Broadsword’s Keith Kanneg dropped a quarterly producer letter for Star Wars The Old Republic with a fresh peek at what’s coming for the MMORPG as it zooms through spring and toward the most important holiday of the year: May the Fourth.
For starters, the Dantooine Spring Abundance Festival is currently live with a new “minipet,” and the devs are teasing GU 7.9 aka Legacy Reborn, which sees “Darth Jadus, Darth Malgus, and Shae Vizla clash in an epic battle that will decide the future of the galaxy” this spring. Of course, it’s the 8.0 update (expansion?) that we’re all most hyped for. No new info here, alas.
“We know you want to hear more about our plans for 8.0 and we are equally looking forward to sharing what the team is working on! In the last Livestream we covered some of our high-level goals, and we’ve enjoyed watching the speculation about features we might be working on. We also covered how we’ll communicate about 8.0 throughout the year, and the next major check-in will come with the 7.9 Livestream, where we’ll share the first feature details you can expect from this update.”
We can, however, look forward to multiple sales and XP events for the Star Wars Day events in May, and the team has a lengthy piece up on the migration to DirectX 12. It’s a little granular, admittedly, but as Kanneg notes, “technical upgrades such as moving to DirectX 12 and updating to 64-bit are huge milestones for the game, as it both preserves its health and gives [the team] opportunities to build even more compelling content for players.” Currently, Broadsword says it has “all the major features working” barring the UI. When it’s ready for alpha, they’ll get players in.