Everyone has a fighting chance
This past weekend, several members of BioWare Austin descended upon San Antonio for PAX South in the latest Star Wars: The Old Republic Cantina Tour stop. In it, guests were treated to the usual Q&A interspersed with prizes for correctly answering trivia questions. Unusually, the event was actually held on-site at PAX and required a badge although it wasn’t a part of official programming.
During this weekend’s Star Wars: The Old Republic Cantina event being held at PAX South, Bioware distributed a letter penned by Bruce MacLean. In it, MacLean lays out more details about the team’s plans for 2015, including a return to story and each character’s personal journey throughout the game. The letter has yet to be officially published, but several sites have copies on hand and have shared the information contained within.
This week, Star Wars: the Old Republic put in a patch that had a fairly large number of tweaks to the game, mostly a lot of bugfixes and updates to various group activities such as changing which comms drop and rebalancing certain encounters. Sadly, however, much of these things were not the topic of many conversations about the game the past few weeks.
Star Wars: The Old Republic may never live up to the lofty expectations many had for it before it launched back in 2011, but the game seems pretty healthy despite all the initial setbacks. 2015 is a new year and with a new year comes new possibilities. Let’s take a look at some things we’d like to see in SWTOR this year.
In their prelude to their current expansion, Shadow of Revan, Star Wars: the Old Republic spent five months giving us new big-picture epic content via four Flashpoints collectively known as Forged Alliances. I spent an afternoon playing all four of them back to back on solo mode now that it’s possible to do so and have been left with some questions that remind me of another big-name scifi franchise’s first movie: Is this all that there was? Was there nothing more?
On December 2nd, early purchasers of the Shadow of Revan expansion were granted access to two things: the new content that was being added for the $20 purchase of the expansion pack, and the new skills and streamlined combat systems. For people who have played SWTOR in the past and are just curious about the new discipline system, I’d recommend just logging in and trying it for yourself.
Introducing new environments to explore is a staple of MMORPG expansion packs, and Shadow of Revan does not disappoint. After the prologue missions, the new content kicks off on the relatively obscure planet of Rishi, home to some interesting looking bird folk and a whole lot of pirate business. Bioware reached way back and dipped into the classic trilogy for the second planet (or rather moon), Yavin 4, recognizable to fans as the home base to the Rebellion in Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope.
Since the first official announcement of Star Wars: the Old Republic, BioWare Austin has not been shy about letting its audience know that story is one of the main pillars that they felt was missing from the MMORPG space. A bulk of their effort developing the game went into creating a richly-told, voice acted story that would ease the pain of the traditional level grind.
With the launch of early access for Shadow of Revan on Tuesday, Star Wars: the Old Republic retired a subscriber perk that had allowed hordes of filthy casuals like myself to finally get through each class story and have a character at the now-previous level cap. Today’s article is about that perk and whether it ultimately had value to the game.
Bioware has announced that Early Access for the latest Star Wars: The Old Republic expansion has officially kicked off. Subscribers will have a full week to enjoy Shadow of Revan before it opens to all players. The update also brings to bear the new Discipline system and many of the quality of life improvements Bioware has detailed in several developer blogs. All players will have access to this new content.