Star Wars: The Old Republic's next update adds pie-baking and a galactic egg hunt

Star Wars: The Old Republic's ongoing development switched last year from creators BioWare to Broadsword, with promise that the 13-year-old MMO would continue to receive new story content and improvements.

The approaching update 7.5 looks to bring both, alongside a Spring Abundance festival that includes "seed collecting, dancing, pie-baking, animal rehabilitation, and a galactic egg hunt."

Perhaps I shouldn't be surprised at this point by any game that introduces cosy or farming-adjacent activities, and yet here I am, surprised all the same. Perhaps The Old Republic is already littered with such activities and I just missed them; I still think of it as the much more action- and story-oriented successor to the now-defunct Star Wars Galaxies, an MMO which understood the roleplay potential of being a dancer or furniture maker or otherwise performing banal acitivties in a larger galaxy.

Update 7.5 also introduces a new storyline called Desperate Defiance, in which players make choices which shape the direction of their Padawan, as well as a visual overhaul of the swampy planet Hutta. The developers showed a cutscene of the former and before-and-after comparisons of the latter during a recent livestream on Twitch. Hutta looks... greyer now?

Broadsword are also responsible for maintaining other long-running MMOs, Ultima Online and Dark Age Of Camelot, and 7.5 isn't their first update to TOR since taking over - there have been several. Last month they introduced Date Night companion missions in update 7.4.1, which are "fully-voiced, cinematic-only" scenes in which players spend time with their romanced companion.

Update 7.5 doesn't have a release date yet, but it should appear on the test server soon.