A brand new and pretty big update has finally come to Star Wars: Galaxy of Heroes, bringing with it a new game mode as well as the Razor Crest as a reward!
It had been almost a month and a half since the previous content update in SWGOH, so more content was desperately needed and lacking. And while we’ve rightly learned to be cautious about getting excited over new game modes, this one looks really promising.
It’s called “Conquest,” and here’s a brief trailer for it:
According to the post explaining the new mode on the SWGOH Forums, Conquest will launch on March 1 with an Exhibition season! For those familiar with SWGOH, it looks to be a mix of Galactic War and Galactic Challenges, as you will complete a series of battles in various sectors, facing off against bosses as you do so (like Galactic War). As you go, you earn tickets that feed into reward crates (like Galactic Challenges). But it’s so much more than that, too. There will be a “Normal” tier and a “Hard” tier, and every player will have to first complete the normal tier before moving to the hard one. The developers explicitly stated that not all players will be able to totally complete the event at launch, and usually when they warn that up front, it means that it will be very difficult. I’m just hoping that with these various tiers and various battles, it will prove not only rewarding for the elite end-game players who pay tons of money but also to players at every stage of the game. A game mode that incorporates players at various stages would be a welcome breath of fresh air.
It looks like Conquest will force you to be strategic about a number of things. First of all, you can see enemy squads beforehand and thus can theorycraft as to the best teams to take into battle against them. But secondly, they are introducing a new mechanic with Data Disks and Consumables. Data Discs can be equipped on different characters and provide them with various boosts, depending on the Disk. This seems to operate much like the different mechanics do in Galactic Challenges, only here, you are the one strategically deciding which characters to boost, and how. That’s great. Data Disks last for the duration of the Conquest. And Consumables can be purchased and provide you with shorter-term boosts to characters. With this comes a new in-game currency, Conquest Currency. You can buy consumables with them, but it’s unclear what else (if anything) will be available with them.
The current plan is that Conquest will run for two weeks, beginning at the start of each month. But that timeframe is being evaluated, along with other things, in this upcoming Exhibition season.
I’m excited about Conquest, and I’m especially intrigued by how it actually seems to be leaning into theorycrafting and manipulating certain squads. In recent years, SWGOH has overwhelmingly been focused on the “right” squads for each new character, and that has sometimes taken the focus off of the fun of playing around with things (because when an unexpected mechanic kicked in, they would change the kits). So it’s great to see something here where you have a lot more strategic input on your squads, and how to boost them. This is all great. So I’m still cautious, given past events, but hopeful.
And one other cool thing coming with this update is a brand new reward tied to Conquest: the Razor Crest! The (now former) ship of Din Djarin in The Mandalorian, this looks like a very good and helpful ship to add to your collection. It will be unlocked through Conquest, but it’s currently unclear how those rewards will be given out. I’m concerned that it will only be available with max rewards (note that in the trailer it only flies by the last crate), which would make it nearly impossible to unlock anytime soon. But perhaps the shard rewards will simply scale as you go on, so you’ll still get shards, but just not as many. That would be great.
One curious thing about the ship is that the pilot is Beskar Mandalorian. Ok, that’s not curious! But the ship has the “bounty hunter” tag… and Beskar Mando doesn’t! Let’s just get this out of the way: the developers of this game don’t really care about what would make sense in the Star Wars universe regarding tags, but only really what would work well in-game. That’s been the case for years, and though it’s sometimes driven a Star Wars nerd like me crazy, it’s ok. I get it. But I just find it very humorous that the pilot of the ship isn’t a bounty hunter, but the ship is a bounty hunter. Like… what?
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