Like freshly made dough in a hot oven, Star Wars’ Hutt Cartel is rising. However, they are not transitioning into delicious bread but are being bitter buggers and seizing control of Makeb. If that simile didn’t rouse you to action, causing you to log into Star Wars: The Old Republic to fight for Makeb then maybe the new launch trailer will.
In this busy world of new popes and cable cars there’s scarce enough time to keep abreast of current events let alone sinking hundreds of hours into an MMO, seeking to top out your character’s level. Recognising this, Bioware have announced a set of double XP weekends, hoping to halve your time in getting to level 55.
For Star Wars: The Old Republic's first major content expansion Bioware have opted for a whole new planet, Makeb, and a massive chunk of story to go with it. A newly released video goes into how this expansion fits in with the story of the vanilla game and also what we can expect to see on the new planet and, perhaps more importantly, who we will be fighting.
SWTOR’s 2.0 patch has blockaded the Public Test Server in anticipation of the Rise of the Hutt Cartel’s arrival in March. As a consequence, level 55 is now something all classes can aspire to, and patch notes rise so steeply from the peak of BioWare’s Austin offices that they risk touching the sun and burning Planet Earth to the ground.Our Spotlight units plug content our journalists have made, that our advertisers want to promote. Sometimes the promotion is paid for, but the content they go to is always independent with no client oversight or approval.
Players of Star Wars: The Old Republic may have sensed a disturbance in the Force. It was the arrival of this YouTube trailer, their first chance to scope out Makeb, the new planet added by the Rise of the Hutt Cartel expansion. From this footage, the scenery looks pretty damn impressive and we get to see bustling cities, a gorgeous waterfall, what looks like a parched canyon and a giant floating barge.
This is Makeb. It's a gay planet. When I say it's a gay planet I don't mean that the planet itself is innately homosexual. Makeb itself is just a genderless, oblate spheroid of rock surrounding a sexy molten iron core, shuffled away in some dark corner of a far away galaxy. When I say that Makeb is a gay planet I mean that it is the only location in Star Wars: The Old Republic in which you can be gay. It's the one planet in the universe where flirtatious dialogue options will appear in conversations with similarly gendered characters. It's the only planet on which you can kiss somebody with similarly shaped genitals as the screen fades to black and "doing it" music starts playing.
That's very strange. Why have all the space-faring homosexuals been exiled to Makeb? Even weirder: why do players have to pay real money to visit this extraterrestrial homo-haven?
Rise of the Hutt Cartel is a full-blown digital expansion for SWTOR. It will increase the level cap up to 55 and introduce five levels-worth of story-driven missions on a new planet, courtesy of the titular slimy gangsters.
