December 20th, 2011. According to Joystiq the pricing is as follows:

"After the free month that comes with the game, plans start at $15 for a single month, $42 for three months or $78 for six months."

Full pricing looks like:
1 Month Subscription: $14.99
3 Month Subscription: $13.99 per month (one-time charge of $41.97)
6 Month Subscription: $12.99 per month (one-time charge of $77.94)

Pretty much aligned with every other game out there, $1 per month than RIFT i believe.

I hate them :( that's the busiest time of year for my company, I'll probably be working about as many hours as their devs will be haha.

I decided to take vacation right before we go into a vacation blackout period, the first few weeks of November, hoping I might get lucky. Now I might have to cancel that and just do it in late January instead.

I usually take two weeks off around christmas and new years.

This christmas break just got a whole lot more exciting. Thinking about a pre-order now....

Busy time for me too, blackout on vacation days and mandatory overtime.

Buuuuuut... I already arranged for a personal day on my birthday and that's the day after. :happydance

surprised any of you think the game is going to be stable enough to play before the end december.

They're putting a lot of effort into launch prep, with guilds on the website it gives them a decent idea of the number of people that plan on playing. More than pre-orders would I think.
Using instancing on early planets so you don't have a Hellfire situation, and phasing many quest areas also helps a lot.

That said nobody has ever been prepared for the sh*tstorm that is launch day.

The game looks great though.. trust me *wink*

Is that a looks great visually or looks great something else.

like every other game, omgawesome at the beginning, omgwheresendgamecontent at end.

Major Star Wars MMO releases a few days before everyone goes on vacation for the holidays? What could possibly go wrong?

it seemed to play well during my brief time with it at Gamescom. It also looks pretty.

And the NDA is lifted...
Big influx of testers starting Friday.

Yay now I can say how a couple months of beta completely killed my interest and how I canceled my CE preorder (should have kept it to resell for $400, oh well).

Guess there's always TSW, GW2, or Tera. I at least enjoyed the latter when I played the Korean version.

Anyone starting up on friday that wants to group up? Did it kill it for you cause you already played so much of it or because its bad in the levels you've played it in?

I will be starting Friday when i get back from my family's place. Going to have to wait for it to download though as I don't have access to my computer til after my flight. Any idea how big it is?

There were a couple factors really, not all specifically related to the game. My group of friends, specifically one person I was really wanting to play with, all decided not to bother for various reasons. Some still just won't leave WoW for anything, and the one particular person just wants to focus on school and stuff and not get time-sucked into another MMO.

And they were really the only reason I was planning to play it, especially after having my taste of beta all summer and fall. I'm burnt out on (themepark) MMOs in general, and there's nothing fresh in this one to make me change my mind. Class stories are neat but they make up about 20% of your overall game time, and outside that it's the same old "go here do this for that random guy you've never met before" quest grind. It's especially bad in places like Taris and Balmora which can really drag on.

There's just absolutely nothing new in the game to be offered for someone who isn't looking for a reskinned WoW experience, in my opinion. Even a lot of the great "new" features they've touted, like full voice acting, can be a major drawback. Try running a flashpoint for the 30th time when you're in a group that won't skip the dialogue.. a 45 minute dungeon turns into a 3 hour dungeon :/

Thwick: About 22-23gigs.

This.

Well, considering the fact that WoW was the last MMORPG that managed to hold me in game longer than a few weeks/months, that's a lot more than I could hope for!

I'm part of the full beta and I've been enjoying it; still have my pre-order and don't have any intention of cancelling it. They have been swinging the nerf bat around a bit in the beta though, so some people are unhappy with some changes. It's definitely not any sort of revolutionary experience; it's a Star Wars Theme Park MMOG.

It's also a bit linear (for example, Jedi Consulars start at Tython, then at around level 10 go to Coruscant, then at around level 16 go to Taris, then at around level 20 go to Nar Shadda, then at around level 25 go to Tatooine; you're directed by your class quest) but I assume when you're up in level you'll be travelling through most of the galaxy where you want and doing flashpoints.

Just take it for what it is and it's entertaining. I've been playing a Jedi Sage and a Jedi Sentinel, though I'm also playing a Sith Warrior thanks to Catherine Taber voicing Vette Vao, the first companion Warriors get.

As for size, my SWTOR folder is 18.5GB, so it's big but not the 30GB people have thrown around in the past.

Granted I only played in one testing weekend so far, but I'm really looking forward to playing it in release still.

I really don't understand all the "zomg same as WoW with a SW skin" complaints I've seen around various blogs and message boards. Yeah, there are similarities. There SHOULD be. But there are enough differences that it feels pretty much like a new experience to me.

On the other hand, I really don't understand how people find it so significantly different. It's not.

Outside of the class quests (again, not even 25% of the game), companions (gotta be a pet class if you want to solo in this game), and voice acting (have fun with that on your alts). I think it goes beyond just basic similarities, regardless of how they were very clear they didn't want to rock the boat or actually reinvent the wheel here.

The things they HAVE heralded as actually making them different/better/more revolutionary/whatever than WoW ended up falling way short. Lots of hype, little meat:

-Light/Dark rating? Exists only to provide artificial limits to certain equipment that people wear. No actual in-game/story affect besides that.

-Companions? Don't worry, you'll never lose them outside their pre-set story points, we wouldn't want people's choices to actually affect their character! You can be the most dark-sided, evil Sith in the world, and your peace-loving Jedi companion is going to stand around and do nothing watching you murder a steady stream of innocent people. Oh sure, they'll say "grr -1 affection rating for you!" but it's no big deal, because you just buy them a 300 credit necklace and get +30 affection back. Not even exaggerating here, this is an actual character+companion example. Less a companion, more a random animal you tamed and trained.

-Story consequences? Don't exist. Save a guy instead of killing him at level 10, you'll still never see him again. The choices you make in Chapter 1 affect nothing but your XP rewards, because Chapters 2, 3, etc are already written. You can play two characters of the same class with completely different dialogue choices leveling up and you're still going to arrive at the exact same point following the exact same path with the exact same experience (a lot of the exact same rewards too).

Hell, WoW managed to have more alien races than SWTOR, and that's ****ing sad - it's STAR WARS for christ's sake. We don't get aliens, we get humans with spikes or small tentacles on their faces. Or 350lb Jedi (because that makes sense).

They need to be swinging the fix-bat at the Jedi/SWs right now; those classes, especially the full dps ACs, have been such a joke since.. well since forever actually. But they've already said that while those classes are up for the next balancing pass, that's not going to happen until post-launch

As far as traveling around, you also won't be doing that. Your class quest dictates your path all the way to 50, it's no different at any point. For just running flashpoints, unless they change things, most/all of the flashpoints are going to be accessible from one or two space stations. Apparently they want Fleet Stations to be the new SW/Orgrimmar, which is why they also removed GTNs (and I believe class and/or crew vendors now) from almost all of the planets.

So it sounds like if I want to play a smuggler, one of my friends wants to play a jedi sentinel and another wants to be a trooper, we wont get to play together, except if we do flash points?

It's not my argument that the game is without flaws. Most of what you mention as a flaw I agree with. But I'm not talking about flaws.

The companion system is flawed yes... but at the same time it's something WoW did not employ at all (Hunter pets aren't the same and only applied to one class I barely even played).

Dialogue becomes annoying? For quests acquisition and resolution I'll take dialogue over text walls every time. Yeah, I can see where it might become a problem in Flashpoints - frankly I'm not crazy about how flashpoints work with selecting dialogue choices anyway. But even in WoW I don't think I've ever run a single dungeon more than a handfull of time each anyway.

From the sound of it, you never had much interest in the game to begin with, only being interested because your friends were. Even at that though, you played all summer and fall.

Part of my problem with the "same as WoW with SW skin" complaints are that it completely discounts the importance that the "skin" has. Something as simple as tone and atmosphere play a huge part in enjoying any game, and especially an MMO to me. Bioshock, mechanically, really didn't do anything that was groundbreaking either yet its one of the most critically acclaimed and popularly loved games. A minimalist critique could easily dismiss it based on what it doesn't do differently than other first person games, but it would be largely unfair to do so.

A new game bares a lot of mechanical similarities to the leading game in it's genre? This is not shocking to me, nor is it any sort of discouragement from playing the game. Even if I only play the game a couple months, chances are high it'll be a far better value than most single player games I buy anyway. Heck, on the single testing weekend I was part of, I played more of SWTOR than I do the average single player game.

WoW got better over time. I have a certain amount of faith that TOR will as well.

notwen you pegged my experience with the game. I'm loving it because it's a different yet familiar genre, fun story lines, and I'm loving the animated cut scenes during the quest experience. They took the best of all the MMOs and made it theirs. I'm seriously thinking about making this my new addiction for awhile.

Also, it runs beautifully on the "state of the art machine" I built for Vanguard beta about 5 years ago.

For the vast majority of the time you will play together. The story instances, you can enter other people's so long as you're not the same class if they've allowed it. So if you group with a friend who's also a smuggler, once you get to the wing of an area that has your specific smuggler unique quest point, you'll be in separate instances of it. The number of story instances - I say instances but I really just mean gated small area of a zone, it's not like a wow instance (meaning dungeon) - well each zone has about one for every class usually. They don't take long to do, estimated time is usually between 5-10 mins and you can invite/allow other party members to accompany you into yours. There was even some talk of allowing ones of the same class, I don't know if that got implemented yet, it's been a couple of months since I logged in.

However you won't be on the same planet. at least not the Jedi. The first starting planet the force users start on one planet, the non-force classes start on another. That's the first 10 or so lvls and honestly it goes pretty quickly. After that you'll all be able to do the first flashpoint together and go to all the same places from that point.

The game is quite linear, if you go into this game thinking it's anything but a linear game on rails you will be disappointed. You won't have much of a choice in 'do i want to do lvls 10-15 on this planet or that planet?' sense. There's one planet for your faction for that range, you will level up there.

And yes, it is WoW in a Star Wars universe. We might as well be honest on that point, most of the controls you remember from WoW? Yeah, they'll work the exact same way. The layout is similar, the designs are similar, so if you want a WoW experience with Jedi, Sith and bounty hunters - this is the game for you.


Oh yeah, and I will be playing it since well, I want to experience every class' storyline up to max. It's not a game I really picture myself doing hardcore raiding or playing in, I just want to experience the storyline. I do like the storylines, especially the sith inquisitor and the bounty hunter. It's fun to be evil, and oh how evil they let you be...

Awesome thanks for clearing that up!

Honestly, for about 60-95% of the controls (depending on the game), this applies to ANY MMORPG.

And do you really want to have to learn a whole new set of controls each time you pick up a new MMO? Its nice to have a universal control set, as long as the gameplay sets the game apart.

Yes, the Sentinel and Shadow (well, all the melee classes) seem a bit too fragile for my taste. Shortly after writing my previous post I logged on and did some questing; using my Sentinel I ended up getting my rear end handed to me three times (twice with Kira as my companion and once with T-7) by a -2 Champion mob (level 18 vs level 20). Also, multiple basic mobs would really tear down my health more than I think they should. The new 'centering' ability seems pretty useless as I spend time getting it to 30 so I can initiate the Zen ability or whatever it is, only to have it tick down without proccing more than a couple times.

At the start you won't be together (well, the Jedi will be on Tython and the Smuggler and Trooper will be on Ord Mantell), but by level 10 (though I seem to recall for my smuggler playthrough I was barely into level 9 before I left Ord Mantell) you both should be on Coruscant and from then on will be taking a similar route through the galaxy. Your trouble might be in outlevelling content if you end up playing all three class quests and trying to do as many regular and heroic quests scattered through the worlds

Yes, while my system isn't exactly slow I didn't expect it to be able to be run at 1920x1200 with everything maxxed and FSAAx4 enabled through my driver (Core i5 2500K and a Radeon 6870). Any dual core processor and budget gaming card or better made in the last few years should give you a good gaming experience.

The shadow/assassin have been pretty beastly, but that's because of their abilities. The main problem with the sentinel/marauder, STILL, is offhand damage is a joke. And until they seriously fix that, the class is going to be the red-headed step child of the game.

Unfortunately the juggernauts/guardians aren't far behind. Heavy armor is an almost worthless upgrade over medium - all of the tanking viability for those classes comes from taking the tank talent trees, not their armor. And in return they do even *less* damage than the sentinels, even when they take a dps tree, so they're in the same exact boat of even fights with regular packs taking way too much health.

Play a commando and it's easy mode - you can heal yourself and have multiple aoe attacks that'll clear out a group of 5 regular mobs in an instant, and even kill strong mobs :P

I only got my shadow up to high teens and was trying a tank build; compared to my Sage the Shadow was weaker and less fun so I leveled up my Sage instead, but yes the Sentinel seems to be quite bad and even with the offhand skill point increases, my offhand damage is pathetic.

At one point I even thought my offhand skill increases weren't being registered so I went back to Coruscant and retrained all my skill points. I was shocked at the obscenely low 'natural' offhand damage compared to the main hand.

Yeah, I think offhand damage is something like 10% of mainhand. May as well not even have it :P

I think most classes are jokes compared to Sage/Sorcerer, but the Shadow gets better later on. They're just awkward and missing any real good abilities early on, because they're still stuck with the ****-range caster abilities instead of getting any melee attacks (besides backstab spam). That eventually improves.

I'm a little curious to see how my wife's handles it tomorrow (assuming we actually get logged in and can play haha). My E8400 and GTX 560 runs it reasonably well (better after I turned off the default-on windowed mode) but my wife's machine still has her 8800 GT I built it with several years ago. They are basically the same machine except for the video card now.

Oof, yeah that's kinda pathetic offhand. Last test I played guardian, was thinking about running sage this time. On the other hand since I intend to play Republic in release, I was thinking my wife and I might give Sith a go this weekend.

A couple builds ago I played the game for a bit on one of my backup computers with a Core 2 Duo E4300 (1.8Ghz), 2GB DDR2 memory, and a GeForce GTS 250 and it played fine, so while you won't have all the settings up high it should be playable at reasonable settings.


I also just checked my main hand and offhand damage stats for my Sentinel. At level 21 with identical damage weapons in both hands, and including the three skill raises to offhand damage which raises my offhand damage by 36%, my main hand damage is 123 to 152 while my offhand damage is 39 to 58.

I've played a bit as a Sith Inquisitor on Iron Citadel and it's a good game. The HUD/UI is really clean and doesn't take up too much room. It plays just like WoW and feels like it too. I enjoy the cut scenes and voice acting but why is everyone British, including my Twi'lek? I'm gonna push to 10 and do some PvP and then probably roll a new character, maybe bounty hunter or go to the Republic side for a Smuggler. Truthfully, the game feels like a single player player game so far, I'm sure that changes once dungeons come along.

That's the 'imperial accent' - you get a lot of that on the Empire side. Come over to the Republic - people talk normal here . Plus you can be FemShep if you want (Jennifer Hale voices the female trooper).

It is largely a single player experience if you're following your class quest; you have to go out of your way to join groups and do flashpoints and tag along with others during their quest missions to get more of a MMO experience.

Most people want their ship though, so until level 15 or 16 (keep following the quest line) people seem eager to grind it out solo to get their ship.

If they didn't all have English accents on the Sith side, how would we know they were evil? It's practically a requirement to evil.

Everyone in the Empire is British because Lucas filmed in Britain and most of the extras were British, ever since they've always had that accent. I think its the "Imperial Intonation"

Why are over half of the NPCS linebackers? Did they escape from Gears of War? The character customization is not very good. Star Wars is known for its variety of life forms, but in SWTOR you can chose from 5 races, which all look basically the same. Characters of the same race look very similar as there is little ability to create variety. I know Star Wars is known for stupid hair cuts, but for every one normal hair cut option there are 5 stupid options. 1/2 of all NPCs and 1/4 of all players look like offensive linemen who got tattoos and cut their own hair with knives after drinking a case of beers through a beer bong.

People are saying that SWTOR is a Star Wars skinned version of WoW. That's just not true. If Wow is a beautiful painting, SWTOR is a 5 year old's crayon-based copy of that painting where he has added blaster guns and light sabers to everyone's hands.


Ive played probably 50ish hours total. I'm not impressed. Its cookiecutter MMO tripe with little in the way of innovation. The writing is average at best and 1st grade creative writing at worst. Moral Choices are only illusions that have no real effect on the game outside of what gear you can wear. Additionally, what they consider "light" versus "dark" is often not based on any real logic and sometimes the information needed to understand why one choice is light versus dark is not revealed until after the choice is made. So you can choose the "light" response even though there is no logical reason to see it as such until after you click it. The player's intent is also irrelevant. Basically the "morality" is not grounded, consistent, or based on mindset or fore knowledge,

Dialogue choices often result in the character taking a snarky or sarcastic tone, but there is sometimes no way to predict this. On more than one occasion the character said the exact opposite of what the dialogue tree suggested. This combined with the fact that choices have no real consequences makes the the dialogue trees cumbersome.

To sum up, the dialogue tree and light /dark side systems are useless and in the way.


Companions, as noted in a previous post are nothing more than pets.


The combat is fun: it makes you feel like a badass. The game seems stable now. That said, you can get great combat and stable servers in 50 other MMOs, many of which have better writing, end game, and character customization. Don't buy this game.

I'm really really not trying to be snarky here, but really?

I can't remember playing 50 hours of any game that I didn't care for, especially not one that I was basically playing for free. I've started plenty of free MMOs, and put them down in less than five hours. And most of that time was a struggle, trying to find something redeeming.

I was playing with my friend. He loves star wars. I gave it a chance for him. If it wasn't for him I would have stopped at 5 hours or so.

Got a chance to **** about for a few hours last night. I agree with Injijo (minus the WoW as a fine painting comparison--they have a relatively similar aesthetic and color palette as far as I can tell). It is very well polished and runs smooth as marbles but...feels very canned and generic. Admittedly, I already am biased against it because I think the entire Star Wars ip is stupid, so I won't even comment on the writing and lore (which, tbh, I thought were adequate, considering the silliness of core property), but the environment for the smuggler origin seemed really underwhelming to me--it might improve later on, I'll give it a bit more of a go, but the first couple of hours the villages felt just weird considering how proximate and small they were relative to each other.

Got up to 12 on a Trooper turned Commando. Ord Mantell wasn't a great starting area, though I enjoyed the Trooper storyline. Just played through the first flashpoint and it was okay. Kind of a neat setting but it took forever. Too much trash and too many cutscenes. Boss fights weren't anything special, they were all tank and spanks with the added flavor of not standing in the colored circle which let you know damage was coming your way.

I've only played Agent to 49, rest have been 10-20's.
Been in for beta for 4 builds or so now, everything has improved a lot in that time.

On choices having consequences, from what I've experienced only if it is a class story quest will you see the repercussions later, or in the case of agent you make a choice at the end of Act1 that affects everything after that. Making me look forward to playing the class again and seeing where those other story arcs lead.
For your general non story general quests everyone gets they'll really only affect your light/dark points. The Planet story quest (each planet has a main theme quest arc) might have some repercussions, but I cannot recall any atm.

The Nerf batting ( I mean balance) changes have been frustrating. No doubt Inquis/Consular were very OP and needed the bat, but I've been very frustrated playing a Warrior. I feel like a WoW Paladin in Vanilla except I'm not good at PVE either. Atm they do low dmg and can't absorb much even as full tank spec. With the bad guys getting stronger with each build it's gotten worse I think.

BH seems pretty right on atm, been enjoying powertech.


TOR is as much a WoW clone as WoW was an EQ clone. MMO's take the good traits from the previous generation and iterate on them, so far most of the iterations TOR has are very good, the ones that are not so good have been getting polish every new build.

WoW killer probably not, but I think it will take a serious chunk out of their subscription base and keep it.

Edit: Thwick: I hate the first flash point now, the first one or two times it's cool to have the story. The 10th time you've done it you realize it takes about an hour to go through and really isn't worth it if you're 10 and have a AC before you go to the Capital planet which is easy to do. This could be mitigated by running with the same group of friends so everyone skips the dialog.

Wife and I got to 18 doing most everything ourselves. For heroic 4s we just waited till they were green and handled them fine - waiting till green was easy since we were doing all quests together we were a little bit ahead of the level curve on quests. Only did the first flashpoint and that was a bit of a challenge mostly because she has no experience in WoW dungeons at all and I had a hard time getting her to remember to get out of ground effects and I had never done healing in an MMO before that at all.

All around still had a great time. Looking forward to release still :D

Had some very frustrating bugs last night. Kept getting stuck in place repeatedly on Taris and the maps kept stacking all map icons in the northwest corner making them mostly useless. Hope the sticking issue gets worked out soon, I think that's been the most infuriating thing for us overall.

I will join the not impressed crowd on this one, had higher hopes for it.

It isn't a bad game, it just isn't particularly good. If you are looking for a cookie cutter western MMO with a Star wars theme and not the typical swords and magic, it is good for that. Beyond that..meh.

Not a huge surprise I don't like it though, with exceptions to Everquest and Ultima Online, I can't think of a single western mmo I have liked.

heh yeah welcome to Taris (and a lot of higher level planets), I think we're going to be seeing a lot of people stuck in place come release because these issues have been around forever. At least they eventually fixed the problem where stuck people also couldn't log back into their characters until a server reset..