Star wars might be delayed till 2012

[Yooxra]

Bringing Down the Hammer trailer

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FTCz4Of0xGU

[Yooxra]

IGN live stream november 22nd, 4 pst, 4 hours of gameplay.

http://pc.ign.com/articles/121/1213066p1.html

[Gogan]

Who else is playing beta this weekend? Which server?

[Gogan]

FWIW, trying Sith Inquisitor on Ziost (PVE west coast)

[Gogan]

Looks like they preserved your characters from previous betas, so you can pick up where you left off. There are some considerable queue times (1h+) on many of the servers though.

I'm seeing quite a few improvements in the UI since I last played. One notable improvement is the ability to enter the phased class-specific quests in a group. That should help quite a bit for those who want to group while leveling.

The Sith Inquisitor is only "ok" so far. The class quests weren't nearly as good as the bounty hunter's, and I'm not a fan of the big meat shield as a companion. However, fighting with a lightsaber is extremely cool. The sounds and graphics for that are really well done.

I'll probably play a few more levels, and then try the Agent again (only played a few levels last time), and then maybe check out the Jedi Knight and/or Trooper.

[Fusa]

sorry asano I could have gotten back to this sooner quite a few of my friends are on mandalorin's helmet, most of us are already 20+ just 1 solid day of leveling, we are probably going to be killing the worldboss (lvl 18) in an hour and a half Ill let you know what he drops and maybe get some screenshots.

at the moment we are playing gay republic come release we are going to be imperial, by far my favorite is the starfox spaceship missions they are fun and the asteroid belt is amazing

[Gogan]

Nice. We had a raid over here that just killed the world boss. Dropped some level 15 epic blaser mod.

I played an Agent last night till about level 12, and liked it quite a bit. Playing a Republic Trooper right now, and I have to say, it's a lot of fun. The story is really good, and the trooper abilities are about as fun as the Bounty Hunter's. I grouped with a Jedi Counselor a moment ago, and they look like a lot of fun too. So I dunno, Imperials do have Bounty Hunters which are awesome, but overall, Republic might have the most enjoyable classes, imo.

P.S. Have you decided on a server for release?

[Yooxra]

So from everyone that has played swtor beta from what I've heard is enjoying it.

[Gogan]

It's fun for sure, at least for the first 20 or so levels.

From what I hear, the appeal gets lost during the last half of leveling. The end-game is virtually non-existant right now. And it'll run into the same issues WoW had over the last 5 years. Technology-wise, it's about on par with WoW vanilla or TBC. You don't realize what a big difference WoW's phasing made until you suddenly don't have it. Talent trees are bloated and will simply lead to cookie cutter builds. I don't believe there's any kind of in-game macroing. Healing in general feels like an afterthought. My healing-spec'd Commando gets only 3 different healing spells total. Agents/SMugglers seem the same, while Jedi Counselors/Inquisitors get one or two more. Crafting is as boring and tedious as WoW. Some of the quests are super-grindy, e.g. Bonus: kill 135 thugs. And apparently you have to do all the side/bonus quests, or else you'll fall behind the xp/content curve. There's no dungeon finder, and the instances themselves are placed in between planets making it pretty tough to get random groups together. There's also no combat log, and no system for creating in-game mods.

So yeah, it has a lot of problems and it didn't really learn much from previous MMO's mistakes. It has potential though. I had a blast playing it over the weekend. The question is, will they continue to make significant improvements to it over the next few years the way Blizz did with WoW? And are you ok with taking a few steps backwards (compared to WoW) with the hopes that it'll be better down the road?

I think the cold reality is no new MMO at release will ever be able to match WoW today. Wow has effectively been in active development for over a decade. Any other game will be a minimum of 5+ years behind (except Blizz new MMO, of course).

[Gogan]

Just 1 more week until Early Access starts, for those of you who preordered. Apparently they're giving 2 more days of early access playtime, assuming you registered your code early enough:

http://www.swtor.com/early-access

Starts Dec 13 7am EST. You'll get an email shortly before your early access time starts.

Not crazy about the way they're handling this early access thing. It's causing a lot of confusion in the community, and sending out the invites at the last minute makes schedule time off from work pretty tough. Hopefully it's not a sign of troubles to come.