BioWare’s strategy for SWTOR (or simply TOR) is to reach as many gamers as they possibly can. “Star Wars is beloved in the US as well as many other parts of the world,” said Producer Rich Vogel, citing the low system specs required for the game, “and that said, we want to make sure that the game is accessible to as many people as possible.”

The game will look as good as it possibly can, but the voice-acting will make the most impact. It is costly, but effective and used mostly in other MMOs as for special flavor perhaps, for important quests. One of the questions often asked of BioWare is how difficult the voice-acting and files was to manage, but for a company that’s used to the process, the voice-acting, we are told, is the simplest part of the game. It is scripted first in text of course, but with games like Knights of the Old Republic, Mass Effect and Dragon Age behind them, piece of cake!

Gamers who enjoy the Star Wars movies and world but aren’t necessarily avid fans need not fear that their lack of knowledge of all things Star Wars will hinder them in the game. TOR is set about 3,000 years before the movies or Clone Wars. It’s not that the Sith Empire is based on the movies, Palpatine’s empire was based on the ancient Sith Empire! “Just watching the trailers will get you up to speed,” said Lead Designer James Ohlen, “But there will be Easter eggs for fans of KOTOR (Knights of the Old Republic) to find in the game.”

In this Swtor statement, EA CEO John Riccitiello talks a lot about mmo Microtransactions and he mentions playing a game for 6 hours straight and having to pay 1 dollar just to re-clip your ammo (@24:40 of the presentation), should we be concerned at all?

These opinions sparked a Burst of 87-105 pages commentary in the official web-site's forums.

The previus Thread was closed by a moderator due of 1000 posts issue and he opened a new one . The major problem with these statements is EA's CEO didn't clearly explain his thoughts of what Microtransactions he meant or if swtor will have Microtransactions.

There are many type of Micro-transactions ,some of them affect player game ,some of them not.for example, items like special looking rings-earings ,dresses,mounts that do not give any extra stats, XP gain, etc and they are only cosmetics i don't think there is any gamer in the world that is against them.

Οn the other hand there are the items that change stats, XP gain , fire power , armor defense .these items used a lot in free to play mmo games and they the reason that free to play many times cost more than these mmo with monthly fee.

So far it seems like they have only been testing in small amounts ( 100 players ) and that will most likely not be the case with the release.

When swtor goes live and servers are awaiting the first players to walk in it ,there is always a risk to be the first day

1. crash fest
2. Queue fest
3. Synchonize problems Fest
4. Exploit / dupe / Hack Fest attacks and of cource
5. Lag Fest

because Tor has not been tested in mass amounts of variety combinations of [gamers - "gamers"] / [clients -workstations hardware setups] / [clients - workstations software setups ] / [clients - workstations network situation ].Ι ΒΕΤ 50000 credits that the forums in the first days will be hammered with to many problems that will be the community manager's nightmare. A recent mmo game I have been seeing executing open test it fairly correctly was Rift. the headstart gave pre-ordered players the ability to play days before the launch. Failure myths within the normal release has already hammered some mmorpg releases in the past. i don't want right now referrer any of these mmos, but many of us we know what happend in the past. I'm not saying Bioware or better EA should start inviting thousands of players right now, but it would be a good choise the hard test and be better preparation for the worst case scenarios within the last month before launch. An other option is pre-sell and pre-launch a week before normal start, but the time to investigate and solve the problems is limited.

You've all watched Star Wars (well I hope you did..) I read a few developers posts about the cross-faction talk and the said that it's only enabled in the beta, and its highly likely that it will not be in the finished game.

When I heard about that it struck me, being that I'm a heavy PvPer ,i am also and a heavy socialize gamer that use the chat a lot . Maybe if it can be reconsidered being that Bioware/Lucasarts said they want to make this feel like a REAL star wars experience *, Cross-faction talk in swtor should be enabled. It would really add a sense of reality in the game, especially in PvP atmosphere inside the game.

It's used in everquest , and works wonderfully, and it is not used in Aion and that was a reason that pvp in aion sucks a lot ,because you can see that the enemy speaks but you can not read what he writes

Always ,in pvp games ,a bit of QQ chat is like the alas of pvp and many times the qq after pvp is the reason for the mmo gamers to try more to be better in pvp strategy (swtor = startegy ) , armor - weapons and levels

Although I know there are people who don't PVP at all, wouldn't it be easy to just have an option where cross-faction talk can be disabled in Tor due to various reasons of BAD LANGUAGE in cross-faction talk ?

*In every battle with lightsabers in star wras there was a QQ chat between star wars characters !!!!!!!

Discuss it.

Combat Queue, Smoother Animation - My interest in this game has been growing the further along it has gotten. Being a former SWG player (yes pre-cu) I was a bit turned off when first hearing about another Star Wars MMO. But before I get into the two things that have caught my attention the most I would like to say that Bioware has done an excellent job so far in most every aspect, marketing especially.

Firstly, the Combat Queue. I have never been a fan of hotkey mashing every few seconds or so when playing a game. To me it takes away from watching the screen and being immersed in what's going on if every few seconds I have to look at what i'm hitting to battle effectively. Not everyone out there will be adept at knowing where every key is instantly especially if you are marketing to a group of sometimes casual gamers.

All that being said I would promote a Combat Queue which would build up moves you have selected to be executed in the aforementioned selected order. This would reset between each battle and have the ability to cancel said Queue of all commands during combat least you make a mistake or the battle conditions change.