Greetings everyone! The patch notes for this week’s server maintenance are now live, and it is quite a long list this time around. You can read all of the notes from this week after the jump. Continue Reading »

Servers went down, servers came back up, and we were presented with a nice healthy amount of patch notes for our trouble. There were a lot of little fixes in this weeks maintenance, and some little quality of life improvements as well. Almost all areas of the game have been hit with some fixes this week, not surprising since the game has needed some bugs ironed out since the release of 1.2.

Check after the jump for the full list of patch notes this week, and let us know your thoughts on them in the comments section below. Continue Reading »

The hour has finally arrived! 1.2 is now available for download on the live servers, be prepared for a download because this baby is huge. To give you an idea of just how big, check out these patch notes for the update. Here are the highlights:

• Players can now unlock a wide variety of rewards by leveling characters and reaching new Legacy levels, including buffs for your characters, unlocking additional Species choices for every class, and upgrades for your personal Starship. Build your own Legacy with the new Family Tree!
• Lost Island, a new Flashpoint, is available for play! Having uncovered the sources of the Rakghoul plague outbreak in the Tion Hegemony, players must travel to Ord Mantell and confront Dr. Lorrick, the mad scientist who engineered this horrific biological weapon.
• Explosive Conflict, a new Operation, is available for play! The Trandoshan mercenary warlord Kephess has seized the planet Denova, a world rich in resources valuable to the war effort. Players must assault his war camp, situated atop a mountain in densely-wooded terrain, fighting Imperial defectors and heavy war machines along the way. 8- and 16-player Story and Hard Modes are currently available for this Operation.
• Novare Coast, a new objective-oriented Warzone on the planet Denova, has been added to the game. This Warzone, like Huttball, supports same-faction matches if there are not enough members of the opposing faction to be found.
• New repeatable high-level daily missions are available in a new area on Corellia, the Black Hole!
• Guilds now have access to a shared Guild Bank, accessible on the Fleets, with expandable storage.
• A new tier of gear has been added for both PvP and PvE.
• Players can now customize their User Interface by moving and resizing UI elements!
• A new level 50 World Boss with a challenge for a well-coordinated 16-player Operation Group has been sighted in the Gormak Lands region on Voss.

Are you as excited to check out all these new features as we are? Let us know what you think of the changes in the comments below!

Today SWTOR’s Lead Interface Artist, Michael Voigt, guided players though what options will be available to players when they can begin customizing their UI when we finally get our hands on game update 1.2. In the video Mr. Voigt shows off how players can open up the customization window, some of the default layouts available to them, and the options for full customization if they choose to employ them.  Players will even be able to save the customization they perform for one character, making it easy to set up all your characters after you are done. You will even be able to share your customizations with your friends, which is perfect for showing what you like as well as helping any MMO newbies who may not understand how they can optimize their experience.

Check out the video and let us know what you think in the comments section below!

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.

That’s right, even after being updated in Tuesday’s patch there are more changes on the horizon for the global cooldown animation.

Ever since the cooldown animation was updated in 1.1.2 their has been a growing group of players who have been disappointed with the change. The white flash of the abilities as they enter the cooldown state has been visually unappealing to players, with some even reporting that the animation makes then nauseous and causes headaches. There have also been complaints that since using any ability causes all of your abilities to go grey it makes it difficult for classes that spam abilities every second (such as the Sentinel or Marauder) to know if their abilities are ready, if they are in the correct range, or even if they have enough resources to activate their abilities.

BioWare opened a poll earlier today to try and get a feel for what percentage of players were disappointed with the changes. By the time the poll was closed over 57% of players who responded voted that the thought the new animations were terrible. BioWare assured players that changes would be coming based on the feedback that they received, and elaborated that they would not have implemented these changes in the first place had they received this kind of feedback out it on the Public Test Server.

Getting players to participate on the Public Test Server has been somewhat of a challenge for BioWare, as most players do not want to roll and level a brand new character for the sole purpose of testing new content. In order to help alleviate this problem BioWare announced that they are working on changes that will allow players to freely transfer their characters to the Public Test Server in order to help test new content. No official word on when these changes will be coming, but we will be keeping an eye on the forums and will update you with a date once it is announced.

BioWare released a new video today which features James Ohlen talking about some of the various new features players can expect to see in the near future. He focuses on four major aspects of future content; new warzones and PvP content, Legacy system upgrades, guild features, and UI customization. All of these features are things that the developers have talked about before, but it is awesome to get to see these features in action.

One thing that caught my eye in particular was a Miraluka who appeared to be using Force Charge. That’s right, a Republic Only species using a Sith only ability. Does this mean the legacy system will allow you to roll a previously unusable species on new characters? Only time will tell.

What do you think of the new features we have coming our way? What would you like to see that has not been discussed? Let us know in the comment section below.

We found this video among the media SWTORCrafter shot at E3. I’ve posted it a while back on our YouTube channel and I think it is about time I put it up on the site as well. There is some nice footage here of the new UI as well as companion specific UI. There are some nice enough shots of the sexy droid companion Scorpio to be found in the video. I’ve replaced the show floor noise with some original tracks from Knights of the Old Republic. People have been complaining about all the music and trailers that were heard in the background of previous E3 videos. I hope you find this a much better solution.

Me neither … but people at Darth Hater certainly do. The whole staff attended E3 this year and have been able to summarize their impressions in one 5 pages long article. This is so far the most concise gathering of interesting, hands on, information available on the whole internet. They got to play for a few hours and through several levels and were able to each play a different class. This gives us the chance to read their impressions on UI, flow of combat for each of the classes (5 total), AI, graphics and art style and much more. I especially was interested in how they felt about the Dialogue System since that is the biggest venture out of the MMORPG standards we are used to. You can see them being kind of careful in their comments on the dialogue system, but overall with positive opinions. I guess it is going to be one of those love it or hate it things.
Make sure you don’t miss this article.

While I’m on the subject of community news, there is a new podcast in the swtor universe (like we don’t have enough of those 😛 ). I liked it though because we have two girl gamers discussing the game instead of your regular geeky male Star Wars fans (don’t look at me). Corellian Run podcast Episode 1 has hit the interwebz. Good luck with the podcast girls.