Last seen in February, next week sees the return of the Grey Secant, the ancient Gree warship that plagued Ilum. It’s return marks another week for players to unlock unique armor, pets, weapons while fighting through its tight alien-filled corridors.
SWTOR update 2.1 today sees denizens of both the Republic and the Sith Empire down their blasters and meet in no-man’s land to ask, ‘Who are you wearing?’. And slightly more disconcertingly, ‘Whose face are you wearing?’.
EA rang their shareholders for a chinwag yesterday, and talked a great deal about the biggest event in their year so far: SimCity. Sales of Maxis’ messy mayoral reboot were “solid”, thanks to an upsurge in direct downloads via Origin. But EA are working to ensure its disastrous launch, which saw servers swamped and inaccessible to a large proportion of players, “won’t happen again”.
The future of Star Wars’ long and occasionally fruitful flirtation with our fair medium has been uncertain since LucasArts vanished in a puff of financial logic just over a month ago. Not so now. EA have inked a deal which gives them exclusive license to publish and develop “core” Star Wars games, and have handed the keys to three of their favourite children: DICE, Visceral, and BioWare.
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.
Everybody wants to be a cat. So the song goes, and so it is. In the past, the given reason has been that cats know where it, something, is at - now, it’s that cats are possessed of some of the greatest natural agility and self-discipline in the known galaxy, and consequently make for excellent jedi.
The Old Republic’s take on the cat-person, a fantasy staple for reasons I’ve never been privy to, has been around since launch. Especially if you’re in Republic space, you’ll have regularly come across the Cathar as NPC, companion, or jedi master. But only now are they set to become playable. We think.
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.
Star Wars: The Old Republic’s bolster system is receiving a complete overhaul as part of the 2.0 update. It should fix issues of fairness which are encountered when players turn from level 49 to 50. Now, rather than a universal buff to their abilities, players will receive a boost determined by the equipment they have attiring their character.
Speaking at GDC James Ohlen, creative director on Star Wars: The Old Republic, revealed that since going free-to-play the number of players has risen to 4.5 million, a boost of 2 million players, at a rate of 10,000 new players a day.
The shift away from subscription has marked a turnaround for the game, revitalising its playerbase. Though Ohlen explains there were more problems with The Old Republic at launch besides its subscription model.
SWTOR’s Asia-Pacific servers have reportedly been on the wane for a while now. As such BioWare have been looking for a solution in consultation with the game’s community, and last night announced that they’ve found one, after a fashion - they’ll be doing away with them altogether, and offering their players a one-way ticket to North America.
The thing about SWTOR’s ongoing free-to-play revival is this: while many justifiably don’t feel like celebrating when a number of punitive systems remain in place, it really has revitalised the game. Two million have joined since its relaunch in Autumn, and thousands more go through the rigmarole of account creation and a many-gig download with every passing day.
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.
This is extremely good news. You remember the reduced experience rate free-to-play SWTOR players know and suffer? Well, it’s still there. But it’s become much more palatable in the latest update.
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.
The Old Republic’s free to play option, launched back in October in response to black slope-sliding subscriptions, has reportedly paid off.
The news comes as BioWare push out The Old Republic 1.7, which introduces that Reputation system and an Ilum event: the first in the dev team’s attempt to build a newly “dynamic, ever changing universe”.
More on all of that beyond the jump.
The Old Republic is getting a localised reputation system, which will see players rewarded for completing certain faction-based tasks. Don’t expect to be able to turn the whole of Hutta hostile, though - the numbers only go up.
SWTOR 1.6.3 is responsible for the elongating yellow bar that kept you from logging into the game yesterday evening. But it also introduces some new and discounted items to the Cartel Market, and prevents players from being knocked off purchased air-bikes quite as easily. Swings and $3 roundabouts.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.
A wizard visited me in a dream last night. We were sitting cross-legged in that infinitely long corridor out of The Matrix, idly rocking back and forth and trying not to make eye contact, both waiting for the other to speak first. "Have you--" I started, before the greying wizard silenced me by placing his gnarled wooden staff against my lips. "Steve," he spaketh. His voice was like that sound when Indiana Jones pushes a button in a tomb and the ceiling starts to move. "It is important that we carry out our work before you wake." He gestured to the old grandfather clock from my dead nan's house, how on earth did that get there!?
The wizard used two dusty fingers to slide a plain white card across the floor between us. I picked it up and turned it over. In gently embossed embossed Helvetica I saw written on the card a collection of gaming news stories. But not any gaming news stories: gaming news stories that had not yet come to pass. This week's upcoming gaming news stories.
I can share them with you now.
