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Blue Milk & Cereal: What Perks Are You Most Looking Forward To?

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!

It has become a golden standard of the gaming industry to provide players who pre-order a particular game with some in-game bonuses. BioWare is currently offering two bonuses for pre-ordering TOR – the Early Game Access perk as well as a Color Stone which is an in-game weapon modification item. Everyone who pre-orders gets those things, however depending on the edition you pre-order, there may be some other perks as well. BioWare is offering three editions of the game – Standard (Physical and Digital), Digital Deluxe and a Collector’s Edition. It’s the last two that provide the player with some additional in-game, and in the case of the Collector’s Edition, out-of-game physical goodies as well.

Regardless of what edition you pre-ordered, or if you have pre-ordered at all, there has to be one particular item or perk that interests or attracts you the most. Personally, I am looking forward to accessing the CE in-game store and getting some cosmetic changes for my character, and of course seeing benefits from that CE store as it’s re-stocked with new items over the life of the game. As is the usual for hot-topics, there is a thread on the official forums discussing the idea. Currently, the favored response is “Early Game Access” – at over 68%. This is to be expected as we have a lot of eager fans that have been waiting for TOR’s arrival for tens (!) of months, and any option that allows them to access the game is understandably desireable.

What about you? What are you looking forward to the most about your TOR pre-order? Let us know below!

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Blue Milk & Cereal: Does TOR Have Room For Social Professions?

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!

Every class in Star Wars: The Old Republic is focused squarely on the combat aspect of the game. That’s not necessarily a bad thing either, however, as it allows a very specific focus for the player and developers alike. But we all know that MMOs can provide a wider variety of activities than just combat. That’s exactly the point behind this discussion on social professions on the official forums.

For those that are not sure what a social profession is – the best example would come from another Star Wars MMO – Star Wars Galaxies. The game in question had quite a few professions that fully revolved around interacting with and servicing other players. You don’t fight anyone (unless you really, really want to). You practically stand, socialize and do the tasks that are appropriate for your class. A great example would be the Entertainer profession, which allowed players to stay in a cantina and actually work there, essentially buffing other players. It’s certainly not everybody’s dream to play an Entertainer, but it gives an option to play and progress through the game more on the social side than the combat side. A varied style of gameplay, to be sure.

So while we know that the classes for TOR’s launch are related to combat, is there room for more variety later? Can we see non-combat classes such as social professions? Maybe in an expasion down the road? Could the BioWare story for these classes be as interesting as that of the combat classes? You can vote, but we’d love to hear your thoughts below!

 

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Blue Milk & Cereal: How Many Hours Per Week Will You Play 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!

The MMO genre is infamous for requiring a lot of time and commitment from its players. Some say it is because the MMO genre combines aspects of other genres into one, thereby attracting many people and allowing them to do a lot of things they could not typically do in other games. Others say that the MMO genre is so “addictive” due to its gameplay progression systems, or dependance on the actual interaction and cooperation with other players, as well as the presence of very sophisticated  social networks in form of guilds. Regardless of what it is, we all know that primarily we’re looking at a game being fun to play – which in itself will absorb a lot of time.

There is an ongoing thread that asks the same question and the results are quite wide-spread with about 50% of people claiming a plan to spend about 10-30 hours a week on TOR. There is also a fairly large group of players (over 17% ) that set their bar to 60+ hours a week. Of course, at this stage the official forums are generally populated by people who are extremely passionate about gaming and in TOR specifically, so such results are to be expected. Personally, I am going for a simple approach – “whenever I am not working or outside – I am on TOR”.

What about you? How many hours per week do you plan to spend on TOR? Does this differ from how you played other MMOs in the past? Let us know!

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Posted by ReDDoT | 16 Comments

Blue Milk & Cereal: Will You Miss Day/Night Cycles 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!

In many ways, an MMO strives to simulate the real world. To a lot of folks, immersion is one of the most important factors in their enjoyment of the game. If something breaks that immersion, the game can become less and less appealing to a player. There are many aspects and layers to this immersion, but without a doubt one of the biggest contributors is the atmosphere of the game. The mood of the environment can be heavily influenced by the lighting in the game, and in many games over the years, developers have used a day and night cycle to help create that atmosphere. However, in Star Wars: The Old Republic, we already know that the day and night cycles will not be present:

Will a Day/Night cycle be in the game?
Daniel Erickson: No. It was a technical decision. Scenes look better if lighting is consistent.
James Ohlen: multiple worlds present in game with different # of suns/moons, so it became too difficult to make it work.

Keep in mind, this does not mean we will not see day and night in-game – in fact the developers have confirmed we will. All it means is that we will not see them dynamically changing at the same location/planet. The SW:TOR community has an ongoing thread about this matter, as well as a poll, that’s currently sitting at approximately 34% of people being unsatisfied with such a design decision.

Personally, I’m not a huge fan of this, but I can definitely see BioWare’s stance. Given that the story element of the game is so important, they need to be able to more tightly control the way a player experiences it.  Anyway, time will show if BioWare made a good decision in this area of the game.

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Blue Milk & Cereal: Will You Stick To One Character 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!

The standard cycle of playing an MMO for most players typically involves various activities including, but not limited to: leveling your character to the maximum level, participating in end-game raids, PvP and, possibly, rolling new characters or alts. Rolling alternate characters requires a longer time commitment to keep each character viable and up-to-date, but it does increase the longevity of the game and allows the players to experience something new.

BioWare is adding a brand new incentive for players to roll a new class in Star Wars: The Old Republic. Not only will they experience a change of play-style that comes with a new class, but they will go through a completely different story line, meet and interact with brand new sets of companions, fly and upgrade a brand new spaceship and many other unique aspects of starting over. In addition to that, it seems we may get a shiny Legacy System, as reveled in one interview with Damion Schubert, BioWare’s Lead System Designer:

We really want to put in systems to encourage replay. The Legacy System, which we hope to get in, will hopefully be in that venue. I am not ready to talk about what exactly it is and how we do that, but we are really betting heavily on the level up game.

Of course, there are also those players who prefer to invest completely and totally into one main character.  Perhaps others will simply not have enough time to level another character, but hopefully they will eventually be able to experience the story of other classes and not miss out on quite a few hundred hours of BioWare-quality writing.

So with all of that in mind, will you stick with one character? Will you immediately level multiple classes? Or will you take the more popular approach of reaching a maximum level on one character and start many alts from there? Will TOR change your approach to any of this? Let us know below!

 

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