The month of October is upon it, full of spooky nights, winding corn mazes, and pumpkin spice everything. For this month’s MMOCO column, we’ll be looking at upcoming updates for TERA, FFXIV, and SWTOR.
TERA Gets New Aerial Island Event This Week
The Aerial Island event, dropping on October 15th, will introduce a new land mass (the Exodor Archipelago), a Card Collection system, a new Dungeon (Akalath Quarantine), and new gear. Getting to Exodor is easy: look for Ryshan at the Amadjuak Trading Post in Spring Valley and he’ll give you a quest entitled “the Way to Exodor.” Exodor will feature new content (quests, BAMs, and a solo dungeon questline) for those looking for open-world and solo fare, while the Akalath Quarantine dungeon will provide group content for five level 69 characters who have an iLevel of 458.
For those looking for less traditional MMO aspects, Aerial Island will also introduce collectible cards. Players can start their collection as soon as they leave Velika (the human Capital city) at level 11. It takes 20 fragments to complete a card and these fragments can be sold or traded. Each completed card will grant new bonuses and abilities for all a player’s characters on the same server. You can check out all the details in the video below:
FFXIV Patch 5.1 Coming Later This Month, Details to Performance Feature
Patch 5.1 for FFXIV “Vows of Virtue, Deeds of Cruelty” will be launching late this month (specific date TBA). With it will come a new dungeon (The Grand Cosmos), New Game+ mode, Fellowships, and much more. One such additional change was detailed last week: updates to the Performance feature.
From my understanding, jam sessions in FFXIV are quite popular, but lag can really throw a wrench in things. Patch 5.1 will introduce Ensemble Mode. Once all musicians have joined up in Ensemble Mode, they will be able to use the Metronome and mess with different settings (such as All Members vs. Self Only playback settings). Ensemble Mode will send the notes played by each party member to the server which will then combine them together and play them to the audience.
Five new brass instruments (Trumpet, Trombone, Tuba, Horn, and Saxophone) are also being added in this patch as well as a new Performance Assist feature.
SWTOR Onslaught Expansion Launches October 22nd
On October 22nd, the next big expansion for SWTOR will land, bringing with it a new planet and storyline, new gear options, a new Operation and Flashpoint, and much more. When the expansion arrives, it will be free to subscribers. Instead of having to pay individually for each expansion, anyone who subscribes for even one month will unlock and current and past expansions permanently on their account. As a special Onslaught promotion, anyone who was a subscriber between September 1, 2019 and October 22nd, 2019 (launch day) will unlock the Nautolan species for absolutely free.
Onslaught will be overhauling set bonuses to focus on types of mechanics/tools a class uses (e.g. bleeds, cover, shields), rather than on specific abilities. It will also be introducing Tactical Items, which will modify one of an Advanced Class/Discipline’s abilities. For the past few weeks, Bioware has been running a series that looks at each Advanced Class in the context of Onslaught, outlining their new abilities, Tactical Items, and new set bonuses.
That wraps it up for this month! Hope you all are enjoying the cool fall evenings with some MMOs!