According to Best Buy’s Gamer Magazine, “A Flashpoint mission will be available at level 10, 16, and then every four levels up to level 48, with two Flashpoints awarded at level 50.”
Is that too many? Too few? Just right? Are they too close together? Too far apart? Remember, once players reach Level 50, they can go back to each Flashpoint and do a Level 50 version of that Flashpoint according to the most recent information from BioWare. Let us know what you think.
The PDF of the swtor Article from Best Buy’s Gamer Magazine is located here.
Tonight via the @SWTOR account on twitter I was made aware that Bioware is advertising a sneak peek at the Friday update, a Developer Dispatch having to do with companions.
It is a great one in my opinion, over seven minutes of some of the developers talking about companions and the mechanics revolving around them. Such people as James Ohlen, Daniel Erickson, Georg Zhoeller, and more make this one of my favorite dev dispatches to date.
It is an interview done by Gamespot, very well done and full of information indeed. It talks about customization options, companions with levels and the ability to level them, and many more goodies. If you haven’t seen it yet I highly recommend going to see it or you could just wait till tomorrow……..
Today via a tweet on twitter from @Rockjaw (Stephen Reid) we were pointed to a official statement on the dev tracker regarding the inclusion of same gender romance arcs with your companions. The statement reads as follows,
Due to the design constraints of a fully voiced MMO of this scale and size, many choices had to be made as to the launch and post-launch feature set. Same gender romances with companion characters in Star Wars: The Old Republic will be a post-launch feature. Because The Old Republic is an MMO, the game will live on through content expansions which allow us to include content and features that could not be included at launch, including the addition of more companion characters who will have additional romance options.
All fun aside and in all seriousness, today I have the pleasure of Introducing our latest featured writer to the site and the launch of our newest weekly column, “The RP XP” written by our newest staff member “MJ”.
Here at the offices of Swtor-Life we have been trying to decide which area of game play and related topics would be best for us to branch out into for you the community. You are the heart and soul of why we do this.
We have the normal news style posts about SWTOR like most fan sites do, rehashed from fan site to fan site but, it is still necessary to get that out there to you. We have some funny and witty articles, we have some specialized content focusing on specific areas of game play like crew skills and in game economics to class focused content.
We are pretty well rounded as is but we wanted to add more. We want to add something else that’s specialized in nature, but of a different direction than we have taken you in the past. We want to chart unexplored space here at Swtor-Life while we ride the train leading up to launch and beyond.
One of my absolute favorite reveals of Pax Prime came from the Sunday presentation in the main theater. Of course Darth Hater was there and they did a outstanding job of covering it for us that could not attend, they brought us the scoop on what the Developers are referring to as open world pvp. It looks fun, it looks exciting for sure!
We had three major reveals and one major trailer released from the Old Republic headquarters during this year’s E3.There were a bunch of interviews by the major media outlets, yet most of the information heard there was already known to the people that follow this game for years now. I tend to look at the fan site interviews and gameplay impressions to get the really interesting information and new reveals.
When the first cinematic trailer “Deceived” came out everyone’s minds were blown away. None expected the second trailer “Hope”, because by that time we all knew the game was still some ways off and spending even more money on a super cool trailer would seem unexpected. We all knew that there was going to be a third trailer and since it lacked that element of surprise of the first two it had to be the best in the bunch. What followed was 6 minutes of epic Star Wars cinema and “Return” made all the fans squee like little girls at a Justin Bieber concert.
The very first big piece of info came out through a Gamespot live show with Daniel Erickson where Daniel showed what is the last quest in a chain of 10 group quests on Alderaan. This is the fight with Bouris Ulgo, self proclaimed king of Alderaan himself. The interesting thing about this footage is this is not a flashpoint. It is group content that is not like your regular instance. It is just something existing in the world that you can only do with a group. This is fun because it is still a big boss fight, but not as extensive as a flashpoint. I wonder if it is repeatable? UPDATE: Lethality of askajedi.com explained to us that during his talk with Daniel he found out that this is not repeatable and it is a cinematic ending to a long quest chain, yet, you do get your own “phase” or “instance” to do the quest in so others wouldn’t mob steal your boss. Beside what looked like a fun storyline and an OK event we learned that there are item sets (the trooper had what seemed to b e a 7 piece epic gear set) that have bonuses for more pieces you wear. We also see that there are low level epics, because one of the pieces in the set was level 13.
What followed was for me the best display of SWTOR at E3. It was a live feed on EA.com with Daniel Erickson playing Tatooine and answering viewers’ questions live. For the first time we saw a Jawa companion called Blizz, which made a lot of people squee until they learned that only Bounty Hunters can have those. We also saw vehicles, a small quest line on Tatooine and just in general some fighting and questing on one of the planets. Turns out Tatooine is really huge, because Daniel spent a better part of the demo just flying on his speeder from one place to another and still, when looking at the big planet map, you could see that he traveled only a portion of the planet’s whole surface. We learned that there is a lot of PvP happening in the Dune sea and it was just fun watching the game being played for a whole hour.
The last major reveal was showing for the first time any information about raids (or operations as they are called in TOR) in a form of a teaser trailer. Not much more has been said about raids other than what we see in the trailer. We know that the operation’s name is Eternity Vault. It is located on the planet Belsavis (a prison planet) and the story behind it is that an evil ruler of the universe from 10.000 years ago is locked in that Vault, which is opened by accident. We know for sure that there are 8 player raids and that these represent the “easy mode” versions. There are going to be larger raids than this, and people have been counting the number of players in the trailer until their eyes started to bleed in order to determine exactly what is the number of players we can expect to see in a raid. The current tally is 16, but this is all subject to change through game testing.
To learn even more information about the game in its current state you should visit all the fansites that reported from the event. I’ll give you a rundown of the articles I found the most informative.
Darth Hater did a list of general things learned that sums up a lot of small things from the game they saw while playing or watching others play
Published by Mikro under E3,video on Jun. 09. 2011.
Here’s an officially released video of gameplay on Tatooine. This is similar to what we saw Daniel Erickson and Stephen Reid play during the live stream event on the first day of E3. You can enjoy it in full HD beauty bellow or even download it from the official site.
During the first Fan Site Summit Bioware organized for members of the Fan Sites that write about their upcoming MMORPG Star Wars: The Old Republic, we had a chance to sit down for 2 days and play the game. These are impressions from our hands on experience and they are divided into the following segments:
DISCLAIMER: Everything discussed here is subject to change. The version of the game we played was not even the latest build that was about to hit the beta servers around the time we visited Austin. Please, take all of the things said here with a grain of salt. Through testing and player feedback things drastically change.
I will be covering exploration in The Old Republic in this part of my Imperial Agent hands on series of articles. Why exploration? It has become a lost art of MMO design. As developers moved towards creating more accessible games in order to reach the widest audience possible they chose to hold the players’ hand every step of the way and take them down a predefined path. This made exploration a moot point since there was nothing outside that laid out path. Massive Multiplayer games are, however, a perfect setting for exploration. With its massive lands that take hours to walk across you should be able to find things that none else saw before. Little gems of lore and land that game designers left for those inquisitive types of players. Does Bioware provide something like that in The Old Republic? Click here to read more about my exploring adventures with the Imperial Agent
