It’s been a whole year since I last did a new entry in this column. After hitting the level cap very early on in the year I hit a roadblock where I just didn’t know what I wanted to do in the game. I had a lot of other stuff going on at the time and the lack of any grouping tools just made the whole prospect of doing endgame stuff seem like too much effort. I wanted to jump back in when Bespin hit, but when it turned out that to begin the story you had to have completed the Hoth Heroic (group content which I had yet to get round to), I just bounced into a different game altogether.
Around October however, I started to get the urge to return. The Galactic Moon Festival and Life Day feel as much an integral part of the holidays for me as putting up (real world) decorations and watching Home Alone, so that was a major contributing factor.
I did jump back into the game to check out the Galactic Moon Festival stuff, but I was still a bit lost as to what other reason I had to be in the game. The idea of getting back into the swing of things wouldn’t leave me though, so I decided to sit down and make a list of all the content I’d like to experience in the game. Some of it was stuff I had done years ago on the live servers and some of it was Legends exclusive content. There was a good mix of long-term, short-term, group, solo, and non-combat things on the list so I would never not be able to look at it and find something to do depending on my mood.
Alongside the list, another important discovery has got me playing a lot more – Discord. Yes ok, I recognise that I’m about five years late on this one. I’ve been using Discord for a few years now, but I’ve always been kind of against it in the sense that there’s a part of me that feels that it creates something of an immersion breaker between myself and the game. The reality is though that it’s a bloody helpful bit of software that, if nothing else, makes organising any sort of group content a million times easier.
Rather than wasting time spamming LFG messages in Mos Eisley, I can just plug in an event sign-up on my guild’s Discord server. We can all be ready at the allocated time and we can get straight into the content we had planned. It’s extremely efficient, and as you can see from my list above I’ve already managed to tick off a few boxes which require bringing along some friends.
Life Day kicks off today and there’s an event celebrating the 10th anniversary of the game’s sunset also taking place at the moment so I’m definitely going to spend some time checking those out in the coming days, but next up on the agenda is to do a few more Heroic runs to get my 5-piece jewellery set, then I’ll feel satisfied to take on Hoth and Bespin. On the whole, I really can’t overstate how happy I am to be back in this game and actively partaking in its community. 2021 has been a banner year for the SWG Legends server and I really can’t wait to see what the team have up their sleeves for next year.