The day has finally arrived—the final content update for Star Wars Hunters, which will officially shut down on October 1. And I regret to inform you that it's so much worse than you probably imagined.
To be clear, the patch notes are accurate, and everything previously promised in the final update has been granted. The new Hunter, Tuya, has arrived and is fully playable in-game. In-app purchases have been disabled, and a LOT of content that you previously had to pay for is now free. Game modes, now through October 1, will rotate regularly to give us the chance to play them all as much as possible for one last time.
They could have stopped there. But they didn't. And instead of rewarding players with free skins and a new character, they essentially removed every single incentive for anyone to keep playing.
The events tab is completely gone in the new update. No challenges, no quests. So sure, you get skins and the like for free -- if you completed Sentinel's second mastery to get that cool skin, guess what? It's free now! Congrats.
But this also means that we can no longer continue grinding as we play to complete other character masteries. And any progress we did make is just ... gone. Completely wiped from existence. What is the point of continuing to play if there is nothing to work toward? All the time that we spent winning matches and getting critical eliminations -- it was actually all for nothing?
Which, yes, this would have been the case when the game goes away completely. But what are we supposed to do between now and then? Continue to get matched poorly with bots or players who don't engage with nothing to unlock until it all ends?
To say I'm disappointed doesn't even begin to cover it. I am angry. This game has been a daily comfort for me since it launched, and there was no notion -- no warning -- that all incentives to continue would be taken away today. Which means, though we thought we would have time to grieve the end before it arrived, we actually don't. It's already over.
This is a huge "kark you" to players who have been around since Day 1 (or before the game launched), and it's unforgivable. This game had one last chance to make the most of its final months, and it has instead rendered itself already dead.