Trooper Character Progression

Last Friday had a new armor progression video for us, this time showing the progression of the Trooper. Here's the official news:

As your character progresses in Star Wars™: The Old Republic™, you will see them grow more powerful as they gain experience and discover new skills that will allow them to utilize new gear.

As the elite Trooper rises through the ranks of the Republic military, there are several ways he can specialize his training, and several sets of armor and weapons to match. Watch this video to get a small sampling of the many different armors and abilities that your Trooper can acquire through the course of the game.

I'm not that big a fan of the Trooper, but the armors look decently Trooper-ish enough. It's a nice video to watch.

Read on after the break for developer quotes.

Studio Insider: Combat Audio

I think that BioWare is probably keeping their information releases fairly low-key for a while until E3 where they'll obviously want to try and make a big splash again. As such Friday we got a Fan Friday with Studio Insider. And they uploaded a video of the Fan Site Summit so that we can all get jealous watching other people play the game.

The Studio Insider talks about the combat sound design, giving a bit of insight into how the sounds for The Old Republic are created. here's an excerpt from the full post:

One of the first things we do when beginning audio production on combat abilities is to give each class a distinctive aural character. We’ve discovered that a great way to establish a sonic palette for each class is to come up with one or two descriptive terms that capture the essence of what we’re trying to convey, and attempt to tune every sound to those terms. The Jedi classes are very “Zen” in nature, employing a lot of yellow, white, and blue visual effects – usually softer around the edges. For these, we want to convey ideas like “smooth” and “wavelike” in our audio. Because the Sith represent a more corrupt and “edgier” side of the force, we want the sounds associated with them to be more “rough.” Smugglers are “flashy”. Agents are “refined” and “sleek”.

The Studio Insider also contains a Q&A answering some art related questions. But that, and the Fan Friday update as well as the Summit video and Developer Quotes will be after the break.

Sith Inquisitor Records

Last Friday BioWare revealed more details, and a video, on the Sith Inquisitor class (so now only the Jedi Consular class is left to get the same treatment). Here is the official news:

Inquisitors, the dark geniuses of the Empire, are masters of treachery and dark Force power. Feared as much on the battlefield as they are by prisoners and political enemies, they will stop at nothing to earn themselves more power. The paths to power are many, though. Is your Inquisitor an Assassin, striking down enemies from the shadows with cunning tactics and a skilled blade? Or are you a Sorcerer, a triumph of the dark side, smoldering with ambition and uncovering dark secrets of the Force to destroy your enemies?

Find out more about these dangerous Sith:

• Meet Khem Val, an ancient, deadly Dashade with an insatiable hunger
• Explore the Fury-Class Imperial Interceptor, the Inquisitor’s personal starship
• Witness the terrifying power of a Sith Inquisitor in the new class video

I wonder if they'll put up a similar update on the Consular before E3 this year, but since that's only a few weeks away...

Anyway, read on after the break for a couple more articles from other sites and for the developer quotes.

BioWare Blog: Introducing the Codex

There are two major updates from last week. First is the Friday update with gave us a developer blog about the codex. And secondly the second embargo for the Fan Site Summit was lifted, allowing sites to write about their PvP experiences.

But first is the official update; here's an excerpt from the article:

The Datacrons Challenge

That’s not to say that some codex entries shouldn’t be challenging. Quite the opposite, we want some codex entries to be worthy challenges – but we want those challenges to be centered on exploration. Enter the datacrons. In-game datacrons will be a sub-set of the codex entries. The world builders had been kicking around the idea of these little world gizmos for a while now. These unique objects are placed throughout the world for the player to find, usually in hard to reach places. If you successfully reach one and interact with it, one of your stats will be increased -- permanently. The codex gave us a way to increase the visibility of these devices, and offer a player an easy way to track his progress finding them.

I do like the idea of the codex as I quite enjoy exploring and finding information, reading them back later. But I do wonder if the codex also tracks other things (like the Tome of Knowledge in Warhammer Online) or whether it's 'just' an information repository. I can't help but shake the feeling that the codex seems a bit... underwhelming. That said, most MMOs don't have any kind of codex at all, so it's already above that.

Read on after the break for more Fan Site Summit links, including a boatload of PvP articles, and the developer quotes.

Sith Progression, UI and more

This is going to be a long one. Not only do I have two weeks of official updates to catch up on (due to being away over the Easter weekend), but last week lots of sites started posting previews out of the Fan Site Summit. And then there's a lot of developer quotes on the official forums too. So sit back and enjoy the, euhm, read.

There are three Friday updates from the past two weeks; two last Friday and one the week before. Last Friday BioWare released a Sith Warrior progression video (similar to the Jedi Knight one a while back) as well as a BioWare blog entry talking about designing the UI. And the third update revealed the coming release of a new Star Wars: The Old Republic novel. But I'll start with the video; here's the official news:

In Star Wars™: The Old Republic™, your character advances through the ranks, gaining experience, growing in power, and reaping the rewards of more advanced gear and skills.

Take a look at this Sith Warrior as he develops and amasses power in The Old Republic. While there are many paths to choose from, this example gives you a small glimpse of the armor and abilities a Sith Warrior can claim as he pursues his own destiny.

Join the discussion on the Forums, or leave us a comment below!

To be honest I'm not really that interested in the Sith Warrior (anymore) and none of the appearances really tickle my fancy. But I'm sure that it's nice for those who are looking forward to the class.

I'll put the rest of the official updates after the break, in part because my responses to them will probably get a tad rant-y. Also continue on after the break for the Fan Site Summit previews as well as the developer quotes.

Studio Insider: Environment Polish

Last Friday was another Fan Friday with the usual Studio Insider, the latter this time giving us a look at polishing the environments and why walls are important. Here's an excerpt from the text:

As you can imagine in The Old Republic, we have a lot of walls! You can see from the images here that any wall can undergo a lot of polish. We might start off by creating a very basic wall design with a simple texture, but as development progresses, we’ll often rework the assets involved. This can be as simple as reworking a texture, by altering the diffuse map, normal map, specular map, or any combination of the three in order to help make the wall stand out or blend into an environment. Sometimes, we may rebuild the asset from the ground up. For instance, sometimes our design team may decide that an area needs to be re-worked to look more high-tech. That means we may have to re-work our flat metal walls to add more panel work and tech ‘bits’, as seen in the images above and below.

The Studio Insider also contains the Community Q&A about classes and there's the Fan Friday itself. That as well as the developer quotes and a few other bits you can find after the break.

But before we get to that a quick note. Next weekend is the Easter Bank Holiday weekend, which I'll be spending helping my parents move to France. So I'll be away this Friday and won't be back until Wednesday, so Friday's update is going to be later (and I mean even later than this one was... call today's tardiness a measure to help you get used to next week's).

BioWare Blog: Advanced Classes Update

After all the excitement of the UK Community Event, this last Friday BioWare had an update about the advanced classes for us. Principal Lead Combat Designer Georg Zoeller takes us through skill trees, class roles, and changes they've made recently to the advanced classes and why. It's a fairly lengthy and interesting (I thought) blog post, but what I found particularly interesting was getting a glimpse of how they use metrics. here's a bit from the full blog post:

Here is a movement heatmap and death details for a sub area on Ord Mantell, from an earlier test. This exposed, shall we say ‘survivability issues’ for Smugglers on their class quest at early levels. That’s since been corrected!

We also use these heatmaps to understand the flow of movement through an area, optimize maps and other guidance systems and identify potential locations for special content such as datacrons or unique enemies, which are specifically designed to reward explorers that go off the beaten path.

Quite interesting stuff. Don't miss out on the rest of the blog post which includes details on recent changes to the advanced classes (Troopers and Bounty Hunters can now also fulfill healing roles, Jedi Knight and Sith Warrior has a viable single-saber damage role, Inquisitor and Consular get a tank spec, etc) and some more details on how the skill trees work.

There's more from last week though, including a surprise mid-week update with a PAX East video, more from the UK community event and the weekly developer quotes.

Read them after the break.