Tuesday 20 March 2012

Your Saga Continues

I'll be honest. I'm finding myself having a hard time bringing up any enthusiasm for TOR and haven't played in weeks. Though I'm eager to start playing my Consular, I'm waiting on a friend who I was supposed to play her together with (and that friend is likely deep into Mass Effect 3 right now; it's getting to the point where I'm just considering playing alone as I'm wasting my subscription fee like this).

But anyway, that lack of enthusiasm extends to keeping the blog updated, which in turn means I've got a rather big backlog. Particularly since last week a fair number of details from the Guild Summit were released across various sites. Add about half-a-dozen official BioWare updates and a truckload of dev tracker notes and it's a lot to get through.

So let's get to it. To start with last Friday BioWare's writer Charles Boyd posted a BioWare Community blog entry titled "Your Saga Continues: Story in Game Update 1.2". Here's an excerpt:

First, you will be called upon to return to the embattled world of Corellia, joining their faction’s forces to carry out missions in an all-new district known as the Black Hole. Refineries in the Black Hole process a rare and unstable starship fuel called hypermatter that’s necessary for all starship travel, and a critical component of fleet operations for the Republic and the Empire. Hoping to play both sides for maximum profits, a corrupt Corellian councilor has seized control of the entire district, hiring the toughest mercenaries and deadliest criminal scum available to lock down his holdings, effectively enslaving the refinery workers, and brutalizing anyone who tries to stand against him. Whether the councilor’s new regime stands will be up to you.

Read on after the break for... well a whole lot of stuff.


I've posted the trailer for update 1.2 before, but now it's available on the official homepage:

With Game Update 1.2, “Legacy”, a whole new array of features will be introduced to Star Wars™: The Old Republic™. While this includes playable in-game content, such as the brand new “Explosive Conflict” Operation, “Legacy” will also introduce a bevy of new features including Player-vs-Player Warzone ranking, and the next evolution of the Legacy system!

Take a look at many of the new features coming in Game Update 1.2 in our New Features video.

BioWare also announced that The Old Republic will (by now has) feature(d) in The Big Bang Theory on TV (for those that still watch TV):

We are excited to announce that Star Wars™: The Old Republic™ will be featured in a brand new episode of The Big Bang Theory! The episode, titled “The Weekend Vortex”, sees Sheldon having to choose between going with Amy to her aunt’s birthday party, or spending the weekend exploring The Old Republic™ with Bernadette, Raj, Leonard, and Howard.

You can catch The Big Bang Theory episode “The Weekend Vortex” tonight, March 8th, at 8:00PM EST / 7:00PM CST / 9:00PM MST / 8:00PM PST on CBS!

I've never watched the series in question, but supposedly it's funny.

BioWare also announced that Update 1.2 is on the Test server. Here's an excerpt from the news:

The biggest change with Game Update 1.2 is the evolution of the Legacy system. As we first highlighted back in January, players will be able to tie their different characters together in their Legacy family tree. Characters that are placed within a Legacy family tree will then be able to unlock special Legacy emotes and abilities. Players will also be able to unlock different species for any character class in their Legacy.

This is just the start of the Legacy expansion. Players who increase their Legacy level will be able to unlock new convenience items for their ship, such as an on-board mailbox or Galactic Trade Network terminal. There are also Legacy bonuses tied to a player’s Companion Characters and moral alignment, among other things.

They also posted the patch notes for the Test version of Update 1.2 as well. They're quite extensive.

Finally, though BioWare skipped a week (which is partly why I'm in somewhat of a backlog now as well as I was waiting on it to post various stuff) they also posted another Community Q&A. Here's an excerpt:

Ziko: Already having 8 characters on my server...will I be forced to delete characters in order to take advantage of the Legacy system or will I be able to change race & new Legacy customization features on pre-existing characters and will there be more character slots added?

Georg Zoeller (Principal Lead Combat Designer): We have heard at the Guild Summit that there's interest in being able to acquire additional character slots on the servers. We are in the process of determining the requirements for such a step and will update the community when such a feature has moved past the planning state.

Right, on to the external articles.

To begin with, IGN reports on some numbers regarding TOR. Here's an excerpt:

Of all these design decisions, storytelling is what's stood out the most, making some players even tell BioWare they can't go back to Blizzard's MMO. And perhaps that's a direct result of how much work was put into the story. The Old Republic has over 321 actors, voicing more than 4,094 characters. It also features more voice over work than every single other BioWare combined. The story also takes place across 20 planets, resulting in over 200 hours of gameplay for each of the eight classes.

I'm fairly certain that with "aka World of Warcraft" (in the preceding paragraph) they really mean "aka Star Wars". But anyway. It shows some impressive numbers, particularly that they had a veritable army of people working on the game.

The Escapist reports similarly, but their article goes into a bit more detail talking about triage meetings. Here's an excerpt:

"There are probably dolls of me in the studio with needles through the eye," said Dickinson after discussing the need for change. Iterative development also means iterative development of processes. That's healthy, and people need to embrace the change. Dickinson said that wasn't always the case, however, and that the mentality was somewhere along the lines of: "Every time we change a process Jesus kills a baby." Managing people and dealing with change was a challenge for the SW:TOR, especially because it was the biggest BioWare has had to deal with..

There were six weeks per milestone (with one week after for fixing bugs). The teams regularly had a "Death Star" meeting, sometimes once a day, with leads of the disciplines meeting to cut features. They had to triage often to make goals - triage is when you lose your "nice-to-have" features (which makes a team sad) but has to happen.

"We made people cry in the 'Death Star' many times," said Vogel.

I can well understand how you have to set priorities and not everything will make it in. Though at times I wonder if they've been a little harsh (considering that number of features that many consider standard in MMOs that SWTOR didn't have at launch). But at least with it being an MMO there's a good chance that many of the things that they had to cut will still see the light of day sometime.

On a lighter note then Kotaku linked to a video which makes, what they call "hilarious light" of the conversation system in TOR. Here's the video:

Let's just say that humor is subjective. While I agree that the shorthand dialog options have a lot of problems in TOR the video just wasn't funny. Mostly because they exaggerate it in an attempt to make a joke (it's much better if you take something that's close to an actual situation), because they're apparently unaware of the option to hide dark side corruption, and because they stopped playing at level 10. But anyway, maybe someone finds the video as hilarious as Kotaku apparently did.

Over on Massively they got a hands-on with Update 1.2 during the Guild Summit. Here's an excerpt:

During the recent Guild Summit, while the guild leaders and fan site press were shuttled off, the press made its way to BioWare studios to try out the new content in Update 1.2. Each member was given his or her station to tool around with. Immediately, I noticed that the two Bounty Hunters in the character selection screen wore armor I had never seen before: Black Hole armor and War Hero armor. We were about to step into the new flashpoint called the Lost Island as well as the new Novare Coast warzone.

If you've been following me or the Hyperspace Beacon, you know that SWTOR's UI is a thorn in my side, and I prefer a very odd interface layout. Justin from Darth Hater referred to the changes to the UI layout as being similar to the Dominos mod for World of Warcraft. Personally, I would say that it's very similar to RIFT mostly because I never played with mods in my short time with WoW. Designer Emmanuel Lusinchi glanced over at my UI layout and asked whether I actually played like that. I replied that I'd probably do a bit of tweaking, but generally, yes, I do play like that!

Next to the UI changes they mainly tried out the new Flashpoint and the new Warzone, and seemed overall quite happy with them. Nice writeup.

MMORPG.com was also at the Guild Summit and posted up some impressions. Here's an excerpt:

Another issue I found were the leaders that asked questions that only affected them and perhaps a few others that they knew of. While there weren't too many questions asked like these, I felt these questions to be unnecessary and, in a sense, selfish. As guild leaders, we were there to represent a general whole... whether that whole be our guild or different types of gamers found within the game. Many leaders often have players of every type in their guild, so I suppose I just expected questions that would be less concerned with themselves and more with everyone else.

For example, the leader who seemed upset that Bioware was encouraging people to reroll alts with the Legacy system. I guess this didn't really seem like an issue to me. As a guild leader, I definitely want my guildmates to reroll if they are bored or want to try something new and I trust them to uphold PvP and Raid schedules. My guild has developed that sort of bond and, in fact, a lot of us have rerolled alts together to level casually when we aren't playing our mains.

Since I wasn't at the summit I can't speak for how things went there, but I have to question MMORPG's complaints here. First they complain about repeated questions (where I'd say: just because you know the answer doesn't mean that everyone does or that there's no further clarification to get). I think a bit of that is inevitable and only if they took questions in advance and screened them would you avoid that, and then only in part and at the cost of the free-form approach. If they screen questions that'll quickly give the impression that they might not want to answer some things.

But the complaint I quoted above seems ever weirder, particularly with the example given. It might not matter to you that people roll alts (and it doesn't much matter to me either), but that doesn't mean that it isn't a valid concern for people. I definitely know that guilds fear people leaving because they play alts (and then add those alts to other guilds) or that a guild will become a mostly alt guild (meaning that the overall activity will be much lower). I also strongly suspect that the other issues the author complained about were just issues the author didn't personally care about and couldn't see how they might matter to anyone else. This makes me wonder who was really being selfish there.

Anyway, during the same Guild Summit MMORPG also held an interview with Gabe Amatangelo. Here's an excerpt:

MMORPG.com:  With the ability to mod many different outfits coming in Patch 1.2, how are you planning to retain class identity when a bunch of slave dancers and sand people are running around in PvP?

Gabe [Amatangelo]:  On the user interface we will be enabling the ability for players to be able to see class icons on the nameplates. These icons will be color specific. So players will still be able to identify classes and it will actually be advanced class. So it'll be Sentinel and Guardian as opposed to just Jedi Knight. It will have different icons and different colors for that.

That's how we're preserving it for PvP purposes.  Some felt that it was important for PvE and story customization to allow players to roleplay in the kind of outfits that they wanted to.  So that is where it stands for Patch 1.2.  As with all features, we'll continue to listen to feedback from the community regarding that system and making adjustments in the future as necessary.

That's kind of... unique. Usually PvP considerations seem to trump other consideration. Because PvP needs silhouetting the rest of the game gets limited customization. Because of fears of people switching sides for PvP the rest of the game doesn't get free server transfers. Things like that. But here we have something where appearance customization seems to be considered important enough that they came up with another solution for PvP. And though from his answer Gabe doesn't seem happy about it ("some felt") I say that that is how you approach conflicts like this. Makes me quite happy.

Ten Ton Hammer's SWTORHub also have an interview, but they have it with James Ohlen. Here's an excerpt:

Ten Ton Hammer: That absolutely helps with community as well. So skipping back to the GTN, it wasn’t quite up to par. Out of curiosity though, why was it designed in the way that it is right now?

James Ohlen: I like to read the articles that say that I must be an idiot to come up with such a crappy design. (laughs) However, I didn’t intentionally come up with a design to limit people or make it very hard. The search functionality is a much more difficult problem than you might think, so it’s something that requires a lot of server programming because you have to search vast databases of all different items that are available on the Galactic Trade Network. In order for the searches to not bring down the servers…it’s much more complicated than a simple search function. I learned this. When I first got the estimate of how expensive it was, I was like, “What! Why the hell is it this expensive?” Then it all made sense.

For launch, we needed to have a search function, so we tried to figure out a search function that would work that could be completed in the time period available to us. We put that in. We then had the server programmers working on a full standard search system, and then we could also get a sense on how our fans reacted to our temporary search system. How bad was it? Turns out it was pretty bad! (laughs) When that came up, people really complained about it and that was one of the wins we had with game update 2. This was something that the team really reacted to. It looked like that we weren’t going to get the new search function done by game update 2, but all our team members hear what the fans are complaining about and the server programmers are kind of upset over the fact that this was making us look bad. So they put in the long hours and they got it out in time. It wasn’t actually part of the game update 2 plan because the server programmers were busy with all sorts of things. It was a big win for us that we got it in. I think the fans will be happy that it’s there.

I found this part interesting because it shines some light on how things might come to be as they are even though they're generally not considered that good by most everyone. It might seem simple to have a search function up, but as the answer says things often aren't as easy as they seem. If nothing else that's something to keep in mind whenever you run into something that seems they could've 'easily' done better.

The rest of the interview was quite a nice read as well.

Massively also had a talk with James Ohlen. Here's an excerpt:

Level-50 content

Ohlens admits that after the game launched, BioWare changed "what we are focusing on over the course of the year based on the feedback the fans have been giving us." He put forward the level-50 content and tools as being the greatest example:

"The number of level 50s is a lot higher than we thought it was going to be. Therefore, our group finder has become a much higher priority. It's essentially our highest-priority feature that is not going in 1.2. If there is one feature that 1.3 will have, it will be the group finder.

"A lot of our feedback from the level 50s revolves around the dungeon finder. We have two operations, four level 50 flashpoints, and the hardmodes for all of them. We have a ton of PvE high-level content, but our metrics show that a lot of it hasn't been consumed by level 50s. Dungeon finder is the key there. That's one of the reasons that PvP is so popular because PvP is so much easier to get into than PvE. Once I started getting that data I was like, 'Oh, OK.' I knew that group finder was important. When leveling up, like we found during beta, you don't really need the group finder, but when you reach the max level, it becomes very important."

I know I'm not much of a group player. I hate spamming general chat with group invites and rarely respond to them either. I don't like all the arranging and waiting that tends to be involved with them. So for me a dungeon finder would be a blessing. Maybe then I might actually be able to finish up my group quests and do the Flashpoints.

Back to SWTORHub again they also have a hands-on with Update 1.2. Here's an excerpt:

The Legacy System

This could very well be the highlight of Update 1.2 for myself and my friends. Finally, a game where playing alts doesn't feel like wasted time. As all of your characters on your server contribute to your Legacy Level new Legacy perks are unlocked.

The interface is simple enough. By pressing 'Y' on the keyboard you're able to pull up the new Legacy window. Here you will have several options on how to develop your Legacy. First, you can create your family tree with a simple drag-and-drop interface. All of your characters on the server appear on the left and you place them on the flow-chart-style page in the interface. You can set various relationships like spouses, siblings, parents, allies and step-children to flesh out the lineage. I imagine the role-playing community will have a hay-day with this one.

When BioWare first started talking about a Legacy system I wasn't aware that they were doing a full family tree thing. I must say that I quite like that they are taking that approach... though I also wonder what the point of it is. Are there unlocks that you only get on characters that are children of your existing characters? Will there be any point to the tree-structure and the associated relationships at all? Can other players see it (and would you want to)? As a roleplayer I don't really need such functionality in the game, and in fact they can often get in the way of things ("yeah, but, my character is none of these relationships"). So I kind of wonder why they went to the extensive effort to implement the whole tree things here. It might sound silly, but for roleplaying I'd much rather have a biography/description field on my character that others can read.

Still, the Legacy system sounds quite nice as does a lot of the rest of update 1.2.

Another interview with Gabe Amatangelo is over at Games On Net. Here's an excerpt:

Mark: On the point of cross server matching, what are you envisioning here? Are we talking about a class and group focused thing, will there be matching to other friends on other servers, pre-mades with other guilds even?

Gabe: Well, of course, it’s going to be a staged thing like any sort of tech feature. Ultimately, we’d love to see it at a point where you can go and match up with friends on other servers. Guilds, yeah, maybe, maybe not. So far, that’s not really a direction we’re seeing that we want to head towards. But friending people on other servers, yeah that’s something we’ve talked about a lot. Obviously, that’s not coming in the first wave, but it’s awesome and something we really want to reach towards. At first, it will be about friends on your own server and about the matches themselves, and matching to the right skill levels. The more you can match the skill levels on both sides, the more fun, the more challenging, the more rewarding that match is going to be. So we’re keeping that as the focus for the first part.

It’s also a case of, not just catering to the match itself, but allowing the player to establish a set of preferences. Like, I only want to play Voidstar or I only want to play Huttball. So it’s like, okay if that’s your preferences, then we will be looking more to reach outside your server to make sure matches will pop.

I've felt since the beginning that they should have had cross-server matching (which, as I understand, won't be in 1.2 just yet). Having a larger pool of people to play against can only be a good thing. But I hadn't heard of the cross-server friending yet. That would be awesome. Though I really wonder how that's going to work. I guess that they'll have to introduce a unique cross-server name for players in much the same way as City of Heroes did after launch. Though that's probably something that they should've kept in mind from the start; would've made things a hundred times easier for them now.

Finally there's a whole bunch of articles from Darth Hater. I'm not going to quote them all, but here's the list of them:

  • [link] to Lost Island Flashpoint impressions at Darth Hater.
  • [link] to Novare Coast Warzone impressions at Darth Hater.
  • [link] to Patch 1.2 hands-on at Darth Hater.
  • [link] to interview with Georg Zoeller at Darth Hater.
  • [link] to interview with Daniel Erickson at Darth Hater.
  • [link] to interview with Stephen Reid at Darth Hater.

Here's a small bit from the interview with Daniel Erickson:

Sticking with community, what do you see as far as community features going forward? What is the long term plan for community features on the website and as far as integration with the game?

There is a really bold — and you have to talk to Stephen for all the details — but they’ve got a really big team that’s actually really had a dedication to making the site more of a targeted place for fans to go than I think any other MMO has tried to do. They want to surface a huge amount of the information for the game. They want to be a place that you can trust the source, that they can feed stuff out so we have a standardization so people know where things are going there. I think the long term plan is sort of to be the one stop resource for all of your questions and anything that you actually want to know or need to find out how you’re going to figure out about The Old Republic.

That's quite interesting. I think that they have some ways to go for that yet. For one, with how Flash-heavy the site is it certainly isn't a convenient place to look up information (the site will need to become a lot more 'boring' animation-wise for that to work; there's a reason why most wikis are pretty much just text). There's also a lot of information missing that I can find elsewhere (and things like character planners and such). Long, long way to go yet.

I'm kind of disappointed in Darth Hater for not asking Stephen about this though. Maybe they had the interview with Stephen first or they didn't communicate the question between interviewers or just forgot. Because I would've liked to hear what he had to say on it.

Anyway, that's it. Now just the developer quotes.

  • [link] to Georg Zoeller on purchasable Legacy features.
  • [link] to Georg Zoeller on changes to all classes.
  • [link] to Chris Collins on "Darth" in French.
  • [link] to Georg Zoeller on (no) class balances changes in 1.1.5.
  • [link] to Georg Zoeller on (no) cross realm Group Finder.
  • [link] to Georg Zoeller on engame moddable lightsabers.
  • [link] to Georg Zoeller on macros.
  • [link] to Georg Zoeller on legacy XP.
  • [link] to Georg Zoeller on (no) 64 bit version.
  • [link] to Georg Zoeller on speeder prices.
  • [link] to Georg Zoeller on balance changes in 1.2.
  • [link] to Georg Zoeller on gear customization.
  • [link] to Georg Zoeller on class balance differences.
  • [link] to Georg Zoeller on speeder prices, part 2.
  • [link] to David Bass on guild testing.
  • [link] to David Bass on cross-server PvP queues.
  • [link] to Georg Zoeller on free respec in 1.2.
  • [link] to Georg Zoeller on purple items.
  • [link] to Georg Zoeller on cross-server Warzones.
  • [link] to Stephen Reid on eight-man Warzone queuing.
  • [link] to Stephen Reid on (no) MacOS port.
  • [link] to Stephen Reid on Ilum world PvP.
  • [link] to Stephen Reid on Heroic Ability Legacy unlock.
  • [link] to Stephen Reid on (no) MacOS port, part 2.
  • [link] to Georg Zoeller on balance changes in 1.2, part 2.
  • [link] to Georg Zoeller on balance changes in 1.2, part 3.
  • [link] to Georg Zoeller on balance changes in 1.2, part 4.
  • [link] to Georg Zoeller on reusable stims phasing out.
  • [link] to Georg Zoeller on shotgun RE.
  • [link] to Georg Zoeller on GTN deposit.
  • [link] to Georg Zoeller on JC/SI tank shield recipes.
  • [link] to Georg Zoeller on first aid kit.
  • [link] to Georg Zoeller on Warzone balance statistics.
  • [link] to Georg Zoeller on Legacy unlocks.
  • [link] to Georg Zoeller on reverse engineering and 1.2.
  • [link] to Georg Zoeller on moddable techblades in 1.2.
  • [link] to Georg Zoeller on augmentation slots in 1.2.
  • [link] to Georg Zoeller on Legacy features.
  • [link] to Stephen Reid on balance changes.
  • [link] to Georg Zoeller on augmentation slits in 1.2, part 2.
  • [link] to Georg Zoeller on repair astromech unlockable.
  • [link] to Amber Green on 1.2 Test Patch Notes.
  • [link] to Allison Berryman on security reminder.
  • [link] to Georg Zoeller on Legacy cosmetic changes.
  • [link] to Georg Zoeller on white color crystal.
  • [link] to Georg Zoeller on under the hood changes.
  • [link] to Georg Zoeller on moving chat UI.
  • [link] to Georg Zoeller on UI import/export.
  • [link] to Georg Zoeller on testing feedback.
  • [link] to Georg Zoeller on social gear.
  • [link] to Cameron Winston on daily quest and operation.
  • [link] to Georg Zoeller on commendation drop rates.
  • [link] to Georg Zoeller on increased Operation credits.
  • [link] to David Hunt on set bonus.
  • [link] to David Hunt on patched items.
  • [link] to David Hunt on new schematics.

That's a looong list of quotes, but even so I only picked out a couple of highlights, all of them by Georg Zoeller it turns out.

The first one is a post where he talks about the future Group Finder:

Quote:
Originally Posted by MUFanatic
I am disappointed to see the cross realm LFG tool being talked about as a future addition to the game. I was really hoping to keep that out of TOR just because of it's ability to destroy community in a game. I would be all for LFG server wide but cross realm is a no go for me.

The Group Finder feature we've discussed for the near future is definitely single-server only.

I really don't get this talk of "destroying community" that the poster Georg responds to seems so concerned about. To me a community isn't formed by forcing people in the same place, if anything that tends to be the kind of 'community' that degrades quickest. Instead to me community is groups of people with shared interest getting together. A cross-server group finder would help with that as you'd naturally group with others interesting in doing, well, group content. But I think that in general the problem here is that TOR isn't build to handle cross-server communities, which is to its own detriment. There's a lot that TOR would need for that to work well, so I can understand them not doing cross-realm group finding.

In the second post Mr. Zoeller talks about macros:

If you're invoking the Guild Summit, let's be a bit more precise about what we've said:

A) Macros are a possibility in the future. We don't hate them.

B) I am opposed to macros that automate combat (shouldn't be a surprise). I'd rather take tedious things (such as sprint turning off after death) and modify the design than to rely on people to create macros to deal with these things - which creates unnecessary barriers of entry in my opinion.

C) We don't consider interface improvements and quality of life features (e.g. mouse over healing) to be macros (so 2 does not apply)

D) Macros for social behaviors, etc are definitely a possibility too.

I'm generally a fan of macros as I quite like to use them for various roleplaying things. In Age of Conan I had a whole set of them to run an in-character acceptance ceremony for new guild members. I've also had macros for songs (mostly for the timing between lines) and various other such things. I'm also not opposed to macros to automate certain gameplay, but generally speaking if such automation is greatly desired then that tend to point to a problem with the gameplay that needs to be fixed instead, so such macros shouldn't be needed, as Georg pretty much says. So let's hope that they'll include macros for emotes and such.

In the next post he talks about giving free respecs:

Well no.

Any kind of structural change we do (e.g. a skill that had 3 points now has 2 points) or if a skill changes what it does or moves to a different tier will require us to give all players in that tree a free respec. Anything else would be unfair to the player. I'm not going to start changing your character without giving you that option.

Game Update 1.2. contains the result of several months of feedback and data gathered from real player interactions with our servers. We're quite deliberate in our pace of making adjustments to classes, taking our time to see where classes are developing as players get into the game, watching new specs coming and going as the community develops counter measures against them. Game Update 1.2 is an opportunity for us to roll out greater changes and big picture improvements or rebalances.

The changes made to most classes are more evolutionary adjustments or quality of life upgrades along with balance improvements (up and down). Still, we won't be the arbiter of whether a change makes a skill worthwhile or no longer worthwhile for your build, you can make that decision for yourself, hence the free respec.

Though I've read (well, scanned) the test server patch notes for 1.2 I find it hard to lay a finger on how extensive the changes I might be required to make are. But either way I'm happy that they're giving a free respec for it (I was more or less planning to use one anyway as there are some skills I find myself not using... so this would save me the fee).

Finally, there's a short post about social gear:

As mentioned at the Guild Summit, we are working on a system that makes Social Gear adapt to the armor class of the wearer. However, that system will not be in 1.2. but in a subsequent patch.

This I like quite a lot. Though I'm sure that there will be people who object to this (as now a slave girl bikini can have the same stats and protection as the heaviest armor) I always felt that customization and freedom of stories trumps such notions. If I want to roleplay a cyborg whose skin is as hard as the hardest armor, for example, then there's no functional reason not to (people finding such a thing silly is something that should be solves socially, not through gameplay mechanics).

As a next step I hope that they'll do the same for all armor so that I could wear a stormtrooper armor if I wanted to. But somehow I doubt that they'll do that.

Anyway, that's all for now.


[link] to numbers news at IGN.
[link] to triage meetings news at The Escapist.
[link] to dialog parody video at Kotaku.
[link] to 1.2 hands-on at Massively.
[link] to Guild Summit impressions at MMORPG.
[link] to interview with Gabe Amatangelo at MMORPG.
[link] to interview with James Ohlen at SWTORHub.
[link] to interview with James Ohlen at Massively.
[link] to 1.2 hands-on at Massively.
[link] to interview with Gabe Amatangelo at Games On Net.

1 comment:

Latro said...

Don't worry as soon as your friend hears about the ending of Mass Effect 3, his enthusiasm will die and he'll be back to playing other games.