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Star Wars The Old Republic News
Star Wars: The Old Republic: Pre-Launch Interview with Dallas Dickinson
Dec 6th
MMORPG.com recently got a chance to sit down with BioWare's Dallas Dickinson, Director of Production on Star Wars: The Old Republic to discuss Game Testing, Early Access, and what lies ahead for Star Wars: The Old Republic post-launch.
Will server names be released ahead of launch? The pre-launch guild registration system wasn't able to facilitate the RP-PvP crowd and I imagine this group of players would definitely appreciate being able to plan ahead of the chaos of launch day.
Certainly we’re going to be announcing them during Early Access, but I think we’re going to announce them slightly before Early Access, so people will be able to have some dea of where they want to go. I can’t tell you the exact timing, as that was actually up for debate as of this morning, when we would fully announce at least the opening list of server names. We’re not going to announce all the server names; we’re probably going to only announce the ones we’ll be running during Early Access, and then we’ll announce more as we ramp them up.
Read more of Michael Bitton's Star Wars: The Old Republic: Pre-Launch Interview with Dallas Dickinson.
Star Wars: The Old Republic: Item Modification & You
Dec 6th
Emmanuele Lusinchi has posted a new article on the Star Wars: The Old Republic forums that goes into pretty decent detail on how items will be modified in the game.
The post was written in response to the last patch notes published in which Lusinchi remarks, "So, it turns out some of the patch notes regarding our modding system were probably poorly written (by me, I must add) and generated quite a lot of concern. I’ll try to explain the changes better and, while I'm at it, explain the logic for those changes."
Lusinchi goes into great detail about what was wrong with the system including such things as too many modifications that had to continually be upgraded every few levels which, he opines, "was a pain in players' backsides".
Then Lusinchi outlines all of the forthcoming changes to customization including:
- Customize anywhere any time without a work bench
- Reverse engineer and create blueprints and purple mods
- Mods can be extracted from custom items
- Some mods are now common to all items
There's a lot to read so head to the Star Wars: The Old Republic forum to check it out.
Star Wars: The Old Republic: Impressive Beta Stats
Dec 6th
According to a short notice on GamesIndustry.biz, over two million players took advantage of beta game play weekends for Star Wars: The Old Republic. Most notably, EA's Eric Brown revealed that over 750,000 unique players gave the game a whirl during the Thanksgiving weekend beta play session.
Read more at the link above.
Star Wars: The Old Republic: The Music of SWTOR
Dec 1st
The official Star Wars: The Old Republic site has been updated with the news that from today through the game's launch, one of the game's seventeen original tracks will be released for fans' listening pleasure. The first track is called "The Mandalorian Blockade" and can be downloaded from the official site, the SWTOR Facebook page or the SWTOR YouTube page.
Read more on the Star Wars: The Old Republic site.
Star Wars: The Old Republic: EA to Make a ’Significant’ Profit
Dec 1st
Earlier in the week, Blizzard's Bobby Kotick opined that EA might not see the stellar profits from Star Wars: The Old Republic that might be expected. However, financial analyst Michael Pachter begs to differ. LucasArts is anticipated to take a 35% cut of profits but only after EA has recouped its development costs.
"On an ongoing basis, they will split revenue from running the subscription business. My best guess is that they will attract 1.5 million subscribers paying around $15 a month, so they should generate around $270 million in revenue. If LucasArts gets 35 per cent and if EA incurs around 35 per cent operating expense, they make 30 per cent, or around $80 million per year, in profit. That's not bad."
Read the full interview over at Eurogamer.
Star Wars: The Old Republic: Mirrored Classes
Nov 29th
Recently we took a look at five not-so-great things about Star Wars: The Old Republic, but we may have left out one glaring omisssion: mirrored classes. This week's Star Wars: The Old Republic column examines the mirrored class design found in the game and how it impacts the overall experience.
Having mirrored classes generally implies that each class has a counterpart on the opposing faction, but in Star Wars: The Old Republic this idea is taken quite literally. SWTOR’s class mirrors are actually not just extremely similar, but identical. For example, if you’ve played a Smuggler, you’ve played an Imperial Agent, and if you’ve played a Bounty Hunter, you’ve played a Trooper. Sure, they use different looking gear, their animations are flavored and styled to be class appropriate, but otherwise every skill and every talent is completely identical.
Read more of Michael Bitton's Star Wars: The Old Republic: Mirrored Classes.
Star Wars: The Old Republic: Blizzard CEO’s Statements Rain on EA’s Parade
Nov 29th
According to a report from Reuters.com, Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick believes that "downward pressure on profits" will hurt EA's chances of making a gigantic profit from Star Wars: The Old Republic.
Kotick points out that the main beneficiary of the game's sales and subscriptions will be LucasArts and that EA will likely see less money incoming due to licensing agreements. "Lucas is going to be the principal beneficiary of the success of Star Wars," Kotick said. "We've been in business with Lucas for a long time and the economics will always accrue to the benefit of Lucas, so I don't really understand how the economics work for Electronic Arts."
Activision-Blizzard is understandably nervous about SWTOR's arrival, particularly in light of recent reports that show declining subscriptions for World of Warcraft. WoW subs are down approximately one million since late 2010. Some reports have said that WoW could lose up to 500,000 more subscribers to SWTOR.
Read the full article at Reuters.com.
Via Develop-Online.net
Star Wars: The Old Republic: Five Not So Great Things About SWTOR
Nov 27th
In this week's The List, MMORPG.com Community Manager Michael Bitton follows up on our previous "5 Things We Love About SWTOR" by taking a look at some of the not so great things about Star Wars: The Old Republic.
I don’t think BioWare’s games have ever been known for their exhaustive visual character creation options, but I was hoping they would prove me wrong with The Old Republic. Unfortunately, they haven’t. Again, to be fair, from a technical standpoint, there is actually quite a bit on offer. You’ve got four body types, all with numerous heads and hairstyles to choose from, as well as a smattering of visual details you can add or remove from your character. They had to make sure all this stuff animated well for their cutscenes. I can appreciate all that, but the fact of the matter is there are only a short list of species to choose from, they are all completely humanoid, and to make matters worse, the vast majority of them share the same heads, hairstyles, and other options.
Read more of Michael Bitton's The List: Five Not So Great Things About SWTOR.
Star Wars: The Old Republic: Torhead.com Launches
Nov 23rd
Our friends at Torhead.com have let us know that the beta version of the one-stop information site for Star Wars: The Old Republic has officially launched. The site contains mind-boggling amounts of information about items, missions, skills, abilities, etc. and has handy dandy tools like skills calculators and more. It's definitely a site that every ToR fan will want to have at their fingertips. Check it out!
Star Wars: The Old Republic: Freedom!
Nov 21st
MMORPG.com Community Manager Michael Bitton celebrates the dropping of the NDA and offers some of his own thoughts on the craziness that followed in his latest Star Wars: The Old Republic column.
I was actually surprised by the strong positive reaction I’ve seen from many gamers, not because the game is bad or anything, but again, expectations have been just that high. It’s also surprising how fast the game has basically been blown out. If you’re looking for it, you can find videos of raid fights, open world PvP, story spoilers, datacron locations, and heck, some sites even have functional databases up with up-to-date talent calculator tools. I expected all this stuff to roll out over the run up to launch, but it all coming out as fast as it did was truly impressive.
Read more of Michael Bitton's Star Wars: THe Old Republic: Freedom!