort of stuff seems somewhat counterintuitive to what Broadsword is trying to achieve, which is a difficult challenge. Having powerful grenades or a buff that makes me crit nine times out of ten seems to defeat the point of it, but again, I'm not really the target audience for this.

Overall, I think it's a cool system, and I'm glad it exists. I think for me, if I do partake in it, I'll mostly be ignoring all those extras they've added and just playing it old school with the harder difficulty enabled.

 

WoW Forever - My Thoughts

It's been a few days since BlizzCon, and I've had some time to gather my thoughts on what Blizzard announced for WoW Classic. I managed to watch it all live, and even kept up with my two brothers via Discord who also play WoW. I have to say that it was a lot more than I ever expected!

World of Warcraft: Forever is the name of the next project, and while it's massively on the nose in name, it really does encapsulate how much Blizzard wants the community to know this is going to be the main focus of the Classic team for the foreseeable future. I went in with somewhat low expectations overall, I had preferences for what I wanted, of course, but even something like a SoD re-do would have been fun for at least a month or two, it was more so a case of how long the fun will last, as opposed to will or will I not like it, as I tend to like pretty much anything related to WoW.

Honestly, I don't really want to just sit here and write everything that is coming, but I was not expecting anywhere near the amount of content that ended up getting announced. I was also not expecting it to be such a far departure from Classic Era. Blizzard have said Forever is Classic+, but I think in design it falls very much as a sort of middle ground between Classic and Retail, which on Blizzards part I think is incredibly smart and forward-thinking. They'll now have 3 vastly different versions of WoW that will appeal to entirely different groups (as mentioned by Holly, there is very little overlap between Retail and Classic). Once the newness of Forever wears off, I expect it to have a very dedicated player base, with the Classic purists likely to be moving back to Classic Era or Anniversary after a month or so, which I think is totally okay.

 

I loved the cinematic they revealed, and watching it, I felt like a teenager again. I loved that they used the unnamed Dwarf hunter and his pet bear from the original cinematic, and as a retail Paladin main, the Forsaken Paladin in the cinematic looked so cool (still playing Alliance though)!. 

In terms of content, it's a huge amount of things. Multiple new dungeons, new raids, new zones, expanded original zones, updated graphics, new systems like camping and a lot more. All the info is out there if you want to find it, or you can check the video below. The biggest thing for me was their intent focus on "horizontal progression" and the levelling journey itself. Again, this massively separates it from retail WoW and will give Forever its own identity and community. As someone who has never really partaken in the rat race of retail WoW's vertical progression, or cared about having the best gear/stats, this is hugely exciting to me. This excitement grew even more once I realised we were getting a roleplay option again in the new "realmless" system they have, which was totally missing from anniversary. Roleplay realms/communities are always my favourite way to play an MMORPG.

I've seen a lot of discourse over the new elf race the Skyborne, but personally, I think it's a fine addition. I'm not huge on them being a neutral race, and I've never been a massive elf person, but I can totally see why Blizzard have done it the way they have. I'd say it's pretty common knowledge by now how massively popular Blood Elves were at release, and Blizzard purposefully put them on the Horde, as they realised the Horde needed a "pretty" race for balancing reasons. Likewise, I think this time around, they've just given both factions the pretty elf race from the start because they know if they stick it on one faction it'll likely cause similar issues.

I've seen people ask why they didn't just do High Elves and Blood Elves for each faction, but personally, I prefer this. It's a brand-new race, with new lore and stories to tell, and most importantly, they're designed to be distinct and to be in WoW Forever. In my opinion, Blood Elves wouldn't really make any sense in the context of Forever, as their entire reason for existing was designed around the story for the TBC expansion, specifically Kael'thas leaving for Outland and joining with Illidan. It wouldn't really make any sense to just throw them into Forever without any of the lore or story beats surrounding them. Skyborne on the other hand have a dedicated story, with a unique starting zone that fits into the world of Forever. You can also make them look pretty much like Blood/High elves anyway, so I think the entire "issue" has been blown out of proportion (as the internet tends to do). Similarly, I saw a lot of hampering for Ogres, but that's a lot of work for a race that let's be honest, barely anyone would actually play long term. As mentioned, Blizzard learned quite quickly back in vanilla that the more monstrous looking races tend to not really be played at all in comparison to the prettier humanoid looking races. I could see Ogres in the future, but having them on the Horde and a pretty elf race on Alliance would not have been good for the game, and I'm sure Blizzard knew that.

I'm even more surprised by the fact that WoW Forever is included in the sub fee just like Classic is. After seeing all the information and content coming, I was fully expecting a box cost much like how retail gets with expansions, but they're only charging for the elf race and its relevant starting zone. I've also seen a lot of complaints about this (I think it's time for me to stop reading places like Reddit and forums, because they seem to just be non-stop whining & negativity), and I don't understand the complaints. I think this is so much better than a hard box cost, and people going in expecting all of this just in the sub fee in 2026 were being massively naive. Furthermore, I'm fully expecting an in game shop similar to retail WoW as well, especially if the plan is for new content to come in at a regular cadence. Ultimately, this is the reality of game in 2026, like it or not.

I did find it weird how we got literally zero mention of the future plans for the other versions of Classic like MoP and Anniversary, but I fully expect some news in the near future regarding those, as I can understand them wanting to fully focus on Forever for Blizzcon. I do think it's pretty clear we won't be getting WoD Classic, or that surely would have got a mention on the weekend, and it seems even WotLK anniversary is up in the air now, we will see in the near future, hopefully.

Galactic Seasons 11 is Here

I'm a few weeks late, but SWTOR's Galactic Seasons 11 is now live, and similar to GS10, it focuses on two older seasons, and as a result, a lot of the rewards are from those two older seasons (season 2 & 4).

I like Galactic Seasons as a whole, and think they've been mostly a good addition to the game (especially with the amount of cartel coins you can get from them), I've got most of the rewards from most of the seasons, but not everything, as I tend to play SWTOR in waves, so there were some seasons active during some of my down periods with the game. Not only that, but I tend to focus on only one server nowadays, I have tried to do multiple servers in the past (for more CC), but I've learned it just leads me to burn out and stop altogether, so I no longer attempt to do that beyond the easy level 8 200 CC reward.

I must admit, that I've grown somewhat tired of the recent seasons. They've lacked that big hook that the earlier seasons had, in that there hasn't been a new companion or anything that revolves around the seasons. It's just a re-do of the older ones, with a few new rewards sprinkled in. Don't get me wrong, it's great if you missed some of those older rewards (and I have), but the season definitely lacks that excitement that other seasons had. Season 11 very much seems like a re-do of season 10, with the only positive difference being that I don't have to do the DvL bosses any more, they had long worn our their welcome for me.

I'll definitely try to get the full track finished on my home server, but I also tend to be wary of falling into that FOMO trap that this sort of system is designed to pull you into. I finished the full track of season 10, but my sub ran out, so I actually missed out of the level 100 mount reward (as I can't sub right now due to some life circumstances). On the one hand, I wasn't happy about that, but on the other hand, I know the system is designed to make me feel that way, and it's just one mount out of hundreds of others I have, so it's not a big deal.

I do really like that Galactic Seasons will push me to do things I don't normally do, but after so many seasons, I tend to stick to the objectives I know I can do quickly and efficiently. I'm not one to do the full 7/7 each week, and I'm usually content with 4 or 5 a week. Furthermore, I'd like to think that with Masters of the Force on the way soon, that a lot of their development time has gone into all the new stuff coming with that, so GS10 & 11 using older rewards, makes development easier for them in that aspect. I'd like to hope season 12 spices it up a bit though instead of just being season 5 & 6 rewards, I suppose it wouldn't be the end of the world for me, as season 5 & 6 are the two seasons I am missing most of the rewards from.

 

Growing Excitement for SWTOR's Upcoming Difficulty Modes

Recently, Broadsword did a livestream, with Eric Musco playing on the PTS server showing off the two new difficulty modes coming in Masters of the Force. I had some free time, so I was able to watch it live, and even got a few questions answered I had about them, which was nice. I did speak on this in my last SWTOR post, and I'd be lying if I said my excitement levels haven't increased since then.

The biggest thing that I noticed during the livestream was the XP changes. When it was mentioned they were lowering the XP requirements, I had assumed it would be quite small nerf, but now that I've seen it, it's actually a significant nerf to the point that it looked to me like vanilla rates, or at least very close to it. Granted, we only saw the starter planet, and I don't have plans to download PTS and try it myself, but it's definitely significantly slower, and that was only in the Veteran difficulty, the harder Master difficulty lowers it even more! 

This change alone has me hugely excited, on live SWTOR I play the game in a specific way that makes it harder for myself and slows the XP down. I don't use the XP boosts that the game loves to throw at you, I use a white acute module if I have one, I'll use worse gear on purpose, I keep companions locked to their default roles, I tend to keep my characters to their original advanced class options at creation and I almost always do every quest available. Still, I'll usually be level 80 before I finished the base vanilla stories due to how fast the XP is. So seeing someone playing the game in 2026, doing every quest and still barely being at the level required, or even under the level required has given me a sense of excitement for this game I haven't had for quite a long time, it's like this system was designed exactly for me! I truly hope the XP is slow enough that you can almost follow the original levelling curve again, and be level 50 at/around Corellia, as originally designed. We will have to see though.

Notice how Musco is only level 7, but has Kaliyo.

I did see quite a few people in the chat unhappy that these difficulty toggles are just that, toggles. Taking issue with the fact there's no reward, and no designs in place to stop players cheating the system, but I think these people are missing the point. The people that are going to use these new difficulties long-term won't have anything to "cheese", because the entire point of these difficulties are that it makes the game more fun, and better (in my opinion) for the people that want it. Broadsword knows this, which is why they're also introducing the new ventures, which I am assuming will be more reward/task incentivised for players that want the carrot on a stick as a reason to engage with it, and no way to turn it off to cheat it. The toggles seem more designed for players that just want a harder and slower paced levelling experience 24/7 because they dislike how easy the modern game has become.

They did also mention they are planning to do a ventures focused livestream in the near future, so that'll be interesting to see, but for me, I am more than happy with the basic difficulty toggles. I can't see myself ever playing on the basic story difficulty again beyond specific scenarios like Galactic Season farming. I'll definitely make some ventures characters for sure, but any sort of reward incentive is just a bonus at this point for me.

I really am happy that Broadsword is addressing these sorts of changes, and giving options to slow the game down, and make it more difficult. I never really expected them to ever do this sort of thing, as SWTOR's community has always felt so heavily skewed towards that fast & easy sort of design, with huge pushback to any sort of recent change in the opposite direction (I still remember how mad people were when they added credit costs to quick travel again).

I may write a separate blog post at some point writing why I prefer this sort of slower design in MMORPGs, but I personally think that having friction and barriers, and overcoming them is the core of what makes video games fun. I suppose it's similar to the mentality between WoW classic players and WoW retail players, they want different things at the end of the day. I've just always felt that for SWTOR, the players that lean onto the classic side are a massive minority, but maybe it's a larger minority than I thought considering the upcoming changes here. I'd love to see them go even further and add training requirements/costs back to trainers, unlocking taxis again and unlocking sprint again, but I'll take what I can get at this point.

Casual Adventures in Anniversary

I recently mentioned in my last blog post about Classic WoW, that I was doing some casual levelling on Anniversary while I wait for BlizzCon, it's been fun, but my time with it is probably coming to an end at this point.

I rolled on the Horde side, as I'm an Alliance player at heart, so as a result, the majority of my time in Classic is on the Alliance. Furthermore, I thought I'd mix it up a bit this time for my class, so I went with a Troll hunter, and it's been fun. I forgot how good hunters were for levelling, and some quests that are usually a real struggle on the classes I like to play (heavy armour melee), are a breeze on a hunter with a pet.

 After a day or two of levelling, a small YouTuber I watch called midventures made a video stating he was starting a casual guild project on the same server and faction that I was playing on. For a bit of my history with WoW, I tend to be fully solo most of the time, and I don't tend to join guilds. I find guilds in WoW to be almost business-like, in that most people treat them as a ladder to move upwards, as opposed to joining a guild purely for social reasons and to hang out with people. Saying that, I came from Star Wars Galaxies, which was a heavily social MMO with a lot of roleplayers, so WoWs guilds ecosystem has always felt quite foreign to me, although I know ultimately, not every guild will be like this.

I figured I might as well join, and see how it goes, and it's been a pleasant experience overall playing with people with a similar mindset to how I play. I still have mostly played solo, but having a chilled & friendly guild chat as I quest and explore has been a nice bonus for me, and I know there's no real expectations, so that usual sort of anxiety & dread that guilds in WoW tend to bring me hasn't really been an issue.

While I haven't managed to do any guild dungeon runs, I have done a Ragefire Chasm run, and a Wailing Caverns run via pugging. Both dungeons did end successfully, Wailing Caverns was a bit of a trial as our tank abruptly said he didn't have time and left 75% of the way through the dungeon. I don't fully blame him, as we had got lost multiple times, and had multiple wipes, but the tank didn't really help himself as he refused to sit and eat, or even pull mobs away, so every pull ended up becoming a stressful life and death scenario. This meant that for the final quarter of the dungeon, my pet, and the Warlock's voidwalker were chaotically bouncing threat between each other, but with the tank gone, we could pull in a much safer way at least.

It got to the point that towards the end, we all just wanted to be finished as we were about an hour and a half in by the time we got to the final escort part of the dungeon, and the group chat had devolved into mild chaos as the length it had taken us to get here started to take its toll. We did prevail in the end though!

I'm unsure how much more of Anniversary I will play at this point, I dove in just to get a bit of a taster so I could scratch the itch I had to play Classic. I'm in my mid-twenties now which is usually where I start to slow down in Classic anyway, and with Blizzcon closing in, I think I'll mostly be waiting until that news drops so we can see what the future holds for Classic.

 

8.0 is Coming - Where I'm at with SWTOR

The wheels are now fully in motion for Star Wars the Old Republic's next major patch. We've now had an 8.0 focused livestream, and even have some content on the PTS available for testing. In regard to where I'm at with SWTOR, similarly to my current situation in WoW Classic that I previously mentioned, I'm mostly in a sort of waiting state beyond casual log-ins. I tend to play SWTOR in an unconventional way anyway, a lot of my time on the game is just doing the vanilla 1-50 story content on repeat. 

I've played the game on and off since launch, and the furthest I've ever got in the story is when you go to Iokath, which was released in 2017. Furthermore, I never really planned to play in this specific way, it's just naturally what I have gravitated towards doing in the game for many years now. I do still plan to eventually take my "main" character to the latest content, but I've never been in a rush to do that, and I usually end up running an alt through the vanilla content again instead. 

I've had many characters, and deleted just as many characters over the years (I am one of those that likes to keep the character screen quite clean). My current furthest along character is a Sith Warrior just about to start Makeb, after doing all the vanilla content including group content. Fun fact, despite playing like this for years, I've never actually finished the trooper story, so the legendary flair still eludes me.

Why does this mean I'm mostly waiting for 8.0 to release? Well, Broadsword announced some big new features and changes to the levelling process for the game that has me very intrigued, and looking forward to playing through the vanilla story once again when they come into effect. The first is that they're slowing down the overall XP gain, I've seen quite a few veteran players not happy with this change, but I personally think it can only be a good thing, and from the sounds of it, it's mostly focused on the early levels, which are in my opinion, absolutely much too fast nowadays, slowing these down will be beneficial in the long term, especially for newer players coming in which seems to be Broadswords focus. I hope it's quite a significant nerf personally, but I think in actuality it'll be quite a small one, but that's better than nothing at this stage.

The feature announced that caught my eye the most was the levelling difficulty options introduced. This is something I've wanted in SWTOR for a long time now, and is probably the closest we will ever get to an official classic SWTOR version. One of my biggest issues with current SWTOR is how brain-dead easy the levelling content is, especially in the earlier levels. Adding these difficulty modes will hopefully fix this, while remaining the best of both worlds for everyone, because people that enjoy the lack of challenge don't have to engage with it if they don't want to. There are some side effects due to this, mainly in that the damage you do cannot change, but I'd gladly take that trade-off so people playing on different difficulty modes are not in separate instances and can play together.

These new difficulty modes combine with the new upcoming levelling "ventures", personally I'm not too fussed about this one, but I'm sure I'll end up doing at least some of them due to how much I play the vanilla story content. I know we've had a venture already in that dog droid companion, but I don't have that done yet, as I haven't got far enough in the story, or I've just not engaged with it if there's no story progression requirements tied to it.

Huge bonus points to Broadsword bringing back the old class icons as well (including the beta Imperial Agent one). While I don't want to be disrespectful to people's work, I do think the original logos are better overall than the ones we've had since, and I think bringing them back is the correct decision. I'd love to see the ship hangar on character creation come back as well one day to replace the black void we have now.

So with the knowledge of these levelling changes now coming, I'm mostly just waiting for them to go live, as I'd rather be playing on one of those new difficulties as I play. I'll maybe still do some casual levelling, and maybe progress my Sith Warrior some more, but I'm not sure yet.

 

Waiting for Blizzcon - Where I'm at with Classic WoW

 I'm in a bit of a flux state with WoW at the moment, I tend to spend most of my time in WoW in the Classic version of the game, just out of personal preference, although I do also enjoy retail WoW as well from time to time, mostly collection based content.

That being said, Classic is in a bit of a lull for me right now, as BlizzCon is just around the corner, and Blizzard is seemingly holding all of their cards close to their chest until BlizzCon to talk about what's coming, and more specifically, what's happening with the multitude of different versions Classic has become since its original 2019 launch. I figured I'll go through each version, and talk a bit about my history with that version, and my current stance with them.

Classic Plus:

I think at this point, everyone and their mother is expecting the much hyped Classic+ to be announced, at the upcoming BlizzCon. What the plus actually means though, no one knows. It could be something like a Season of Discovery sequel, or something like Turtle WoW was with a focus on the vanilla game and expanding it. I'm trying to keep an open mind, as I think no matter what Blizzard do, there will be a large section of the player base unhappy, as everyone wants seemingly different things. There have been some leaks, with the Camelot stuff, but I haven't really followed it much personally.

Mists of Pandaria:

I haven't really played this version of classic since the run of WotLK Classic came to an end, and Classic Cataclysm came along. For me, the classic part of WoW ends with WotLK. Cataclysm brought in the world changes, which can be played on retail anyway, and the game really starts to move quickly in a direction away from the classic trilogy. There's also the fact that I didn't really play much of TBC or WotLK during their initial retail run, as I was new, low level and just enjoying the vanilla game content, so it felt fresh in Classic for me. By the time the original release of Cataclysm came, I was max level, and much more entrenched within the game and playing it a lot. This is even more true for MoP, so my desire for a re-do on Classic servers wasn't really there to begin with for those versions.

The biggest question mark is what happens with MoP once it has finished, next up would be Warlords of Draenor, which was one of WoW's least liked expansions. I must admit, I'd find it quite ironic if Classic WoD actually happened as this was the era of "you think you do, but you don't", and when the push for official Classic servers really started to become more popularised and requested by the player base due to how much the game had changed from its original design. Without WoD though, these servers have a big question mark over them, do they remain MoP forever? I don't see much of an appeal for MoP era servers, so hopefully Blizzard talk about their plans at BlizzCon for this version of the game.

Season of Discovery: 

Then you have Season of Discovery, which "finished" quite a while ago at this point, SoD is one of the few times I've ever hit 60 in classic (yes, I am that slow at levelling), and I enjoyed it for what it was at the time, I've had thoughts of dipping back in, but again, with BlizzCon coming up, and SoD always being a "seasonal" server, I'm unsure it'll be here for much longer. I'm actually surprised its still available now to be honest, as its season ended long ago. I do log in to my 60 Night Elf Rogue sometimes, but don't do much beyond peruse around Stormwind or Ironforge for a few minutes before logging off again.

TBC Anniversary: 

I'd imagine Anniversary is where most of the current player base is, and at the time of its launch, I was really looking forward to another go around for Classic Vanilla and TBC again. While I did play Classic 2019, most of my time was spent re-rolling, playing alts, and moving servers, so I never really got past level 30 or so. I was keen to change that for Anniversary. Unfortunately, this was when Blizzard moved towards only doing 1-2 "mega servers" with zero roleplay server options, which personally, I am really not a fan of for a multitude of reasons that maybe I'll talk about one day. I ended up burning out around level 35 or so, mainly due to the fierce mob tagging for every quest just making the game a more frustrating experience than anything.

I have recently come back to anniversary, but only for some casual starter zone levelling, as I had the itch to play again, but didn't want to commit too much while waiting for all the BlizzCon news to drop. Furthermore, I'm very surprised by how competitive the mob tagging still is, even though it has been over a year now since Anniversary started. 

The biggest question is if these servers will move towards WotLK, or end to make room for Classic+, there's also questions of if we will get a TBC Era, in the same vein as the Classic Era realms, Blizzards silence has been rather frustrating on this. Personally, I'd love to see a TBC era, because I imagine the servers would be way less populated than they are now, which I would personally prefer.

Era:

I appreciate era a lot, mainly because of its stagnancy. A lot of people write it off due to that, but I think it's almost its biggest positive. The fact there is an end goal, you can "finish" it. I quite like that aspect of it. It's also one of the few versions remaining with smaller population realms, and more importantly, RP realms. I tend to come and go with Era, and I never cloned any of my characters during the initial TBC release, so I don't really have any dedicated high level characters on this version, but I always know that it's not going to go anywhere, so there's no real rush for me. I do fear Blizzard may do some server consolidation with all the upcoming news, and remove the RP realms as both of them (I play on EU) are extremely quiet, I really hope not, and it would be a real shame if that happened.

I know there are hardcore realms as well, but that's never really interested me much, I don't like the idea of losing a character for dying once, but maybe I'll try it one day.

So beyond some very casual levelling in TBC anniversary right now, I'm mostly just waiting for BlizzCon so we can get some answers on what's happening next. My desire to play the game is as strong as it ever was, but not knowing what's happening with all these versions means just waiting seems to be the best solution right now, which is unfortunate.