Broadsword released a teaser trailer of sorts to announce that the SWTOR 7.6 PTS is coming soon with a new Lair Boss and the Dynamic Encounters feature available for testing.
SWTOR 7.6 Public Test Server Announcement
Eric Musco, SWTOR’s Game Director, hosted an announcement video on the game’s official YouTube channel for Update 7.6 ” Galactic Threads that teased a Lair Boss known as the Propagator Core XR-53 and new feature called Dynamic Encounters, both of which will be available on the PTS soon.
The exact date of when the PTS will be made available is currently unknown, but more info on the SWTOR 7.6 PTS will be released “next week”.
The devs stated that more info will be released on SWTOR’s website on how to join the SWTOR PTS, but you can also read our SWTOR PTS guide on how to do that when the server is active!
New Lair Boss: Propagator Core XR-53
A new Lair Boss, Propagator Core XR-53, will be available in Story and Veteran Modes in 7.6 and on the PTS. This instanced boss is located on Ilum and is designed for 8 players. It is a self-replicating droid that crashed onto Ilum as a piece of the False Emperor’s Space Station during the Battle of Ilum.
Lair Bosses are single bosses inside an instance on a planet, basically a cross between a World Boss and Operation Boss. They are built for 8 and 16 player groups, though it seems they’ve moved away from supporting 16m content with the most recent Operation, R-4 Anomaly. There are 5 Lair Bosses in SWTOR, including:
- Xenoanalyst II (Gray Secant, Ilum)
- The Eyeless (Rakghoul Tunnels)
- Golden Fury (Toborro’s Courtyard, Makeb)
- Colossal Monolith (Ziost)
- Geonosian Hive Queen (Ossus)
Both of the most recent Lair Bosses were released towards the very end of each expansion, so it’s possible that 8.0 could be on the horizon. If they keep to their schedule of releasing an expansion every 3.5 years, we could see 8.0 before the end of 2025.
They didn’t show any footage of the boss itself yet, but we did get to see some WIP shots of the instance. The shots didn’t seem to have lighting working fully, which makes me wonder what additional changes are in store.
They dredged up the wreckage of the Star of Coruscant in the Starship Graveyard at the edge of Hoth and plopped it down on Ilum. The lighting makes it look more like it’s still on Hoth though, just at night. It’s possible this might even be outside the instance itself.
Inside, we see a blending of Imperial space architecture that seems to be pulling heavily from Darth Marr’s Flagship in Chapter I of KotFE.
Reusing old assets so heavily gives the devs a chance to give them a face lift, as we’ve seen with all of the other Landing Zones added throughout in 7.0.
With 7.6, it’s likely that we’ll see Imperial facilities receive the art modernization treatment, galaxy-wide. It’s hard to tell how that will pan out with this art being such a work in progress.
Musco explained that the Propagator Core XR-53 boss is a droid, and since it has control of the facility, you’ll kind of be fighting the stage itself, which reminds me of IP-CPT, the first boss in R-4 Anomaly.
I see elements from Maelstrom Prison here, along with possibly Nihrot , though it might just be blood, as the previous image suggest cables going into biological containment units and that looks like blood, not Nihrot, on the floor.
Dynamic Encounters
SWTOR 7.6 will also introduce a new feature called “Dynamic Encounters” to add more life to planets. Planets can have timed events and will gain a new 8-point star icon during active events.
The teaser video displays Dynamic Encounters on the Planetary and Galaxy Maps with gold and green 8-point star symbols as seen below.
Systems like Dynamic Encounters have been a mainstay in open world games for years now, so this really feels like more of a necessary modernization effort than new gameplay, though it’s still good to see and creates more of an incentive for players to be on planets instead of hubs.
Examples of Dynamic Encounters in the video include defeating enough Imperials to summon and defeat their leader riding a Walker (1), a Hidden Chain Invasion on Hoth (2), and saving a cantina band’s gear from Womp Rats (3).
So far only Tatooine and Hoth have been shown to have more diverse types of encounters, while Hidden Chain Invasions were described as being “spread across the galaxy”.
I suspect the Hidden Chain Invasions are meant to tide us over and make the rest of the galaxy feel more active until they can do this on the rest of the planets. Perhaps they can get it done in time for the next story update, but I think 8.0 would be a more realistic bet.
I’m curious about how these events will interact with Conquest, as they’re a natural fit for each other. They may have a larger revamp underway for Conquest as a whole as the Battlemasters and Commanders at faction bases are kind of a proto version of this sort of thing.
Ilum has been getting visual enhancements throughout 7.0 as part of Broadsword’s art improvements and visual enhancements. The snow and huge chunks of ice are the only things left that haven’t been touched, so I suspect they now have a justification to finish their efforts on Ilum while beautifying 99% of Hoth too.
It’s more intriguing that Tatooine is included as well. In SWTOR, snow and sand are basically the same thing, just different colors. It might just be easy to do them both at the same time, as those textures are more complex than the others they’ve added thus far because they are the main environmental feature.
I long for the volumetric snow and sand, like the kind we see in Star Wars Outlaws, though the only physics simulation this game does at all is ballistic impulses on knockbacks, so that’s a bit of a pipe dream.
PTS Reward: B1-SAL Minipet
Players will have a chance to near a B1-SAL droid minipet as a reward for participating in the SWTOR 7.6 PTS. It’s clearly inspired by B2EMO from Andor, modified to fit SWTOR’s floating cube droid art style used for promotional pets as of late.
This hovering droid was unintentionally distributed to players who happened to log in on the morning of April 28th, 2023, but has been unavailable ever since.
The exact criteria needed to earn the pet has not been released yet but will be seen on the SWTOR website when it’s available. In the past, the requirements have been quite arduous.
Stay tuned for more information about 7.6 “Galactic Threads” on the PTS and the upcoming SWTOR Dev Livestream in November, also touched upon in the SWTOR Q3 2024 Producer Letter along with a new native Mac launcher.
