Eternity Vault spoilers from PC Gaming mag:

That sounds really freaking cool.

That's awesome....

The friday update seems very late today. I wonder if it's something big?

Yes! It's consular day!

(That's my class...)

Here's the vid:

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(holy shit, what a badass video - of course, I'm biased)

Also, there's information on Qyzen Fess, the Trandoshan hunter who's the Consular's first companion, the Mirialan race and the Corellian Defender, which is the light corvette that serves as class ship for both Consulars and Knights.

Consular is a caster dps/healer class?

The Sage AC is healer/dps. The Shadow AC (which was not really highlighted there...) is a stealth/melee (double-bladed lightsaber) class that can be traited to tank.

(At least as far as I know...)

Knight on the other hand can be Guardian (tank - one handed sabre) or Sentinel (dps - dual-wielded sabers).

Our release date window may have just narrowed. There's an article in yesterday's guardian (major UK paper...) that ends with the following:

Mass Effect 3 is released in March 2012 on PC, PS3 and Xbox 360. Star Wars: The Old Republic is set to launch on PC in November.

Brief bit of leaked video (which may not last long...), just because it's the first look at stealth I've seen. An agent doing an Alderaan quest line. Not much in the way of combat action, but pretty cool.

Not sure why, it's awfully orange, but I love this Voss image:

woot, got my beta invite today :)

Let us know how it is. I've been thinking of cancelling my preorder, I just haven't seen one thing that has impressed me about this game yet. Guild wars 2 has really looked loads better to me.

Half of me is jealous and half of me doesn't want to play too much before release.

Congrats. I have heard they are going ot be opening up a bit more late august early September so as to stress test the servers a bit more then they have been. Keep us all informed.

Officially, they're doing wide Beta Test Weekends in September. They announced that the same day that pre-orders went live.

I agree. Have not pre-ordered, but something is not sitting well with me on TOR. Cant put my finger on it, but nothing really impresses me.

GW 2 and Arche Age are ones I am looking forward to.

I know it's going to be an absolutely amazing game. I'm not a big fan of the setting (WoW setting was amazing) but I'm sure that won't affect it too much. I freaking loved KOTOR after all.

I think I'm finished with fantasy MMOs for the forseeable future. That's part of the appeal of TOR with me (although you could argue that Star Wars is a fantasy setting). But for me, as I've said before, the story aspect is what has sold me, from the get-go. I'm a huge fan of BioWare RPGs, and that's basically exactly what TOR is, a multiplayer BioWare RPG.

Beyond that, I've spent a lot of time the last two months watching every bit of leaked content I could find, and I love every aspect of the game that I've seen so far. So much so that it's frustrating to me that I can't play.

The only thing I have not seen so far is high level play. I've seen a lot from 0-30, but very little from 30 on up. They announced today that they'll be showing a small piece of Eternity Vault at gamescom next weekend, and I'm excited to see that, both because I haven't seen much level 50 play, and because I've seen zero raid content (it hasn't been publicly tested yet...).

But, in the end, I've never hidden the fact that I'm going to be biased towards TOR, because it's basically the game I'd design for myself, if I had that opportunity. Although if and when they do something I don't like, I won't be shy about venting my frustration.

Fresh from gamescom in Germany, a short demo of The Eternity Vault. To quote myself in a message I just sent to a friend on facebook, so, i watched this for a couple of minutes and was like 'eh, not bad, nice to see some raid footage' and then the giant robot landed and i was like 'oh shit, this is awesome'.

What is it about giant robots?

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I like how it took them 30 seconds to wipe on a minor boss. Challenging raids are fun!

They actually threw that fight because they were out of time on that demo. LMAO

There's a longer vid:

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Looks like pretty standard raid stuff, what I've seen so far. I've seen people complain that it looks easy, but it should since it's developers playing it on what I assume is Normal. About as close to a pro team as you can get.

They will have different difficulty settings. Right now it's (I think) Normal/Hard 8-man and Normal/Hard 16-man, with the best drops/most difficult obviously being the Hard 16-man. There's talk that they're working on more than 2 difficulty settings but no confirmation on that, and they haven't commented on what those difficulty settings mean (whether it's just harder hitting bosses with more HP or different stages to the fight).

The loot information that's come out is interesting, too. It's not new information and I'm sure I've posted it on here already, but the boss fights will drop a loot box for every person in the raid, giving some combination of gear or barter items to acquire gear. Which I personally love. You could ask anybody that's ever gamed with me (if they were on here, which they're not....) and they would confirm that I am the most unlucky person in the universe when it comes to rolling on items. We're talking 20+ single-digit rolls in a row gear grinding in Moria instances in LotRO, having to run raids 10 or 15 times to win a single piece of gear (thank god for ladders in my later guilds). And even if I wasn't that unlucky I would still think that loot distribution is likely the worst, most dull part of any raid, and ultimately causes the most problems. So I'm a big fan of a level playing field, and the system does not in any way mean that the grind has been removed, only that you're guaranteed something every time you go.

I've also seen confirmation this week that corpses are highlighted in different colors depending on what kind of loot is on the body (i.e. green highlight for green gear, blue for rare, purple for epic, etc, however they classify it) and that AOE looting has been implemented in the latest patch, which I will use the hell out of at least at low levels.

Ahh, I see. And yeah, those are all awesome ideas as far as looting goes, although I must say, it will be hard justifying running the same raid for the 37th time since you'll be decked out rather quickly and won't have a need for DKP (or whatever system your guild uses). Maybe they'll just have some uber rare badass items with super low drop % in there as a way to incite people, IDK.

As far as that Huttball, I personally am not a huge fan of chaotic PvP, I'd much rather they have something like the Arathi Basin and Alterac Valley then a Warsong Gulch - Arena PvP hybrid. That's just me, though.

I realize they're probably just filling the need of intra-faction PvP in what they think is a fun and "realistic" way, but I just don't think it'll be very fun at all. We'll see, I guess.

Thing is, I don't think there's any guarantee that you willll be decked-out quickly. Getting something doesn't mean that something is what you want or what you're there for, and if you get tokens of some kind instead of gear (whether by choice or by luck) it may not be a 1 for 1 trade. But we don't know what the system actually is yet, in solid terms, so it's hard to really discuss the merits and the problems...I don't remember WoWs battlefields at all. I know I spent some time in Alterac Valley, but it was so many years ago...

I don't think Huttball is my cup of tea. Seems kind of silly, albeit in a fun way, but I do like the idea of a warzone that lets you take on people from your own faction.

As far as more standard warzones go, that's what they're giving with Alderaan and the Voidstar, I think. But again, I haven't pvp'd for literally years. I never even set foot in the Moors in lotro.

You're right.

Some Alderaan PvP from gamescom:

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Late in the same video there's a bit from the middle of the Eternity Vault. Direct link.

Long video of huttball in action, and I've got to admit, this looks way cooler than I thought it did:

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Of special note is the stun grenade/dirty kick by the smuggler at 12:22 LMAO

This game looks great. I have taken a break from the MMO's the last few years and hit console because the lineup as become tiring. This game along with the launch of Diablo 3 really has me excited!

Bit of smuggler gameplay, and the fellow playing goes into some detail about why he's interested in the game although it's by design a standard MMO.

(Smuggler looks like a lot of fun, I may have found my republic alt)

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Random video by some random guy about the top 10 reasons he's interested in TOR. Nothing ground-breaking, but it's well constructed and I like it so I thought I'd share:

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Removed.

Le Sigh.

Edited in a new embed. Same video uploaded by the same uploader. Not sure what they did.

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PAX starts friday, I would expect the demos will be largely the same, although they're apparently announcing some stuff about open world pvp.

Awesome, hopefully we'll have a release date by the end of PAX.

That's what I'd thought would happen originally, release date at PAX, since it's the gamer convention as opposed to the marketing or developer convention but now I'm not sure. This is totally a guess on my part, but I don't think we're going to get a release date more than a month out from the live game, and I don't think it's shipping until mid-november.

They are definitely ramping up the beta, though. Appear to have been a lot of invites lately and they're initiating high level testing as of today (giving people level 40s characters).

I'll admit, the more I see of this, the more I like it.

Just not sure it's going to really play like end-game WoW enough for me to stick with it long-term, though. I really like raiding and this just doesn't seem to have the same kind of feel.

Yeah, it's hard to tell at this point. They've said (officially) that there will be more than the 5 flashpoints announced so far, and that the Eternity Vault is only the first operation and that more are planned. But that doesn't really tell you anything solid.

I think they do intend for raiding to be an important part of the endgame, but that's just the feeling I get from interviews and demos. The information on operations is still so new, and they've shown so little of it at this point, that it's hard to get a real handle on it.

They do seem to be very bold as far as what they're trying to do. As in trying to do everything. There's already talk of an entire world dedicated to solo end-game content, as well as an entire world for PvP (I don't know about that one, as in if it's real or not, should hear about it Friday if it is...), in addition to the Eternity Vault operation and the 3 announced PvP warzones. I'm glad on one hand they're doing so much and not just relying solely on experiencing the other class stories once you've finished your first class, because I think variety is the key to a healthy long term game (as in giving people plenty to do after they "finish") I just worry that it will mean a whole lot of different watered down systems, none of them really spectacular on their own.

Now, I haven't seen anything that actually indicates that's happening, it's just a general concern I have. We should get a better handle on it as they get closer to launch, and now that they're testing higher level stuff in beta.

In any case, what people think of the game 6 months after launch, once the 'ooh's and 'ahh's and the newness has worn off, is what will ultimately determine the level of success. It's going to be interesting to watch.

Let's no kid ourselves, fellas. There's no way EA is suicidal enough to invest so much into this huge MMO only to not have end-game. I don't think that's even a question, if you don't have end-game, you don't have an MMO.

I think a tricky thing is that there's never been a game before, in this genre at least, where starting over again from the beginning is something you'd actually want to do. Which will be the case in this game for a segment of fans (i.e. people who love bioware RPGs, like myself). But that's a hard sell to traditional MMOers as being "endgame", where playing an alt is like some kind of punishment you want to get through as quickly as you can.

So I think you're right that they know they have to have endgame, but their vision of end game may not be exactly what people are used to. Or it might. It's hard to tell.

I'm still curious to hear more about the vaunted "Legacy" system. Even the people in beta don't have a clue on that, at least not that I can find.

I guess I'm a different kind of RPGer. I make one character and he's my perfect one and I just stick to him. I made twinks in WoW just for fun, but I never had more than one max level character in the game. Same goes for SP RPGs. I don't replay Bioware RPGs to see how different it would be if I played as a different character and made different choices. I do it how I like the first time and then I'm done (I realize I'm missing on a ton of content).

Making choices without being able to go back and redo something will be ****ing wild, though.

The question is not if it will have endgame, but the form in which it will come.

Oh, I gotcha. Do you prefer the big, epic 40-man raids from old?

pfft, 72 man raids. Emp SSRA, Xegony, Rathe Council! haha Good ole days. Or can go back a bit further with the Avatar of War. Blade or Carnage! Or Ralloz Zek the Warlord. That fight was intense as **** for an MMO.

How do you organize 72 people? Do you have any room on the screen left to see what's going on around you? LOL

You're thinking about it wrong. Rolling alts in TOR is not like replaying a single player RPG. It's like playing a completely different single player RPG. To a point at least (world arcs for each faction are shared).

So say you start as a Sith Inquisitor. Let's equivocate that with playing KotOR, just for ease of discussion. You finish and decide to start over as a Smuggler. You aren't playing through KotOR again, doing all the same quests over again with different decisions. You're playing through KotOR 2 now. It's a new game with new characters set on some of the same worlds, and on some new worlds you haven't seen before. Completely new companions, completely new world quests. Completely new game, although it's still technically SWTOR...

When you go to play a third class after that, it'll be the same thing, for the most part. Since you've played both factions now, you'll start to see some degree of recycled content (world arcs), and you'll obviously have the same group stuff (pvp, flashpoints and operations). But the story for those classes, and the companions that they each have, are again completely new. So in essence you'd be playing KotOR 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 and 8, because each class story is a completely unique play through the game, not recycling the experiences of the Inquisitor or Smuggler. It won't be replaying and seeing how the decisions play out if you make them differently, it'll be playing something new each time (until/if you repeat an actual class...).

WoW was nothing close to that. LotRO (which I played even longer than WoW) was nothing close to that. In all those games, and this is throwing aside the fact that I skipped most of the quest text anyway, when you played an alt you were doing the same goddamn thing you'd already done on your main, with no variety, no choices to make, nothing. Just the same rote quests over and over, and in the end just the same grinding over and over to reach the cap.

It's really hard to think of what TOR is, in MMO terms...

Hell, thinking about organizing 16 and trying to run Eternity Vault on hard is giving me nightmares. (And they're probably going to have something worse than hard).

40 man raids in Molten Core and Blackwing Lair were fun, but the longer I've been playing, the bigger fan I've become of smaller groups (12 in lotro, occasionally 24) built with people I know really well.

Nah, I'm good with the 25 mans. Hell, even the ten mans are fun. Dungeons are boring, though.

40 man is fine, but it's just too hard to do well because of the logistics of disconnects, bathroom breaks and the like.

Loot distribution on 40 mans was never much fun either as i recall. Although people seem to be just as prone to rage quit over a drop in a 12-man as they were in a 40. LMAO

Not that I've ever done that. o:-) :banghead:

Nope, it was mad Chaos, thats what made it fun haha after a while tho, if you hav ereeruns around, it sucked, but if you had solid players. its fun as ****

Also back in the days, no one used ventrillo but to **** off with. Raid everything was done in chatbox's. It wasnt difficult to organize when you have a good/decent guild. If your guild sucked, then it was just shitty.

I hear you, man. I'm still probably just going to stick to my dual-wielding jedi the whole time. But then again, maybe I'll be so blown away that I will simply have to try other classes.

I just can't imagine having 72 health/mana/rage/whatever bars on my screen during a raid.

I gotta say that the only real reason I stuck with WoW this long is because I love my guild. Plus, I'm like the 3rd best geared shaman on the server.

Has there been a suggestion of getting a CP guild going for this game? There seems to be a lot of interest from this community in the game. Just wondering.

Yeah, that's what I've come to discover over the years. The games are usually only as fun as the people you play with.

(which is ironic, I know, considering how much I solo)

Another good total biscuit video. I tell you what, I am not a PvP guy, but this looks (and sounds) fun as hell. He's clearly loving it (and he wasn't a big fan of TOR until fairly recently).

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lol, this is everquest, there was NO other people outside of your groups health bars. You wanted a heal, your group either hooked ya up, or you shouted in guild/raid chat HEAL HEAL HEAL lol

And no mana bars. Necro's/mages had to call out every few min, Cleric's mana! and you fed them if you were able.

I played a necro so i never required heals or mana buffs really. Necro's regained mana with health and lifetapped mobs for health. We were on our own lol

Oh, lol.

Yeah, they had those world encounters like that in WoW too.

here is a screenshot of my UI in everquest back in the days... well its 2006ish i think. The max raid size in that pic was 54. That was a wipe from an AE rampage. 54 people died in like 2 seconds. lol

Holy shit information overload....

yeah, my class required it. i had to know what dots were on and what were off. If i was a melee, it wouldnt be even close to that, i would have like 2 windows tops.

Fuuuuuuuuuuck that.

lol, yeah, its actually ae death touch. your in a big ass torture chamber n dude would yell out a raid members name then chase him, you would have to run away til he gets tired of chasing you. if he caught you anyone close by is dead lol.

Shit was a fun ass fight though. I used to have it frapsed, but lost it when google deleted all their videos.

Wow, that brings back memories.

Looks like this week's Friday update is (a small part of an...) Eternity Vault walkthrough. Not sure if there's anything in there we didn't see last week at gamescom. Spoiler tagged so it doesn't autoplay on people, I'll youtube it once they have it uploaded there.

So I just got a beta key for this. Not sure how exactly, but low and behold, I received it this morning.

I'll will fire it up this weekend and report back. :)

Congrats on the beta key. Have fun with it

A lot of keys have gone out lately. Sometimes I think I'm the only guy who doesn't have one. LMAO

Hopefully will get a weekend sometime in September. Although at this point I'm not sure playing the game for a couple of days and then having them snatch it back for another 6 weeks will appease me all that much.

Like that new Eternity Vault vid. Gives a better, clearer perspective on that first boss battle and shows a bit more about how the class roles were being filled. Nice seeing more non-Force healing, and also seeing the raid frames moved on the UI (first UI customization of any kind I've seen so far).

Some new details from the initial developer presentation:

12:26 - GA: Story is meant to be accessible to everyone. Maybe 3-6 hours of raiding to get through it... hard mode is tougher with different mechanics. Easy mode lockout does not apply to hard mode lockouts.

12:30 - GA: You haven't seen even half of our Flashpoints.

So, have you finished half your download yet? LMAO

(For people who don't know, I hear through the grapevine it's a 30+GB download)

(I've also heard that servers have been down recently because they introduced some serious logon issues with the last patch, although they might have performed maintenance on that today)

yeah it took me a day and a half to download and install

wow. 30 gig game? ****, Vanguard was 18, but i guess when you add that much audio its expected.

Yeah, there's an enormous amount of audio files.

Hey all.
Question for those who are tracking this game closely.

Can anyone give me the details on how PvP is going to work? As many details as you can if possible? I have had zilch luck trying to find anything about how PvP is going to Work in TOR.

BTW, busy weekend and did not get a chance to play. 30 gig download took a long time to download and play. Will report back my results when I play.

Cheers.

Details on PvP so far (from memory - I'm not a PvPer, so I may not know as much as somebody who is..):

Basically, the impression I get is that the PvP in TOR is designed in the same manner as the rest of the game: they're building on what's worked for MMOs in the past and trying to make it better and more polished. So if you're looking for new and innovative PvP (whatever that entails...) you're probably not going to find it in TOR, at least at launch.

What you will find are, of course, PvP servers, plus warzones and world pvp (on Ilum, apparently) on all servers.

3 warzones at launch:

1. Alderaan, a control point style warzone, involves Republic and Imperial teams (of 8 - PvP appears to be 8v8 in warzones) vying for control of 3 turrets which are firing on starships from each faction. Once your faction's ship's shields are taken down, you lose.

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2. Huttball, a capture the flag style esport where the objective of each team is to score by taking the 'ball' across their opponent's goal line. There are environmental hazards and traps (fire, acid, gas, etc), and apparently you can get pretty creative offensively according to the developers (you can pass the ball etc). Team with the highest score before the timer runs out wins. And huttball can be played against your own faction (so it can be Empire/Republic, Empire/Empire or Republic/Republic).


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3. The Voidstar. Not much is known about this one yet; they haven't shown it publicly. It involves the Empire and the Republic vying for control of a starship called the Voidstar.

There is a bolster system in place in warzones that allows all levels to PvP together. Obviously high levels will have more in terms of skills to work with, but I've seen several warzone videos with people in their teens fighting with and against people in their 30s. There's also a system in place to prohibit CC chaining (diminishing returns). In terms of combat, it's a sustained fighting style, rather than quick killing with crits and so on (you can still gang up and destroy somebody in seconds of course...). Tanks have the ability to 'guard' an ally, drawing away a percentage of the damage they take, and their taunting abilities will similarly (purportedly) act as an aoe damage sponge. Healing apparently has similar benefits. Basically, they've gone out of their way to make standard trinity roles beneficial in warzones. If you tank or heal outside, in PvE, you won't be penalized when you try to tank or heal in PvP. It's not all DPS.

As far as PvP rankings and things like that, I don't believe they'll be in at launch. I don't know if that's something they're working on long-term or not. There is a reward system in place. You collect commendations as you PvP which can be traded for gear, and high level PvP gear is apparently competitive with high level operation (raid) gear.

One thing I know that there's some concern about in the community is that currently they only allow single groups (of 4) to queue for a battleground. Which is problematic because each battleground is raid-sized (8v8). I'm putting that down as something that's subject to change. They say they've done it to prevent established 8-man groups from steamrolling PUGs, but it doesn't sound like the right answer to that problem to me. We'll see what happens with that.

They announced world PvP for the first time yesterday, but have not revealed many details yet, so I can't really talk about that...

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That's pretty much everything I can think of.

Video of the Eternity Vault demo from the feature panel at PAX yesterday. They invited 6 people from the audience to join in on the raid.

Let's just say...the ending was one I've experienced a time or two myself over the years... LMAO

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Interesting comment I just came across that ties into this in a hilarious way:

Pretty cool reddit post about the voice acting, which I hadn't really considered before, for whatever reason: http://www.reddit.com/r/swtor/commen...r_classgender/

Listening to all those, I'm pretty sure I'm going to be mixing genders. Something I have never done in an MMO previously. I always play male characters, because I find it's easier to identify with my character. And that actually goes back to my regular RPG days, too. Even with KOTOR, the first game I remember with cinematic styling that's BioWare's signature, I was always a male (and generally a scoundrel/consular, sometimes a scout/consular). But with Jennifer Hale voice acting Mass Effect 1/2, I began to play female avatars for the first time. Her renegade voicing is so good in those games...

So, after listening to all those, I'm pretty sure my consular (main) will be a male - not a surprise there. I think I'll also play a male Knight (although i'm vascillating on that one) and a male smuggler (no doubt...), but with Hale voicing the Trooper, I'll be going female. And on the Imperial side, I'm definitely going female for the Warrior (Claudia Black!!) and the Inquisitor, and male for the BH and Agent.

It's hard to explain, but the voice talent I'm going with somehow sounds the way I envision my characters, which is I think going to be one more level of immersion I hadn't really realized was going to be there. I mean, I knew it was voiced, and I knew it would blow text boxes out of the water, but I hadn't really thought about deciding what gender I was going to be because of the acting. Pretty cool.

I never identify with my avatars. They're always just a means to an end for me. So, I go for eye candy, which is generally female.

I think that's pretty normal for gamers these days. MMOs stopped being "MMORPG"s years ago, and I don't think the console market (which is by far the focus of game development now) has ever had any kind of focus on immersion in the roleplaying sense, even in the console RPG market, with their predominantly eastern (as in asian) influence. Everything is focused on min-maxing.

I'm sort of the other end of the spectrum. I have the hardest time naming my characters, because I want it to be something good, and if it's an MMO I always go with the default character, because if I don't, the game looks wrong to me. Which in one sense is weird, because I'm taking the characters role, but I'm not literally thinking of my actual self in that role. It's more about me being the character, but doing the things I would do (I almost always play 'good'). I think part of the reason I've so rarely had female avatars is the simple fact that so few games have female protagonists.

Either way, I always have the hardest time with MMO avatars, getting exactly what I want, because that character is who I'm going to be until the time I stop playing the game...

I'm already having a freaking nervous breakdown trying to come up with names for all my toons.

Gah, I hate JRPGs.