Star Wars: The Old Republic hopes to recapture the ‘classic’ experience with difficulty options and a new way to start from scratch

I don’t know if Stars Wars: The Old Republic is the best MMO around—or even the best Star Wars MMO around—but there’s something to be said for keeping the party alive for nearly 15 years at this point, even as developer Broadsword took the reins from BioWare in 2023. If you miss those halcyon days when the game had just dropped, well, you might want to give the imminent 8.0 update a look.

It was revealed in a blog post that went up Thursday, and it promises a pretty standard lineup of big MMO update features: a raised level cap, more spells and phat loots to futz with, and new zones to explore in the Twi’lek homeworld Ryloth. But there’s also two new systems both tackling the MMO’s prickliest design conundrum: difficulty.

The first of those is a difficulty slider, which lets you pick your poison between “a cinematic story-driven journey, a more demanding combat experience, or the ultimate challenge.” Notably, you can group up with friends regardless of what you’ve all chosen, so it’ll be interesting to observe how the scaling works out there.

There’s also the new “venture” characters, which operate on their own difficulty system split between classic and expert options. These characters have to start a new story from the beginning, but they’ll get special rewards for completing extra objectives as they play through the game normally. It’s not clear what those rewards are, but the whole thing is apparently meant to “evoke the feel of the classic SWTOR experience” back when it was slightly less easy to roll over a dozen mobs at once.

It’s a neat idea, assuming it doesn’t morph into some battle pass-inspired FOMO nightmare. SWTOR probably isn’t so different from its old self that fans are desperate for an OSRS-style revival, but it does still have a best-in-class leveling journey let down by the fact that you can faceroll your way through a great deal of it. If the rewards are fun to pursue and objectives non-tedious, it could brush the dust off those zones and get people grouping in them again.

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