((The RP XP with MJ #26))

The Padawan Tarik strained himself to the point of a splitting headache, reaching out with the Force to see if the young Rattataki woman next to him was true to her word.

Is there such a thing as atonement or regret among the Sith, or was this a ploy?

“You can turn off the sensor beam into my soul, Zabrak. By now you know I’m telling you the truth. Don’t overdo it.”

Tarik glanced over his shoulder at the covered body of his master as the speeder made a sharp turn. Then he looked at Veetha.

“Don’t talk to me, Sith. I’ll do the talking.”

A smile curled over Veetha’s black lips. After a moment of silence, she said, “That’ll make it hard for me to answer questions, you know.”

“I don’t understand,” he said. “You could’ve killed me and you didn’t. Why?”

“A good question that I already answered. Try another.”

“Try answering it again — and make sense of it this time!”

Veetha smiled at him. “The reason I am accompanying you on the return of your master’s corpse is because I wish to help the Republic.”

Tarik huffed. “Help the Republic? Why?”

“I have my reasons.”

He glanced at her as the speeder slowed its descent toward a secret Jedi enclave on Coruscant. “You said you’d answer my questions.”

“That was an answer, Tarik.”

Tarik gasped. “How did you know my name? I never told you.”

Veetha smiled. “Now that, my friend, is a good question.”

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BioWare fans were hit with some sad news today when Drew Karpyshyn announced on his blog that he will no longer be working with BioWare, or on any video games for that matter. Karpyshyn is well known for his work on Knights of the Old Republic, Mass Effect, Mass Effect 2, as well as several novels linked to those games.

Drew had this to say about his decision.

For the past twelve years I’ve had the privilege to work at one of the best companies in the video game industry, side by side with the most talented and incredible group of people I’ve ever had the good fortune to know. I’ve enjoyed my time at BioWare immensely, but it’s time for me to move on.

I’m leaving to focus more time and energy on my novels and other non-video game related projects. But even though I’ll no longer be working on games for BioWare, I’m not going to be severing all ties with them. Many of my closest friends still work at the company, and I’m also in the process of writing the next Star Wars: The Old Republic novel, though I can’t say too much about it yet……

Even if you are someone who is going to miss my contributions to the video game world, I hope you’ll be somewhat mollified by the fact that I’m going to have more time for novels, screenplays and other projects. I’ll always have fond memories of BioWare, and a great appreciation for everything it meant to me. But my future is wide open, and I can’t wait to see what’s in store.

Drew

Drew is one of the nicest, most laid back writers in the business who always made time to talk with his fans. Luckily we will have one more gem from him in the form of a new Old Republic novel before he rides off into the sunset. While it is truly sad to see Drew leaving BioWare we here at SWTOR-Life wish him all the best in his future endeavors.

BioWare announced recently that they will soon be officially launching Star Wars: The Old Republic in Australia, Hong Kong, New Zealand, and Singapore on March 1st of this year. This means opening localized servers for those regions and making the game more available to players in those areas, who until now could only play the game by ordering online and playing on a European or North American server.

But what about those players who live in that area but are already in game you ask? Well BioWare will be offering these players a limited chance to transfer their characters to a localized server in order to mitigate some latency issues by player on a server in their region. Players who qualify for the character transfer will be contacted in early March with details on how to move their characters to the new servers. Some players are wondering if this is a sign that BioWare will allow all players to transfer characters between servers sometime in the future, but the developers have not commented on that matter at this time. We here at SWTOR-Life are happy to see the Asia Pacific region get some server love, and hope that both new and old players in this region enjoy all the benefits that having localized servers gives them.

You can read the original post about the upcoming release here.

The patch notes for 1.1.3 are now up. No major changes were made this week outside of the general fixing of bugs and tweaking of abilities., though PvP enthusiasts will be happy to know they will no longer not receive credit for winning a match when the first player to enter a Warzone leaves before the match is over. The Surge stat has also been rebalanced and  now reaches diminishing returns the same way as other damage ratings, and its per point damage contribution has been reduced by approximately 10%.

You can read the full list of notes here.

The application process for the upcoming Guild Summit has ended. All the guild leaders who applied for an invitation should expect to hear back from BioWare in a few days after they have the time to review everyone’s applications.

BioWare also announced that certain parts of the summit will be broadcast on a livestream, including presentations by developers and feedback discussions. This way even players and guild leaders who cannot attend are able to participate, great news for anyone who has ideas they want to share but are unable to secure an invitation or able to take time off work to head to Austin for the event. Even if you cannot catch the livestream BioWare will be posting videos of the event after it has ended.

BioWare will be revealing more details as we get closer to the event date. Keep watching SWTOR-Life as we bring you all the updates as they are announced.

Prologue / Act 1: Scene 1 / Act 1: Scene 2 / Act 1: Scene 3

Intermission

I am pausing here to take a good look around. I have talked about the first three planets that have actual PvP on them. I have also touch on the two planets that have no actual world PvP on them after the origin planets.

I want to give you a list of planets and their levels for each faction. There is not much  difference in the list, except that the origin planets are different and there are two planets that trade places depending on the faction. Other than that, both factions are on the same planets at the same levels. Continue Reading »

Tomorrow is Tuesday and you know what that means, it’s time for some weekly SWTOR maintenance. As usual the servers are scheduled to go down starting at 2AM CST (12AM PST/3AM EST/8AM GMT/9AM CET) and are scheduled to be back up again by 6AM CST (4AM PST/7AM EST/12PM GMT/1PM CET).

The current Public Server 1.1.3 patch is what we can expect to see updated during the maintenance time, but we will not know for sure until the official patch notes are posted. Keep in mind that the servers could always be back up sooner or later than the scheduled start up time depending on how the maintenance goes. If the time frame should change for any reason we shall let you know.

This week marked the first of BioWare’s promised “Community Q&A” blogs where the developers answer various questions posed to the by members of the SWTOR community. They orignally stated that they would be answering 10 questions a week but the players must have hit them with some good ones because they went ahead and answered 15 of the biggest questions concerning the community.

You can read some of the highlights after the jump. Continue Reading »

BioWare elaborated on their promise that global cooldown customization features will be coming soon in a recent developer blog by Stephen Reid. He had this to say on the matter:

This week several user interface changes were made as part of patch 1.1.2, including some that changed the look of the ‘global cooldown’ animations. ‘Global cooldown’ is the delay after an ability is used before other abilities can be used. As the global cooldown can affect many abilities at once, the animation is seen frequently and for some, the changes made were distracting.

Our UI team took this feedback to heart and worked up a solution which gives every player a lot more choices in how cooldown animations are displayed. If you’re happy with the way the game currently looks, you can ignore these changes – but we think some of these preferences will be welcomed by many players.

Currently, these new preferences are scheduled to be added to the game in patch 1.1.4, which should be available for preview on the Public Test Server next week and deploying to the live servers soon afterwards.

He went on to outline some of the features players will be able to customize such as turning the flash for when an ability finishes its cooldown on or off, different art styles for what abilities will look like when they are on a cooldown, the ability to change when the game will start showing tenths of a second on cooldown abilities, plus several more. They even included a video showing some of the customization options in action.

You can check out the video and read the blog in its entirety here.

((The RP XP with MJ #25))

Yulel slowly lifted her head and tried to open her eyes, but something was wrapped tightly around her eyes and pinching her lekku to the back of her head. A blindfold.

She didn’t remember much beyond running and gunning. That damn Gand pilot had dropped her right in the middle of a separatist hot zone and she paid the price…

By running into a tree when she was firing back over her shoulder.

Well, at least they didn’t kill me, the young Twi’lek smuggler smirked to herself.

Her eyes useless, she tried her other senses. She heard the low hum of a generator behind her, the high-pitched whine of a repulsorlift on a speeder hovering just outside the room where she was held. The echo of the speeder through the wall gave her the impression that she was inside a garage of some sort, possibly a side office.

The air smelled of sea spray and engine oil with a slight tang of electrical ozone from separatist forcefields. “Mannett Point,” she smirked again. “Figures.”

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