Crew Skills

This thought was prompted by a line in a post over at Going Commando, where Shintar points out that “daily quests … are designed to make you repeat them“.

Many SWTOR players are familiar with World of Warcraft, and describe SWTOR’s features in a context that other gamers will understand – and so heroic quests become “dailies”, because you can repeat them every day and that’s the shorthand that former WoW players will understand. Technically true, but – as Shintar says – I think comparing them to WoW dailies is misrepresenting them somewhat.

In WoW, daily quests really are designed to be a grind; you don’t get anything worthwhile until you’ve done quite a few days’ worth in succession. In almost every case you’re grinding for tokens or factional gains, and you’ll need to repeat the same dailies (often half a dozen quests or more) for a couple of weeks before seeing any reward.

In SWTOR, “dailies” are just quests that you can repeat for extra rewards if you choose. However, they provide meaningful rewards – commendations, moddable gear, random loot boxes, or credits – with every repeat, so you’re not roped into a tedious multi-week grind just to get any value out of one day’s worth of quests. Commendations are arguably an investment rather than an upfront reward, but there are so many ways to get commendations it’s far from a grind.

This might all change at endgame, of course – but as far as the levelling game goes, I find I much prefer SWTOR’s approach to repeatable content.