Episode 143: 7.9 Livestream Recap!

Today on the State of the Old Republic Podcast… we’ve reached the end of an era. Game Update 7.9 — Legacy Reborn — is almost here, and with it, the finale of the Legacy of the Sith storyline. It’s been a long trek: from Elom, to Ruhnuk, to Voss, Hutta, Ilum, and more. And now it’s taking us to a world steeped in ancient Sith history. We’re going to Khar Shian.

 As they say, when one door closes, another door opens. As Legacy of the Sith ends, the next era is set to begin. I’ll share the first details about 8.0.

And finally, this week, I’ll give you an update on DirectX12, May the 4th, and everything else happening in the Old Republic.                                 

Transcript

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Episode 143 of the State of the Old Republic podcast was originally recorded on May 3rd, 2026.

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It's the state of the old Republic podcast.

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This show, we've reached the end of an era. Game Update 7.9 Legacy Reborn is almost here and with it, the finale of the Legacy of storyline. It's been a long trek and now it's taking us to a world steeped in ancient Sith history. We're going.

She-An as they say when one door closes another door opens as legacy of the Sith ends The next era is set to begin. I'll share the first details about 8-0 And finally this week I'll give you an update on DirectX 12 May the 4th and everything else happening in the Old Republic And with that it's time to make the jump to light speed and cue the moron

Welcome to episode 143 of the state of the old republic podcast. I'm your host Ted and as you heard in the opening I have another great show lined up for you today The swotor developers held another live stream this week this time to talk about game update 7.9 legacy reborn Today we're breaking down the April 30th developer live stream. What's coming in 7.9? What's next in 8.0?

and why the team says they're uncontrollably excited for the future of Star Wars The Old Republic. Let's start with Legacy Reborn, the final chapter of Legacy of the Sith.

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The opened with a simple reminder. This is it. The finale. The end of what's been a multi-year galaxy hopping adventure. Swoattor's version of the amazing race. And for this final leg, the teams are all heading to Karchean. At a coal in the hidden chain. Darth Malgus alongside Shay Vizsla and her crew. Darth Jadis and his cult of followers. The Mandalorians led by the Order brothers, Jekaiya and Rass. And of course, us.

and are few remaining allies. As Ashley Ruhl, narrative director for SWOTOR put it, So not only is Jadis and the Hidden Chain going to be on Karcheon, Shay Vizsla and Malgus also know everyone's on Karcheon and the player's going to Karcheon. So we're all going to Karcheon. We sure are. As for what's at stake, well remember that giant machine with the holocron we saw in the Disorder cinematic trailer? The one that was destroyed? Well, it's back.

and it's the million dollar prize in this high stakes race to determine the fate of the galaxy. Now normally the way we experience these stories is from the perspective of us versus the world. That's about to change in Legacy Reborn. At various points in Legacy Reborn, we'll be able to assume the role of other characters. Characters like Lana Beniko and wait for it, Darth Malgus will become fully playable with their own unique set of abilities.

And while it will be fun, as Ashley put it, to play around as Lana in own face as a Sith, it sounds like there may be more to this than just mowing down NPCs in combat. Here's what Ashley and game director Eric Musco had to say about it on the live stream. One of the things I'm definitely most excited about in 7.9 is that not only, course, are you going to play as your own character as you go through the full extent of like, C. Reborn, but that we're going to give you opportunities to play through a lot of unique other

Experiences? Perspectives. Yeah, yeah. And it's not just, you know, single person, like, combat. There are some really interesting... I don't want spoil anything, but there's some really cool experiences that you get with the different perspectives. Yep. Okay. want to say more words, but I can't say any more words. You've got experience. Play it. Yeah. I'm wondering if we may get some dialogue options with some of these characters.

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I wouldn't be surprised if after some fighting as Darth Malgus, we stroll up to Darth Jadus and he's standing there with a purple triangle over his head. And I also wouldn't be surprised if we had to choose between certain characters to play, such as Darth Jadus or Malgus, or perhaps even Hedda Cole or Shay Vizsla. To understand where I'm coming from, I wanna go back to something that Keith Kanig said in his Q1 producer's letter. He wrote,

Game Update 7.9 Legacy Reborn is the legacy of the Sith Finale. Darth Jadis, Darth Malgus and Shay Vizsla clash in an epic battle that will decide the future of the galaxy. Who will you side with and who will emerge victorious? Clearly, there is a lot going on here and maybe there are some big choices to make. And as for how it's all going to end, well, your guest is as good as mine.

I'm excited for it and clearly the SWOTOR team is excited for it as well. It's so good. I'm so excited for y'all. It's, and it is so incredible that we are at this point where you get to see Legacy of the Sith in its entirety, all the pieces, all the story, all the character growth and see it all come together. And we're really excited for y'all to get to play this and see all the love that the team has put into it.

One more thing to add, once again the story will ship without the French and German dialogue. You can play it in English with French and German subtitles, but you'll have to continue to wait for the French and German voices. C'est la vie, or should I say that's life. And that's all I've got on the Legacy Reborn story. Up next I'll tell you about a few other things coming in 7-9, and then after that I'll dive into what we know about 8-0.

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As usual, story is the big pole in the tent, but it's not the only thing we're getting in 7-9. PvP Season 10, Honor and Battle, will start and run for 16 weeks. This season's theme? Knights. And no, we're not talking about Jedi Knights or Zakuul Knights or even Summer Knights. Think Knights of the Round Table. As you quest through the season, you'll earn the Honor Bound, Beholden, Loyalist Contender, and Honorable Combatant Armors.

And no, they didn't show off these armors during the livestream, but Erik Musko seemed pretty excited about them. You'll also be able to earn various titles and decorations as well as two new flares, Knightly Dark and Knightly Light. These they did show off and I think they look great. And I really wish you could unlock them in collections. The currency to buy them is legacy, so why not make the flares legacy as well? Well, that's PvP Season 10.

Get ready to hop into a battleground and get medieval on someone's ass. There are a couple of quality of life changes coming in 7.9. Updates have been made to the intro mission, Wreckage on Dantooine, with cleaner onboarding to content such as hazards, the ability to skip the mission on subsequent plays, and a reduction in the requirements for zone progression. The Orbital Core encounter will be separated from the Wreckage on Dantooine, allowing players to complete the story mission without

having to defeat the final boss. There's also a big change coming for companions. If you started playing S'Wotor after Knights of the Fallen Empire and Knights of the Eternal Throne, you may not have realized that there is a terminal where you can go and get back any companions that were removed through story. For example, in Knights of the Eternal Throne, there's a point where you must choose between two companions. One will live and one will die. You can use the terminal to get back the one that died.

They won't appear in story, but you can run around the galaxy and use them like any other companion. Well, starting in 7.9, the companion terminal on Odessin will be disabled and replaced with a new tab in the companion's window called Ineligible for Story. It's a great change. And that's all I have on 7.9, Legacy Reborn. Expect it to go live at the end of May, and then all eyes turn to 8.0.

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which we know a lot more about thanks to the livestream. That's coming up next.

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When it came to talking about 8-0, the team had to walk a tightrope. Give us something without giving us everything. And the reasoning was simple. This is Legacy of the Sith's moment. Once we get through Legacy Reborn, it's all about 8-0. But they did confirm several things. First, the level cap is increasing to 85, which means new abilities for every discipline.

It also means a new gearing system is on its way as well. No details on how that system will work, but they did say that they wanted it to feel like an evolution of the current system and not completely new. Once you have all that gear, you need stuff to do and there is a new three boss operation coming in 8.0. It will launch with story and veteran modes and, and Keith promised that master mode will come.

later. Of course there will be a new story to anchor all of this and the team confirmed what we already knew. It will be a new story but built on the events of Legacy of the Sith. It's not a hard reset but a bridge and hopefully we'll be able to just cross that bridge and start the story without having to make the full journey. Jedi Under Siege as a starting point for Legacy of the Sith? Yeah that was brutal. The story will take us to Ryloth, the home world of

the Twi'Lix. Ryloth will be a fully explorable planet with dynamic encounters. Now they wouldn't say why we're going to Ryloth because it's tied to the events in Legacy Reborn, but I will remind you that two of the main characters, Sahar and Rakan, are Twi'Lix. So it's a pretty good bet that the story is tied to them and we'll see more of these two in the future. Keith and Eric tease that there are more features coming in 8.0

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and they'll reveal that information when it's time. Most of the content for 8.0 will go up on the PTS and they are targeting summer for us to be able to test everything out. I'm beyond excited for 8.0. I still don't think they've officially called it an expansion, but at this point, if it walks like a duck, yeah, it's an expansion. And they have a lot left to reveal, which they'll do throughout the year. That's all we know about 8.0.

but that's not the only thing the team is working on. Next up, I'll have an update on DirectX 12.

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For now, Star Wars The Old Republic has been quietly working through a kind of long-term renovation project. Not the flashy kind where you tear down a wall and suddenly there's a breakfast nook. This is the other kind, the kind where you replace the plumbing so the house doesn't collapse in 10 years. Back in March, BroadSword gave us a real update on one of the biggest pieces of that renovation, the move to DirectX 12. They opened their article with a reminder of why this matters.

Modernization continues to be a priority for the team as we look to the future of SWOTOR," they wrote. And if you've been following the last few years, 64-bit client, the environment refreshes, the character updates, you can feel how this fits into that larger arc. This isn't a coat of paint. This is structural. The team describes the beginning of the DX12 journey in a way that feels almost archaeological. They had to strip the game down to a bare bones version of itself.

A version where as they put it, objects were drawn with no textures. Imagine logging into Korriban and seeing a world made of blank shapes, like someone forgot to unpack the art assets. But that was the point. They needed a clean baseline, free of the old DirectX9 specific code, so they could rebuild the rendering pipeline without dragging decades of technical debt along for the ride. And then comes the part that surprised a lot of players.

Swotor's engine isn't really Hero Engine anymore. Over the years it's been rewritten, replaced, and customized so heavily that the team just calls it the Swotor Engine. Which means there was no upgrade button to press, no new version to download. They had to rebuild the rendering layers themselves. They even pulled in help from EA's Frostbite teams, not to convert Swotor to the Frostbite engine, which they're very clear about.

but to borrow some rendering components that could slot into the existing engine. It's a little like borrowing a transmission from a sports car and fitting it into a classic cruiser. And according to the update, most of the major features are now working, lighting, textures, shaders, all the things that make Swotor look like Swotor. But there's one big piece still holding things up, the user interface.

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The team says we can all agree that the UI is a must have for any future testing and that converting it has been their greatest challenge to date, which makes sense. SwivelTorch's UI is deeply intertwined with the game's systems and unlike graphics, there's no such thing as a minimal UI. You either have one or you don't. Right now they're pushing to get that UI functional so they can move toward a technical alpha and they're setting expectations early.

First public test won't include everything. Shadows, bloom, and other advanced features may not be ready. The priority will be compatibility. Seeing how the new renderer behaves across the wild ecosystem of GPUs, CPUs, laptops, and Franken PCs that make up the Swotor player base. But the most important part of the article is the long-term vision. The team writes, the goal of moving to DirectX 12

is to ensure that the technology used to maintain the game is supported as well as provide us with opportunities to further modernize the game. That's the heart of it. This is about keeping Swotor viable on future versions of Windows, future graphics drivers, and future hardware. It's about giving the developers room to grow, room they simply didn't have under DirectX 9. And yes, DX12 opens the door to new graphical improvements down the line.

better lighting, better shadows, better effects, but those aren't the headline. The headline is that SWOTOR is being positioned to survive and evolve in a gaming landscape that's moving fast. If you've been playing this game since 2011, you know how rare it is for an MMO to get this kind of deep engine investment 15 years in. It's not glamorous work, doesn't show up in a trailer, but it's the kind of work that keeps the game alive.

and in a year where we're getting the end of Legacy of the Sith, 8.0, and all the other content the team has been teasing, it's reassuring to see that the foundation underneath all of that is being reinforced. BroadSword ends the update with a simple promise. More details are coming and they look forward to showing us what DirectX 12 can really do. And honestly, so am I.

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May the 4th is upon us again, a day where fans celebrate all things Star Wars and open up their wallets to get the latest Star Wars merchandise. I'm not judging. In fact, I am one of you. I'm eyeing those new Old Republic Black Series figures that Hasbro just announced. The story of May the 4th starts long before it became a global Star Wars holiday. The earliest known version of the pun shows up in 1979, the day Margaret Thatcher won the UK election.

Conservative Party ad in the London Evening News played off the famous line, may the fourth be with you. That ad might have been lost to time except a year later, writer Alan Arnold mentioned it in his book, Once Upon a Galaxy, a journal of the making of The Empire Strikes Back. This was published in 1980 after Empire was released. The book was written as a diary of sorts, chronicling important events related to the making of the film on the dates they happened.

Here is the excerpt from his book from May 4th, 1979. Margaret Thatcher has won the election and become Britain's first woman prime minister. celebrate her victory, her party took out a half-page advertisement in the London Evening News. Their message referring to the day of victory was, May the 4th be with you, Maggie. Congratulations. Further proof to the extent at which Star Wars has influenced us all.

His book is the reason the story entered Star Wars lore and for decades fans and even Lucasfilm repeated his version as fact. But here's where it gets interesting. Researcher W.R. Miller went back to the original microfilm and found the ad did exist. Just not exactly the way Arnold remembered it. It ran a day earlier on May 3rd and the wording was slightly different. It read, Dear Maggie,

May the fourth be with you, your party workers. What I love about this whole thing is that it's one of those, the facts are wrong, but the story is true moments. Back in 2018, when I first talked about the origin of May the fourth in episode 76, I did what everybody else did. I relied on Alan Arnold's account in his Empire Strikes Back production diary. And at that time, that was the only version anyone had. It was the version Lucasfilm repeated

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the version news outlets repeated, and the version the entire fandom accepted. I even tried to verify it myself. I went digging online searching for any trace of that 1979 newspaper ad and found nothing. Because there was nothing. The internet just didn't have it. And that's what makes W.R. Miller's work so satisfying. He went beyond the internet and pulled the original microfilm. And what he found is the best kind of answer. The ad was real.

details were just off. The date was wrong. The wording was a little different. But the core story? Completely true. A political pun in a London newspaper really did plant the seed for what became Star Wars Day. And in celebration of May the 4th and the upcoming release of Star Wars The Mandalorian and Grogu, Star Wars The Old Republic has a variety of rewards and events that will run from May 1st through May 22nd.

Anyone who logs onto the game will receive the BXRC Probe Droid Mini Pet. Anyone with an active subscription will receive the Vectron Phantom RC2 Mount. Both are inspired by the Razor Crest ship from the film. There is a 50 % collections unlock sale. All inspired by items on the cartel market will be 25 to 75 % off. And there is a double XP event. Again, all of this will run from May 1st through

May 22nd. May the 4th be with you, everyone.

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A things before I let you go today. A new armor set, lightsaber and dual saber inspired by the Disney Plus series mall were added to the cartel market. And when 7-9 goes live, there will be new cartel market items inspired by the Mandalorian Grogu. They showed some of the weapons on the live stream and they are looking good. There is a new Master of the Fight bundle available now. It's called the Cargo Transport bundle. It costs $99 for which you'll get six months of subscription time.

5,500 cartel coins, the GDU CGL droid carrier mount. It's a companion and mini pet enabled mount with the droid flourish. Base speed equivalent to speeder rank five and it's rideable at level one. You'll also get three utility droids. One serves as a guild bank, one as a personal cargo hold and one as a legacy cargo hold. And if that weren't enough, you'll also get the gray green vulcanized die five per character.

and the green vulcanized gray die five per character and you also get a droid mini pet as well. It's the same value as the previous Master of the Five bundles. This one will be available until June 9th. There is an active Twitch drop going on right now. Watch one hour of Live Swoator content to earn the Dantooine crash site poster decoration. The drop will be active until May 14th.

And then when 7-9 goes live, can earn the Nightshade Hississs mount by watching four hours of live SwoTour content. That campaign will run for 28 days. On June 30th, the Nar Shaddaa Nightlife event returns and will run for six weeks. And yes, there will be some new rewards this year. And last and not related to SwoTour, tickets for Star Wars Celebration 2027 go on sale May 5th.

It will be held in April of next year at the Los Angeles Convention Center. I'm sure Swarter will have some sort of presence there. Whether it's a full-blown cantina, who knows, but I hope it is because they are a lot of fun. Good luck to anyone trying to get tickets. And we have a Star Wars movie coming out in a few weeks. I don't have a lot of expectations for The Mandalorian and Grogu, but what I would love to see is the film open with the Lucasfilm logo.

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followed by a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, followed by the Star Wars fanfare and an opening crawl. And that's the State of the Old Republic for today. Let me cut in the sublight engines and cue the music and congratulate you on surviving another half hour, give or take, listening to episode 143 of the State of the Old Republic podcast. I'm your host Ted, and I thank you for tuning in.

You can find this podcast on Buzzsprout and iTunes. Wherever else you find your podcasts. also back to putting these on YouTube. You can listen to the show directly from the show site, is sotorpodcast.com. And there is an RSS feed where you can subscribe to the podcast directly. If you have a question for the show, you can email me at sotorpodcast.gmail.com. Thank you so much for listening. And until next time, remember the Sith Code, cake is a lie.