No... Not really. The part of the game that relies on DirectX is only a small portion. They could, if they wanted to, simply initialize a higher version of DirectX and change a minority of their function calls to have nominal support for DirectX 12. However, they'd see virtually no benefit and end up requiring Windows 10 to play. In order to get a strong benefit from it, they'd need to do some more significant changes to use some of the powerful new features of DirectX 12. That would take a lot more work, but its far from "rewriting the whole game". The biggest cost would come from the time and resources needed to do all the testing. In the end, the number of changes to support DirectX 12 is probably on par with the number of changes needed to move to x64, but it has far more performance increases. At the same time, the DirectX upgrade would only improve graphical performance. It wouldn't give you better shadows or more detail. Doing that would take a lot more work. In the mean time, the bulk of the performance issues seem to be related to client-server-netcode-gameloop-cpu synchronization and competition. Tha'ts not solved by DirectX 12 or x64 compilation.

Except for the fact that the prequel trilogy (and very specifically Phantom Menace) radically changed the portrayal of lightsaber use, canonized the "Jedi wear robes" idea (before that... we only had Obi Wan wearing robes... and he was in a desert, where you'd expect such things), showed droids used for warfare, provided a canon basis for the Sith, and set a more futuristic level of technological integration than we'd seen before. There's still a lot of EU in KoTOR/SWTOR, but the prequel trilogies changed more than people like to remember.

No... the vast majority of people hate them because some clique of internet people hate them and they desperately want to feel like they are cool like those people. If you say the movie was horrible, you're just admitting that you have very little experience with movies and that your opinion can't be trusted to have any level of context. Compare Episode I to the rest of the action-adventure movies that come out in the summer. If you are completely honest with yourself, it's going to be in the upper half in terms of quality and entertainment. It's certainly better than things like Expendables 3, San Andreas, John Carter, and Chappie. I'd say the majority of people would still put it above pretty much all of the Fast & Furious movies and Jupiter Rising and Robocop. And that's just the highest-level cinematic releases. We haven't even started with the mid level movies or the various movies that turn out bad enough to go straight to video. But no... It wasn't fantastic and it didn't live up to your highest expectations, so its utter crap and deserves hate. Got it. I'll mark you down in the "unreasonable opinions" group.

Yes. Those were the chapters I'm thinking about. The scripts for those are written and recorded already. If you think they're waiting to do that still, then you don't know much about game development. At best, they'll call in actors to do so re-recording or minor changes, but the plot is already set long before we even see the number of chapters involved.

That's... That's a joke, right? You forgot the smiley somewhere? The chapters are all written. The voices are already recorded. The quest area modeling is probably all complete and any animations that are needed are already done. The only things they probably have left for all those post-launch chapters is stringing together the audio and animations, balancing fight difficulty, deciding on quest rewards, and doing a whole bunch of testing. Yikes. Okay... so perhaps you aren't familiar with how these games are made. One, we already have confirmation that the voice actors for the expansion have come in to do voices....and left. They aren't really going to be calling them in every month to record new voices for the upcoming chapter. First, because it's harder for a voice actor to maintain the same "voice" with constant breaks like that. Second, because is horribly inefficient. Finally, because Bioware has said that simply isn't the way they operate. They had voice work recorded for some of the first expansion before the beta was even released. Things like the Telltale games or Life is Strange is a completely different situation, as those "episodes" are produced as mini-expansions, and even then, the episodes are scripted and recorded long before the episode is released, and the bulk of the work between episodes is setting up the activity flow and doing tests of the new content.

Did you update all your chipset drivers?

The problem is the alarmist tone of many of those articles, along with the block-o-dangerlinks that you posted them in. The privacy concerns with Win10 are minimal. Most of the people crying about it are being hyper-paranoid, or following stereotypical advice ("The first version always has bugs!") without actually justifying the conclusion. The various "X Reasons to Not Upgrade" read as lists of rare use cases and vague worries, but have headlines that suggest that everyone should find them interesting. I'm sure there are some people out there with really old printers. Most people do not. A more realistic title would be: "X Rare Circumstances That Might Make You Wait Before Upgrading". Of course... that's not nearly click-baity enough. But the best is your link about Win10 not being free: "It's not free! You'll still have to pay for it.... if you buy a new PC.... just like every PC sold with windows.... which isn't at all what people are asking about ... but I wanted to be alarmist because scared people are more likely to click and generate ad revenue, so.... IT'S NOT FREE!" There's nothing any more worrisome about Win10 than Win8. WiFi Sense is a weird technology that probably should have been a little better thought out, but I doubt that practical exploits of it are ever going to be common. Overall, there's very little to be worried about with Win10, especially since its not much more than an iteration on Win8.1 that is trying so desperately to distances itself from the Win8 name that it skipped Win9 altogether. Internally, they are very similar... similar enough that the worries over bugginess are much reduced. I suspect the bulk of bugs will be UI related... since that is where the bulk of the changes actually are.

This. If removing the side panel of your PC improves cooling, then you didn't do a good job of setting up the cooling on your PC. A good, modern design for gaming/performance PCs is to set up a mini "wind-tunnel", with fresh air entering and quickly leaving through as simple a path as you can find that passes over/around the hot components. If removing the side panel helps, that means that you're critically deficient either in intake or exhaust flow (usually exhaust). It's worth noting that video cards that exhaust into the case aren't actually bad things. They're only bad when you're ignorant of that fact and the ramifications. I have a GTX 770 that exhausts into a small mATX case, but the temperatures stay low (70C) even during gaming because I set up the airflow to accommodate that. When the case temperature rises, I have a second intake fan that starts up and effectively doubles the intake flow. That pushes most of the heat from the GPU out the back of the case rather than having it get pulled into the CPU cooler. Is it something you'd expect a first-time builder to do? Nope. But even a small amount of reading will show you loads of other builders who do it and show you how.

I've been around since beta, so I've gotten a lot of coins. I also have 44 characters spread across three servers. From most-to-least coins spent: Collection Unlocks: The bulk of my coins go here. This lets me get nice armor on all my characters by simply having one character on one server buy it off the GTN, then get it unlocked for everyone else. Doing that, even paying 1.2M for Adept Scout armor was worth it. Inventory/Cargo/Legacy Storage Unlocks: With over 20 characters, it would be sort of wasteful to have them buy all their own storage upgrades. I buy Account-level unlocks off the GTN whenever I see them for a decent price, and buy unlocks off the CM when they go on sale (or when I need them). Character Slots: Yeah. I buy them off the GTN when I can, but they haven't been worth while lately, so I've used the CM the last couple times. Character Customization: I bought both the Cathar and Togruta, and I have most of the extra customization items. I have a ton of characters. It's nice to mix it up a bit more than the base options. Ashfall Tauntaun: I bought and unlocked this when it was on sale. This means I can always run around Hoth on a Tauntaun. It just feels so appropriate. Appearance Changes: It's not something I do often, but sometimes I just want to change something minor after playing a character for a while.

This is the way other promotions like this have worked in the past, too. There is no free lunch guys. Subscriber rewards go to subscribers, not people who are just taking a test drive.

Did the update to Win10 last week and I've had no problems at all. Of course, I did know enough to do driver updates on my video card and motherboard chipset, but that should be standard stuff, right? Right? Anyways, the update was surprisingly clean and I haven't experienced any issues at all. If you haven't been maintaining your PC properly, then the update probably has a bit more risk, but even then, it seems that the vast majority of people aren't seeing any problems.

I sorta hope I'm not. I want it to actually be "Customizable head-feathers", meaning that we can all choose to have a tuft of feathers at the top of our heads that can be colored with dyes. At this point, I'm actually on the side of never allowing changes to hoods, just because the proponents have been so obnoxious about it. But feel free to hope. At least it would reduce the number of entitled whining. No. Actually it would not. But whatever. Looking forward to the actual translation.

Just because you have a great car doesn't mean that Bioware shouldn't pay to replace the engines in everyone else's car. /s <---- Avoiding Poe's Law

That's what people said about 3D space flight battles. Then they got it, found that it was only 95% of what they wanted, and went back to whining a month later.

Oh god... I hesitate to suggest this, but would "Controllable Ruff" be translated to "controllable hoods"?

I don't think that's true. When games are made, loads of people are brought in to get the work done as quickly as possible. After the first release, the amount of developers who can be kept busy is drastically reduced, simply due to the fact that a live game cannot sustain the rate of change that a full dev crew can supply. So, its common --even necessary-- that those developers move on to other projects (or employers). This sort of turnover is very common in game development. You don't build a game with 100 developers and then have those 100 developers spend the next 5 years supporting it. So, of course the development team is smaller. It likely grows and shifts a bit between expansions and other tasks, but its guaranteed that its going to be smaller and that's totally healthy. However, it doesn't mean that there's no one around who knows how to make changes to the core game. That's a silly idea. They've made loads of changes to the core, including rewriting the shadow system and rewriting many of the lighting shaders and the inclusion of dyes. Those are fairly complex, fundamental changes to the graphics code and they were all made after the initial shrinking of the development team. There are definitely people on the dev team who can make changes. However, you can't make huge sweeping changes to the core game without making thousands of cascading changes all over the place. All of those changes put a ton of work on every development group, and twice as much on your testing group. It's not developer competence that keeps them from making huge engine changes, its code complexity, resource management, return-on-investment, testing time, and defect-level maintenance that keep them from doing it.

Ahh. Understood. And I didn't mean for my post to come as a correction to your info, rather I was just filling in the extra information. Keep up the fight, informed person!

This gets brought up often with this subject. The important detail that's left out was that the bulk of the game was left unchanged. The graphical engine and UI was replaced, while the core client-server portions remained with some new logic running inside it. It's a "new engine" but the bulk of the code (including things like the data storage and dev tools) remained. They then made a bunch of changes to the code that remained, iterating on it and improving it just like any studio would improve core game code for feature upgrades. They were just able to make more changes in a short period of time because they didn't have to handle production-compatible release schedules. So, yeah. FFXIV "replaced" its engine, but it replaced it with an upgraded, partially-rewritten version of the same engine.

Hold on...the only reason to grab that datacron is if you have a Warrior or Knight. And its only +3. If you find it annoying, skip it. You will absolutely not notice the loss of that 3 Strength at any later point in the game. There's no point in grabbing the matrix shard because --as a declared min-maxer-- you'd know that the matrix cube is inferior to all the other Level 50 relics. If you're so much of a min-maxer that you need to get everything even if its useless, then "min-maxer" is the wrong term and I'd say you're looking for the solution to your problems in the wrong direction.

Trying to be nice, yet blunt: You don't understand all that much about the game and its engine. Virtually everyone who comments on "the engine can't handle the game" is illustrating their lack of understanding of software and game design. In SWTOR, there are three main parts of "the game": The engine, the graphical/sound resources, and the server-side quest scripts. There is no replaceable part which is "the engine". It's essentially all of the game code running on the client and the server. Quite frankly: You lack the knowledge to make that statement. Obviously the engine can handle it because it is handling it, for thousands of players. As with all software, there will be issues and stability is never a 100% thing, but loads and loads of players play through all the content 24 hours a day and the engine handles it. The fact that it doesn't have the performance you or I might want is a separate concern. The engine handles it, but it doesn't have the performance we might want. Don't say the former if you mean the latter. No.... The fleet's performance issues aren't due to the size of the instances (Tython and Korriban have high populations, but rarely see performance issues), but rather the density of player characters in visual range. Its a huge number of textures and animations to load, and a lot of overlays. It's way more work to draw player characters than NPCs, but simply having players on-planet but not visible isn't much work at all. That's a pretty bad analogy for software. That's not how this works. The game isn't running on some guy's PC in Austin. Its run by a number of server farms. As they add more players, they can add more servers. Remember now, that while we call "Shadowlands" a "server", its actually quite a few hardware hosts, and there may be twice as many hosts backing Shadowlands than are backing Prophecy of the Five. I can guarantee that nothing you said here is new or terribly interesting to the development team. They know far more about this and its scalability than you or even I know. And back to the original point: They continue to upgrade "the engine" with each major release. It's not some static thing. It's the core game code and they are making changes to it all the time. That's how we got things like the reworked shadow code, texture atlasing, armor dyes, starfighter, mega-servers, etc. Those are all based on engine improvements and added capabilities. They've always been upgrading the engine. Most players simply don't even realize it, sometimes because they simply don't notice, but more often because they never really understood what "the engine" was or what it did.

There is no insult here. Quit trying to play yourself up as a victim, when you've always gotten exactly what they told you you were getting. No. You don't get to demand that a game adhere to the stereotypes of a genre. Genre's are assigned to games in order to help people groups similar games. They are not created to force games into patterns. SWTOR is an MMO because a bunch of people agreed that is the grouping it shares most characteristics with. That doesn't mean that SWTOR must conform to the general expectations of an MMO. It doesn't have to conform to anything. Loads of people are paying 15 dollars/euro (er... what does Australia pay? Kidneys? Firstborn children?) for story content. Most people here are simply paying to play SWTOR and aren't trying to impose some rigid rules on exactly what that has to be. This expansion will still have group content, it just isn't adding any more with this release. They've already said they are working on new Ops and Flashpoints. In any case, they are not required to fulfill some sort of quota because you decided they were part of a genre. They are free to make what they want. They never signed any contract with you over how much group content would be added, nor did they ever claim that every expansion would add group content, nor did they ever claim that group content would be a major portion of the game.

The lesson here is: When saying something sarcastic, make sure you actually note that its sarcastic in the comment. The alternative lesson is: Whenever you get caught saying something patently stupid, make a quick post claiming that it was sarcasm, a joke, or an artistic portrayal of someone who is stupid.

Again, considering that absolute complete datacron harvesting yields <1% increase in stats, the benefit is so small that it hardly seems worth wasting time on. Dev statements in the past have indicated that (yet again) the coding behind this is far more complex than the brain power needed to say "Durr, I want it on all my toons." It's not like it doesn't exist because no one thought of it before we came along. Taking a quick guess, I'd say that the main complexity arises from the fact that there isn't any existing mechanism to track quest completion across characters. Each of the Datacrons is implemented (or at least, was implemented) as a quick one-step quest which granted the bonus (as proven by the old issue where you couldn't grab datacrons if your quest list was full). In order to support legacy-wide datacrons, they'd need to track the completion of those quests across multiple characters or risk including bugs where you could double up on the bonuses. Next, there would be some potentially troublesome balance issues if you awarded the full chunk of stat bonuses to low-level characters, especially in PvP. There may be additional trouble in awarding stat bonuses across the legacy system, though they manage to do it with Presence, so it seems there may be some existing structure there.

No. Of course not. I demand that you spend more time living and pay more attention. One of my favorite examples of this is Tombraider 2013. It's a great game. When it was released it sold for $60. It was a showcase game for AMDs TressFX. It was used by many of the hardware review sites as a benchmarking game. A year later, I bought it for $5. Do all the people who bought it at release get reimbursed? Do you get reimbursed for DVDs that you own when they get played on HBO? Or flights? Or NBC? Do you get reimbursed for movie tickets when the cheap theaters start playing it for half price? Of course not. Once you spend a bit of time in the world you'll learn that the monetary value associated with entertainment goes down over time, even for people who have never experienced it. Games drop in price. Movie ticket costs decrease. DVDs get moved to the bargain bin. No one gets reimbursed for that loss of value. Demanding it just shows a mixture of naivete and inexperience with the adult world.

Well, I found your problem. That was never the case with this game. That wasn't how it was advertised. It wasn't how it was at release. It wasn't how either of the previous expansions worked. The whole premise of the game was to have a standard heroic/cinematic storyline --ie: a story where you play the hero-- executed in an MMORPG framework. Having you be special was practically the core principle of the design and they've been repeating that for what... 6 years now? During that whole time a minority of people have repeated the whine "But, why is it an MMO" (Note: for a while, I was one of them). I'm not Bioware's spokesman, but I'll take a few guesses: To naturally provide additional dynamic ambiance without the need to fill space with mindless NPCs. To increase the enjoyment from player customization (as weak as it might have started). There's less point to customize if no one else ever sees you. To allow for the interactivity of a player-based trading market (GTN) To support more social gaming through cooperative play. MMO frameworks have this built in. Other frameworks require things like Lobbies and invites. Compare WoW to Diablo II. To support PvP in a more integrated way (unlike, say... Mass Effect) To easily escalate coop play into large-group challenges (Operations) Could they have made this a straight up single-player RPG with coop operations? Sure. Look at Dragon Age: Inquisition. Would it have been as successful? I guess we'll leave that up to the experts like the OP. I'm getting mild hits off my I-wish-this-was-SWG meter, but not enough to be conclusive yet. More measurements are required.