145: Old Republic, New Rules

This week on the show, Broadsword held a livestream to talk about the first real details of 8.0. Classic SWTOR is coming. Well — sort of. I'll explain. 

Game Update 7.9.1, Light and Shadow, is going live this week. I'll tell you about Galactic Season 11, some cool new additions coming to the Cartel Market, and a couple of Twitch Drops you don't want to miss. 

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SOTOR Podcast (00:00.256)
Episode one hundred and forty-five of the State of the Old Republic podcast was originally recorded on August 4th, 2026.

SOTOR Podcast (00:19.392)
It's the State of the Old Republic podcast.

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This week on the show, Broadsword held a live stream to talk about the first real details of 8-0. Classic Swotor is coming. Well, sort of, I'll explain.

SOTOR Podcast (00:50.04)
Game update 791, Light and Shadow is going live this week. It has. Wait, did I just bury the lead? Well, I'll tell you about Galactic Season 11, some cool new additions coming to the cartel market, and a couple of Twitch drops you don't want to miss. And with that, it's time to make the jump to Lightspeed and cue the moron. Welcome to episode 145 of the State of the Old Republic podcast.

I'm your host Ted, and as you heard in the opening, I have another great show lined up for you today. Broadsword closed out last week with a live stream covering two things Game Update 791 and the first real shape of 8.0. 791 is just Galactic Season 11. It's a rerun season with a few new rewards, and it went live on August 4th. The 8.0 half is where it gets interesting. Broadsword revealed the first details of 8.0 back in February, where

If you recall, there were some yellow boxes representing features they weren't ready to reveal. Now they've revealed them. New things to do? Not really. More like new ways to experience what's already there. Let's dive in.

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Earlier this year, Broadsword ran a double XP event. I decided to roll a new Imperial Agent. I had a desire to see the agent story and play a little space Barbie. Fun fact: of all the classes, I find that my agents have the most outfits of any of them. It's fun going undercover. My journey started by traveling to a stronghold. There I grabbed a few million credits, I popped an XP boost, I added my character to my guild, and I unlocked all the legacy XP perks.

I put on my set of leveling armor, a reward from the Dark vs. Light event from a few years ago. Then I grabbed all the items from my mail. I consumed all the title items, not because I wanted to display them, but because they grant XP when you consume them. Ding. Just like that, I'm level two before I even step out the door. I returned to HUDA. I did the story, ding. I did the side quest, ding.

I did the dynamic encounters and heroic missions. Ding ding. I hit the fleet, ran the black talon, and by the time I was ready for Drum and Coss, I was over level 30. This of course represents the most extreme version of leveling in the game today. If I'm being honest, I don't mind leveling that fast. Yes, it's weird being on Drum and Coss at level 30, but I still get XP and rewards. Not a total loss.

The real issue is combat. There's no danger. I spend more time looting enemies than I do fighting them. If I'm playing a new combat style and there are a few I don't know well, then the abilities come at me fast and furious. It's too much to process. So I'm left with either stopping to figure things out or just mash random buttons because no matter what I do, everything will die. Just not me. It's a far cry from what I experienced.

15 years ago. If you played this game back in the day, you probably remember having a moment like this. For me, it was facing SelmaCorps on Voss. Undergeared and with a lack of knowledge about the fight, and several deaths later, I found myself genuinely concerned that I would not be able to complete it. Information on the internet was scarce, no true guide, just random tips strewn across forums, and comments from other players like this.

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Seriously though, who made the difficulty level for this boss? Bruce Lee? There was enough out there to piece together what I needed to do. In the end, I won't say it was an evening well spent, but the victory was satisfying. That's what Swotor was like in 2011. Silver and gold elites meant something. Encounters with characters like Selma Corps, Darth Jadis, and the Sith Emperor lived up to the name of the person you were fighting.

8-0 is hoping to recapture that nostalgia, and perhaps the desire to smash one's keyboard into tiny pieces. And Broadsword is tackling this in two ways. First is a change to the leveling experience. It'll still be fast, but playing only main story missions will not level you to 85. You will likely have to dip into some planetary arcs and side missions. That solves the pace of leveling, but what about combat?

In what Eric Musko called a response to player feedback along the lines of, I wish I could make the game harder for myself, Broadsword is introducing difficulty modes for overworld content. Let's get into how it works. Three modes story, veteran, and master, all togglable as you journey through the game. As to what these mean, story will feel like the game's current difficulty. Veteran will feel more like classic Swotor.

And Master will present you with the game's biggest challenges. Spectre curse your companions and die here. This is how it will function. The difficulty modes affect the damage and healing you receive and the experience you gain. It does not affect the amount of damage that you do. And the harder the difficulty, the less experience you gain. Yes, that feels counterintuitive, but that's how it's designed. It's also a personal effect.

You can be on story difficulty and your friend can be on master difficulty, and you can fight together without impacting each other's games. Again, all of this is a choice. It's not forced on you. Happy with today's combat? You can still have that. But here is something that Eric Musko said on the live stream that struck me. When we've done internal playtests, the thing that I found and that I honestly absolutely loved playing in difficulties is that.

Eric Musco - Livestream Clip (07:01.0)
Every piece of gear I was getting, I was desperate to get upgrades. I always had the most recent med pack on my bar. Sometimes I had two sets of med packs, depending on if I needed them, to make sure that I had like an emergency out to get away from it. it just changed how I was playing. I was resting in between every pack to make sure I was at full health. It really, really evoked that, hey, I'm going back to classic SWOTOR when the game launched, you know, day one of

I take Eric at his word about what this change will evoke, but I can't help but wonder if left to their own volition, will players choose a harder difficulty or will they take the path of least resistance? Broadsword clearly understands that players might need a little push here too, and that's where ventures come in. Ventures are solo, subscriber-only content worth knowing up front, and 8-0 is adding two ventures centered around the difficulty modes, classic and expert.

Roll a dedicated venture character and choose your track. Classic or expert. No switching, no changing to story difficulty until you've cleared every objective in it. Classic locks you to veteran, and as Broadsword put it in their livestream article, it's really meant to evoke that feeling you had playing Swotor for the first time. The closer to launch you played, the more true this is. The objectives will take you only up to completing the main vanilla game story, level 50.

And other objectives will be things like getting a crew skill, completing planetary story arcs. You get the idea. Playing like you did the very first time, all while in veteran difficulty. Expert locks you to master, and as Broadsword says, it's for the true challenge seekers. You are going into level 80 plus, explore the galaxy, completing heroics, and hunting down rare enemies, all in the hardest difficulty Swotar has to offer.

Master. A couple of other things worth noting here, Broadsword said that venture characters will also experience unique gameplay during their travels, such as special consumables, that allow them to complete time-limited challenges to gain powerful temporary buffs. It will be interesting to see what these are, but it might be tied into something Eric said on the live stream. So we have some controls in place where like there may be some of you thinking, but Eric, I'm just a person on the internet.

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You can't be expecting me to play master difficulty. You just said it's hard. Look, we're looking at things about like as you complete veteran ventures, you're gonna get some things that are gonna maybe power you up a little bit, make it a little easier to complete more veteran ventures, and make it easier for you to complete master ventures, right? Because we do want this to be something that everyone can gain access to and be able to do, you know? so we're aware of that. Even though there are two ventures, there are unique rewards and incentives for completing every venture with all eight classes.

So is classic SWOTOR returning? Not really. Nobody's bringing back the old skill trees. Your companions work exactly the way they do today, gearing, galactic command, none of it rolls back. If you wanted an actual time machine, this isn't it. That would mean standing up a dedicated legacy server, frozen the way the game looked in 2012. What this is instead is closer to our course correction. A what if? What if?

Swootor had kept adding everything it's created over 15 years, all the systems, all the quality of life changes, and just never let go of the feel. Planetary arcs, crew skills, story flashpoints, same as they've always been, just running under veteran or master instead of story. You don't need 15-year-old code to get the danger back, you just need the difficulty turned back up. That's what Ventures, especially Classic, is actually betting on.

It's old republic, new rules.

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Coming up, inventory management is a perpetual problem in the old republic, there are some changes coming that will ease that pain. But first, there's a new operation coming in 8-0, and I'll tell you about that, plus the combat changes you'll need to survive.

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One of the hallmarks of an expansion is combat changes. If you're expecting a complete overhaul of the game's combat styles and disciplines, well, this expansion is not that. But it's not nothing either. Let's start with the mechanics behind these changes because there's a specific design choice happening here, not just new abilities, hooray. Every discipline, not every class, every discipline gets exactly one new ability and one new passive earned at level 83.

But here's the important part. These aren't new abilities bolted onto your bar. They're upgrades, replacing an ability your discipline already has. And specifically the ability getting replaced is one that's shared across the whole combat style, something every discipline in it already has in common. I'll read between the lines a bit here. Upgrading an existing ability instead of adding a new one is almost certainly about keeping ability bloat in check. Your bar doesn't get any more crowded.

Just gets a discipline-specific twist on something already there. And picking a shared ability as the base is probably about scope, one ability to rebalance and reskin per combat style instead of touching everything separately. But even with all that care, it's never quite that simple. Take sorcerer and sage. The shared ability is force lightning and telekinetic throw. For corruption, that becomes something you cast on an ally instead of an enemy.

Channel it and it heals them instead of hurting them. Shooting your friends with lightning, that's kind of kinky. Throwing rocks at your friends, it's all fun and games until someone loses an eye. And once you hit level 85 and have those new abilities, you'll want something to fight. The Null Acolyte, the first boss of the Children of Null operation, is live on the PTS in both story and veteran mode. And if you run operations, that's worth your time twice over.

Hopping on the PTS gets you an early look at the operation, which is set on Darth Knoll's ship, The Enigma, and it gets your team reps on the first fight before anyone's written a guide for it. You don't just get to fight the boss, you get to shape the encounter. Getting onto the PTS means starting over, though, no character copy. You'll roll a fresh level 1 character in one of the three testable combat styles, get teleported to a Destin, and pull from an XP boost vendor.

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And a gear vendor there. Put on some 370 rated gear and then a phase gate near those vendors will drop you straight into the fight. Here's the question worth sitting with though. What does that feedback actually mean when only three combat styles are testable at 85 with their new kits? Real ops team members aren't Marauder, Powertex, and Sorcerer, plus mirrors, and nothing else. To be fair, that class selection wasn't random.

Broadsword picked those three specifically because it's a complete trinity. Tank, heals, DPS. You can actually run the boss as a group, not just poke at it solo. And this time there's something new in the boss room. A droid named the M4RTN, the Operations Observer. This isn't just there to log complaints after the fact. It actually lets you tune the fight yourself. Mid-session. Cranked an all acolytes' health up or down.

Just its damage output, and tweak the health or damage on the ads, and your settings stick between pulls until you reset them. So is this a true simulation or a preview dressed up as one? Between the Trinity of Rolls and a Droid that lets you actually tune the encounter yourself, this looks a lot more like a real lab than a showcase. But three classes still is in a raid roster, and everyone's starting from a level one boost with vendor gear.

Nobody's actually running this the way live ops teams will, gearing included. That's the thing to watch once you try this on the PTS. Not just what the boss does, but whether tuning a fight yourself actually tells Broadsword something they couldn't get another way.

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There was a lot of excitement when Broadsword introduced fitted items to the game. You know, those cosmetic armor pieces and weapons designed to preserve the look of classic and random world drops. That excitement was quickly tempered by the amount of inventory space needed to hold everything. 8-0 is looking to fix that problem. Fitted armor and weapons are moving into collections. And I'll be curious to see what the unluck cost is. Class sets have run around 10 CCs before.

So that's the number to watch. But remember, these are bind on legacy. So if you don't want to spend cartel coins, designate one character as your collector and pull pieces from their personal collection instead. It's more legwork, but it works. The real win though is visibility. You'll be able to preview sets and weapons on your character before you decide you even want them. Another change that will free up some space is

Toys and regen items will become abilities instead of something you carry around. If your inventory is cluttered with things you've already slotted on your bars anyway, this just clears the junk drawer. One more small change worth a mention: animated stronghold decorations will now stay in whatever state you left them in. No more finding your lights reset every time you zone back in. Good changes all around. Speaking of good changes, let's not forget the other features coming in 8.0.

Here's a quick recap. We get the next era of story, level cap increase to 85, and a new gear system. Details on that have not been revealed yet. And then we also have the new planet Ryloth, the Twielik Homeworld, with dynamic encounters. The first phase of the PTS is now live with the Ops Boss, quality of life changes, and combat changes for Sorcerer, Power Tech, Marauder, and their Republic Mirror.

In the coming months, you can expect more PTS phases and more live streams to dive into everything coming in eight

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As I said at the top, Game Update 7-9 went live this week. The highlight: Galactic Season 11, Light and Shadow. It's a rerun of seasons 2 and 4, launching August 18th, with fan favorite companions Fenzale and Amity making their return. Companion gifts for these will be greatly discounted, making it easy to bring their influence level up to 50. You'll want to do this because there are objectives that require you to use these companions.

You'll be able to earn all the rewards from seasons two and four, and there's new items for those that already have them. New customizations. Venzale gets a Headhunter look and a Twirler look. Hamity gets a penumber option, plus a matching armor set that's wearable by players. There are two new hover car mounts, the Emerald Land and Sapphire City. Both are companion enabled. There are a couple of new legacy titles on the track: Last Light and

In disguise, plus legacy achievement title, perfectly balanced, and new character titles and stronghold labels round it all out. Plenty of items to chase while you wait for 8-0. 791 isn't just a season though, it's also bringing something new to the cartel market, a whole new storefront category called accessories. These aren't full armor sets, they're individual pieces meant to layer onto whatever you're already wearing for a little extra customization.

Handful of these items already exist in the game, but 791's first wave leans hard into cybernetics. Few examples include prosthetic feet, prosthetic hands, and prosthetic forearms, some of these inspired by Star Wars Maul Shadow Lord. As we head into fall, the Feast of Prosperity returns with one new reward: a waiter droid customization for your ship droids. And like they do with every update, there's a new Twitch drop available.

Right now, if you watch one hour of live SWOTOR content, you can earn the Runic poster. And if you watch five hours of live SWOTOR content, you can earn the Vectron Colette EM4 mount. This is a two-tiered campaign which runs for 28 days. Just remember to connect your SWOTOR account with your Twitch account. Game Update 791 is lean as expected.

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That just gives you more time to hit the PTS and get an early look at 8.0's features as they roll out. And speaking of rolling out, that's the State of the Old Republic for today. Let me cut in the sublight engines and cue the music and congratulate you on surviving another half hour listening to episode 145 of the State of the Old Republic podcast. I'm your host Ted, and I thank you for tuning in. You can find this podcast on BuzzSprout in iTunes.

Wherever else you find your podcasts, I'm also back to putting these on YouTube. You can listen to the show directly from the show site, which is Sotorpodcast.com, and there is an RSS feed where you can subscribe to the podcast directly. If you have a question for the show, you can email me at SotorPodcast at gmail.com. Thank you so much for listening. And until next time, remember the Sith Code Cake is a lie