Category: Star Wars: The Old Republic

SWTOR: The Broken Mess of Crew Skills

Posted on by Gazimoff

Over the last few days I’ve been digging into the crafting system in Star Wars: The Old Republic. This isn’t something I really got into during beta – I was too busy waving around my lightsaber and shooting lightning from my fingertips to be concerned with harvesting materials and making pointless items.

I’m regretting that decision now, as I’d have loved to provide some choice feedback on the system. Other people may have found SWTOR’s biggest flaw, but for me crafting is about even with my issues on Space Combat.

For those of you yet to dig in to the intricacies of fabrication in Bioware’s MMO, here’s the run-down. At level 10-ish you gain your first companion, and with this you can learn Crew Skills. There’s three categories: skills that make things, skills that gather things and skills that send your companion on missions. Credit where it’s due, the last two choices are interesting as they allow you to focus on questing while your companion does all the tedious work of banging rocks together.

But pick a crew skill that makes anything and be prepared for a whole galaxy of redundancy. Let me explain.

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Five Things To Do Before SWTOR Launch

Posted on by Gazimoff

With the launch of Star Wars: The Old Republic due tomorrow for Early Access preorder players and on 20th December for everyone else, now is the time to get those last minute pre-launch activities complete. With the hours ticking away til we’re finally allowed to invade the live servers, now is a great time to distract yourself from clockwatching with this collection of useful missions.

The Last Minute Tune-Up

Now would be a great time to clear out your PC and have it ready for some intense game playing. Start by checking for driver updates for your graphics card and running Windows Update for all those latest bugfixes. Clear out a healthy amount of space for wherever you’re planning on installing the game- you’ll need about 20Gb for the client and another 5GB for temporary files. If you have one, look at squeezing the client on to your SSD in order to improve those load times.

Grab the Client

If you’ve preordered the game you can now pre-load it onto your system ready for your early access to become active. In order to do this simply head over to the pre-load page and follow the step by step instructions. You’ll need around 25GB free space to perform the install. Remember to run the client a few times to make sure it’s fully patched and ready to play.

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SWTOR Razer Naga Setup Guide

Posted on by Gazimoff

Razer Naga MoltenIf you’ve been playing MMOs for a while then there’s a fair chance that you’ve splashed out on some specialist kit to improve your gaming. One of the most common accessories is a Razer Naga – a high quality gaming mouse bristling with buttons to make spells and abilities easier to execute.

I’ve been using one of these in Warcraft for a while, but I was also keen on getting it set up for Star Wars: The Old Republic. While Bioware’s MMO doesn’t explicitly support the Razer Naga, it’s very easy to reconfigure it and unlock the untapped power lurking in your Mouse. This guide should cover everything you need to get up and running, as well as a few pointers to some more advanced features.

To set up the Razer Naga for Star Wars: The Old Republic start by finding the mode switch underneath the mouse. In ‘123’ mode the thumb grid of mouse buttons map to the strip of number keys along the top of your keyboard. For me this isn’t very helpful as I tend to fire primary abilities with my left hand using these keys. By switching it to ‘num’ mode the thumb grid buttons map to the number keypad on the far right of the keyboard – something I never use while gaming.

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SWTOR Space Combat: Missed Opportunity

Posted on by Gazimoff

As I’ve been playing the beta for Star Wars: The Old Republic, I’ve been trying to experience as much of the game as possible. A significant chunk of that is the Space Combat minigame. Basically this involves using the ship you earn at around level 15 to take part in space missions, such as escorting a ship, disabling an enemy space station and so on.

While this minigame is fun in it’s own way there are some significant limits on how this combat works. All the action is on-rails – your ship flies a preset path from one point to another. All the action takes place around you, from enemies coming in to intercept through to capital ships dropping out of hyperspace.

What this means is that the experience gets very repetitive very fast. While you can move your ship around your limited field of view to avoid asteroids and debris, there’s no opportunity to do things differently. Enemies arrive at the same time every time, so once you’ve recognised the pattern to the attacks you can sail through it easily.

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The Gaming Couple & Star Wars

Posted on by Gazimoff

Earlier this week we finally preordered Star Wars: The Old Republic. The decision wasn’t based on the recent beta weekend – we’d decided months ago that this was the next game we were going to play. Instead it was purely dependant on what we’re doing during the holiday season and if we’d have a chance to take advantage of early access.

By ‘we’ I mean myself and the lady who I started playing Warcraft with some six or seven years ago and who married me last year. I completely agree with Ravven: the best thing a gamer can do is fall in love with another gamer.

Going into SWTOR represents hitting the reset button for both of us. Back at the launch of World of Warcraft we played together, leveled up characters together and raided together. Since then three expansions have passed and our interests in the game have diverged. I’m only logging in to raid these days, while my wife has moved on to other games.

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A Limit on Subscription MMOs?

Posted on by Gazimoff

With Star Wars: The Old Republic being less than a month away, the game seems to be treading the well-worn path of other top-flight MMOs in charging a subscription. For $14.99 or £8.99 a month you’ll be able to clash lightsabers as much as you like. But is a subscription the right model to be using?

At face value a subscription seems to be ideal. Play as much as you like with all the content you want for a single monthly fee. You have the same character slots and the same bank space as everyone else. The only difference is in the box you buy and the extra goodies that come with it.

On the flip side though, subscriptions are also incredibly limiting if you want to play more than one game. It makes sense to pay monthly when you’re only playing one game, but if there’s another that you might only play occasionally you start to question the value of the subscription. It’s something that I’ve struggled with when trying to divide my time between Warcraft and Rift.

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SWTOR: Graphics, Galleries and Gifts

Posted on by Gazimoff

It’s been a busy weekend, mostly consisting of digging further into the Star Wars: The Old Republic beta and avoiding The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim. It’s not that I don’t want to play the game, it’s just that I have a stack of unfinished or unplayed stuff building up because I’m immersed in one MMO or another. I swear that the MMO genre has become the biggest excuse ever for not completing single-player games these days.

During the weekend I decided to dust off the old Youtube channel and start uploading some footage from the SWTOR beta. One of the most common questions I get asked is if it’ll run on x PC or y spec. Although I made a bit of an attempt to address this during my First Impressions post, I figured that it’d be great to show you what I mean.

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Star Wars: The Old Republic – First Impressions

Posted on by Gazimoff

The NDA for Star Wars: The Old Republic has now been lifted and I’m finally free to share my opinions with you. In theory this would mean that I’d be unleashing a huge mega-post containing details of every single nuance about the game. I’m going to resist the urge and scale back a little bit on this, instead focusing on a couple of key areas.

I’m going to go into a bit of detail about my experiences with the two “caster” force classes in the game: the Jedi Consular and Sith Inquisitor, along with the Jedi Sage and Sith Sorcerer advanced classes. I’ll also be talking a little bit about how SWTOR advances the MMO genre and the areas in which it falls back a little.

I’ll be concluding this post with a look about how the game performs on a range of systems. If you’re wondering if your PC will handle SWTOR or whether you should upgrade then feel free to skip ahead to this section.

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The Supermassive Beta

Posted on by Gazimoff

How many beta testers does it take to change a lightbulb?

The rather surprising answer is 89.

  • Fifty to just carry on as if light doesn’t matter and continue killing swamp rats or whatever.
  • Ten to raise a ticket complaining about the complete lack of lightbulb operation and DEMANDING that it be rectified THIS INSTANT.
  • Two to proclaim that lightbulbs themselves are overrated, and that when they started playing MMOs all they had was candles. And they jolly well liked it.
  • Five to argue that lightbulbs could actually do with a buff
  • Six to counter-argue that it’s actually daylight that needs to be buffed, and that lightbulbs themselves are slightly overpowered.
  • One to troll the entire discussion by stating that “lightblbs r for lozers lol”
  • Fifteen to give up the mission in frustration, going on a textual tirade about the pointlessness of lightbulbs and asking who designs a stupid quest around lightbulbs anyway.

And one level designer who sighs inwardly as he moves the light switch to a more prominent location.

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