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Blue Milk & Cereal: Is The Duration Of Early Game Access What You Expected?

No day would be complete without the breakfast of Jedi: Blue Milk & Cereal.  Every morning, the team at Ask A Jedi will get Force-induced thoughts coursing through your head with delicious issues from around the galaxy! Join in the discussion below to make your voice heard!

Just a few days ago, we finally learned some important details about the potential duration of the Early Game Access. Here’s the detail we were able to extract:

 “…Early Game Access may be up to 5 days. The length of your Early Game Access depends on the date and order in which you redeemed your Pre-Order Code…”

It’s probably safe to speculate that if you have pre-ordered TOR as soon as it was announced on July 21st or shortly after it, you stand a good chance to be in the first wave of players and enjoy the full five-day early beginning on December 15th. Personally, I think the five-day, gradual launch of TOR should help bring some much needed sanity and a smooth gameplay experience during the critical time of an MMO launch when others have faltered.

In most cases, a typical launch day for an MMO is usually associated with server instability, heavy latency, crashes and massive queues at peak times. Perhaps the only launch in recent memory that could be considered smooth would be the launch of the RIFT, by Trion games. The developers of the game being were able to adequately provide the community with server capacity to accommodate the influx of players, and respond well to any game-breaking bugs with almost instantaneous fixes.

Seeing as BioWare is implementing the Early Game Access period solely a means to a smooth launch, it should reassure the community that both BioWare and EA are striving to bring a high quality of service to the game we’re all waiting for.

So, does the length of Early Game Access meet your expectation? Are you satisfied? Let us know by answering the poll below!

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Blue Milk & Cereal: Should Players Be Able To Change Their Character’s Look?

No day would be complete without the breakfast of Jedi: Blue Milk & Cereal.  Every morning, the team at Ask A Jedi will get Force-induced thoughts coursing through your head with delicious issues from around the galaxy! Join in the discussion below to make your voice heard!

The importance of character creation in an MMORPG varies from player to player and from game to game. Without a doubt, character appearance in MMOs is more important than in other genres simply because the look of your character represents you to other players and will be the primary associative factor when they think of your character name or interact with you. In addition, we’re going to be spending a lot of time looking at this character ourselves, so we want him to be something we like!

Wether you’re the kind of person that will spend hours in character creation to get everything just right, or you simply hit the “randomize” button and jump into the game, there may come a day when the look of your character just doesn’t appeal to you anymore. Perhaps you want a new hairstyle or a new skin color, or even want to lose (or gain) some weight.

Star Wars Galaxies had an entire class which allowed players to be able to change and modify the look of characters – from a purely cosmetic standpoint. World of Warcraft implemented an in-game barber shop where players pay in-game gold to change their character’s appearance. And of course, there are also examples of games which do not permit any character alteration after the initial character creation process.

We don’t have word on if TOR will have any sort of system in place to accommodate to such needs, but we do know that BioWare believes in customization options for players. In my opinion, since we already know of customization kits for our companions, perhaps we will find something similar for our main characters? Or maybe TOR will have it’s very own Galactic spa where you can get the look you always wanted for a tidy sum of credits!

So, what do you think? Should players be able to change their character’s look? Should it be a paid service or an in-game feature? Let us know below!

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Blue Milk & Cereal: Should The Player NDA Be Dropped Before Launch?

No day would be complete without the breakfast of Jedi: Blue Milk & Cereal.  Every morning, the team at Ask A Jedi will get Force-induced thoughts coursing through your head with delicious issues from around the galaxy! Join in the discussion below to make your voice heard!

Recently, we all got to enjoy  the massive influx of articles, reviews, sneak peeks and other material coming as a direct result from the recent partial lift of the press non-disclosure agreement . However, while the articles are great, the large majority of current and previous beta testers are still under the full NDA and cannot share any information about TOR without violating the it.

While we all may want to know more about the game, lifting the NDA with TOR is a bit different. TOR is driven by its story, and that in fact is one of the primary reasons people play it. But more importantly, to some, story is also the primary reward for playing it as well! Loot might be nice, but there’s more to it this time. As such, lifting the player NDA may cause large story spoilers (even if unintentional) all over the forums and in fact around the Internet.  So we have a feeling we understand why BioWare is keeping the beta testers tight-lipped.

But suppose we’re only a week or two away from launch, would you like to see the NDA lift then? Or should BioWare enforce the player NDA all the way until December 20th to maximize discovery and surprise? Sure, everything will be everywhere within days if not hours after the game launches, but still. Let us know what you think and don’t forget to leave a comment below!

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Blue Milk & Cereal: How Often Should BioWare Release Expansions For TOR?

No day would be complete without the breakfast of Jedi: Blue Milk & Cereal.  Every morning, the team at Ask A Jedi will get Force-induced thoughts coursing through your head with delicious issues from around the galaxy! Join in the discussion below to make your voice heard!

Coming off of a week in which the biggest MMO on the block announced their latest expansion, we can all agree that the MMO genre requires a development and update cycle unlike other types of games. Not only are developers constantly streaming bug fixes and other tweaks, they also have to concern themselves with the ongoing addition of new content. It’s customary to have many free content patches, often moving the world storyline forward with each.

But beyond content patches lie total expansions. These large additions to the game generally contain new classes, races and areas to explore, if not a total revamp of key game systems. Generally, as opposed to content patches, expansions are not free and instead usually come with a one-time purchase cost (but not always). Of course, these expansions take a lot of time and resources to develop – as a result the expansions can only come so fast.

BioWare has yet to announce any specific plans the future expansions of TOR, so the only thing we can currently do is guess as to what they might be and how often we might see them. So that leads us to today’s topic – how often do you think expansions for TOR should be released? And when they are, what is the right price for them?

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Blue Milk & Cereal: How Should Racial Abilities Behave In TOR?

No day would be complete without the breakfast of Jedi: Blue Milk & Cereal.  Every morning, the team at Ask A Jedi will get Force-induced thoughts coursing through your head with delicious issues from around the galaxy! Join in the discussion below to make your voice heard!

As we all know, the Star Wars galaxy has a lot of different inhabitants. Granted, while we may see many of them in Star Wars: The Old Republic, not all of them will be available for players to select from during the character creation process. Even still, there looks like there might be a good dozen or so for players to choose from.

A fairly common feature of MMORPGs is for your character to have a special ability or two associated with its race or species, sometimes called a “racial.” Since the day TOR was announced, players were speculating on wether we would see this staple feature in the game. This weekend at New York Comic Con, we got our answer. Check out what Georg Zoeller revealed in his post:

At this time, we do plan on having “racial” abilities, but they will be cosmetic in nature. Think of them as “social” abilities or actions that your character is able to do based on their species.
…
So, active “racial” abilities are planned, but they won’t affect your combat gameplay in any way.  

In my opinion, this is probably the best approach if BioWare wants to let players choose their race based on purely on their preference at the same time keeping the game balanced. Obviously this is still work-in-progress, but as BioWare told us “We’ll elaborate more in the future.”

What do you think of this approach?  Should racial abilities be cosmetic or combat-oriented? Let us know below!

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