So do you want a Light or Darkside blaster?

From a recent article on Darth Hater by Raiden entitled “Morality Gear”  and a conversation with my friend Zlatto from AskAJedi   I am perplexed by this question.

Just what does morality gear restrictions mean to the crafter in SWTOR?

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Hello Swtor-Life-ians, today we were graced with the SWTOR Facebook weekly screen Today it is a shot from the planet Voss.  Billed as a planet who is described as “The planet Voss is steeped in war between its native species, the Voss and Gormak.”  Not really sure whether this is a shot of some sort of monument or of some type of wreckage or left behind device.  In any event it looks cool and shows the type of scenery we might come to expect on this planet.

The long awaited Jedi Consular class trailer has finally been made available. The bulky look they gave the Consular in the trailer is really just the way I would like my character to look. I was never a particularly big fan of the Consular (played healer in all other MMOS and I am sick of it, thank you very much), but the visual representation they gave in the video is just awesome. To make the update even better Bioware also released a recap video of SWTOR’s presence at San Diego Comic Con. To see all the new media for the Jedi Consular and learn more about the Shadow and the Sage advanced classes visit the Consular Class page on the official site. You can also find out more about the Consular’s trusted Trandoshan companion, Qyzen Fess. Or you can just watch the trailers bellow.
 

 

Erika Christine from Bioware just announced on the BiowareCommunityChannel  a cosplay costume contest starting now to celebrate Bioware being at Gamescom 2011 this year! 

This video has all the details and it sounds like a real hoot!  I can not wait to see what the community comes up with for this.  If you remember the recent San Diego Comic Con you may have seen some of the footage of all the awesome cosplay costumes that came out in full force for this event. Hopefully this contest will bring out some of those along with new costumes never before seen.

The details of the contest include…..

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I knew a couple of guys that were part of a game development team. The game was made by a small team of dedicated enthusiasts and most of them were programmers at heart. It was a strategy game set in space, not unlike Homeworld (if any of you still remember that great game). They slaved at it for 3 years for a small wage hoping to make it big once the game is released. They even got a worldwide publisher, which meant they had a sellable product. When the game came out many tried playing it but found it unnecessarily complex at times and hard even when it didn’t need to be. It had a small following of dedicated fans but it never made it big because it asked too much of players to be widely accepted.
 
The problem with that game was that the programmers made a game for themselves. There was a lot of math involved and complex systems that would make an analytic mind very happy. The problem is that gamers are not analytic machines. They are gamers of various personalities and mindsets and if you are a game maker you better make sure you are pleasing a larger variety of people than just programmers, unless, of course, you were making the game for three years just to play it yourself.
 
What brings games closer to gamers is game testing. Involvement of gamers into the game making process introduces another set of minds, other than that of game designers themselves. This brings fresh perspectives and usually changes the game significantly. We saw a glimpse of this process during Q&A sessions at San Diego Comic Con this year. We found out that some systems designed long ago by game designers have been changed based on game testers’ input. There were even some changes so significant (in terms of time needed to develop the system again) that I was rather surprised they decided to do this so late in the game.
Click here to read how game testing influenced SWTOR and if it’s a good thing