A cynic would say because it's still less resources than actual content... This will be what, the 3rd time the system changes so that we can re run old content under a new one? I can barely hold my excitement. Sadly I think we'll never see the effort/marketing on the level of KOFE/KOTET put into SWTOR again. That was the "reboot" shot devs convinced EA to take and after it fizzled out I seriously doubt they'll get another one. Tumbling from one disaster release to the next of late they probably aren't exactly inclined to burn money on old projects, they'll want cash-cow hits to compensate for BF/Anthem duds. We'll keep getting content no doubt, but nothing really on the scale of the main MMO competitors you'd like to compare this game with. Then if KOTOR movies make a big splash this game probably goes the way of SWG and makes way for the new KOTOR lore based one.

I'd argue the militarization of the order wasn't itself an issue... There always appears to be some jedi angst about them not being warriors but tbh, they're a martial order that has always had the function of monopolizing (F)force for the Republic as a galactic state. It's their function. The galactic crises always seem to come about from their repeated failure to fulfil their raison d'être. I don't think Palpsy was even that extremely powerful as much as a beneficiary of the jedi again failing their primary charge by getting rendered combat ineffective as an order by series one battle droids in one battle. If Vitiate had it that easy...

The more I watch these streams and log into PTS the more apprehensive I get... seems like a veritable RNG fiesta... which surprises me after ben irving "rng is exciting" hit mainstream meme proportions. Say what you will about Ossus, it's grindy as heck for sure, but it enabled focused effort towards a specific goal and tangible progression via crystals towards it. I fear by and lire people won't view random "sidegrades" as progression nearly as much as devs seem to believe.

I think a big reason for overall credit prices being high is the fact demand for crates is in a sizeable part driven by the desire of people with a lot of credits to "invest" those credits into hypercrates they then store. Which also causes a disparity between the worth of items and the worth of packs they're actually in. Packs exchange hands notably more than they actually get opened I'd wager. Reason for that is hypercrate ownership is the only way in the game to avoid your "credit assets" devalue by constant inflation and to actually in theory instead see it grow by doing nothing. Personally, when I at a certain point started playing quite a bit less, dumped everything I had into hypercrates and have a number of them in my cargo hold. On paper, when I scan what crates are listed for these days, I more than doubled my credits. Then again, turning them back into credits in a reasonable time frame might prove a bit of an issue. Regardless, the point is hypercrates are the TOR equivalent of bonds. Which is why they're both relatively expensive yet in more or less constant circulation since there is always demand, which keeps prices in check. On the flip side, only once in a blue moon will someone "invest" into something exotic like a guild rename and they'll list it on GTN at something absurd as a hailmary... it will in actually never ever ever sell for that. CC are another matter though and even there I'd wager the majority of CC enter the system via sub stipend as opposed to direct purchases, skewing their worth.

Apparently there was a reference to DS Rey on SW.com that called it a vision.... and has since been removed. Nothing to see, move along. Wouldnt want to subvert expectations with an actual big plot twist would we.

I'm thinking just some force vision of temptation trailer jebait.

As far as I recall it was a combination of balancing and making playstile of the knights more fluid and mobile... to neither of which a long-ish channelled root didn't fit. In fact I think it wasn't even always a root on the enemy but the issue was they'd run out of range by the time of the third swing/damage tick. So they made it one and opened a new can of worms. Master strike looked cool I agree but it's been rather problematic from the very start.

The issue with BW or more specifically SWTOR writing is the one dimensional light/dark kill/imprison option and pandering to players that want to be able to kill every character with more than 2 spoken lines, which makes every introduced character essentially a throwaway. A couple content cycles of this "philosophy" has left a narrative wasteland. I don't think the vast majority of players can even name the current faction leaders. Contrast that to WoW and TOR as the supposed story focused game falls woefully short. Bringing back Malgus, one of the few characters that ever stuck around enough to resonate with players, is an attempt to paper over the cracks. I sure hope being forced to scrap the bottom of the barrel with Malgus, Gnost Dural and the mutated NPC lady from the starting zone the writers have realised something has to change. They need to build consistent narrative with characters that stick around long enough so the players can build a connection with them. Alas I'm more inclined to believe they'll cave to people asking over and over and rub out Lana next. There's always C2-N2 to carry the narrative torch I guess.

Funnily enough SWTOR at launch played a lot more like a like a SP RPG in terms of slower progression more tied to planet arcs content. You were supposed to run pretty much all the story on any given planet to get to the level of the next one. Which was one of the major sticks used to beat the devs with. WoW didn't expect you to complete all the sidequests on your way to endgame so people didn't feel TOR was MMO enough because it did. But it's in the nature of MMOs to speed older content up as a catch up mechanic. It's unavoidable. The barrier to entry to newcomers or people returning after years would be too great if new shiny expansions got gated behind hundreds of hours of vanilla game. Destiny2 got crucified for months on end for gating new content behind old one... One man's great narrative flow is cumbersome xp grind for 10 others... I get the difference between playing a SP RPG on normal and enjoying blowing NPCs up with next to no effort and feeling like you're using cheat codes which leads to interest lost... which would be comparable to all NPCs being greyed out for you I guess... but I don't think there is really a realistic alternative to just grinding your teeth through the humps in story you reach when you outlevel them and stop getting XP till you get to a bit in the story where you're "synced up" again.

Mats going the way of legacy currency and freeing up legacy storage space sounds awesome but I'm worried the scope of horizontal progression will still overwhelm the capacity or at best make legacy inventory management a nightmare that storage space in itself will just mitigate... I'm picturing the horror show of trying to find a specific set bonus out of a tab full of chest pieces for XY classes and disciplines. Those Odessan boxes that dropped legacy shells, I dedicated one whole toon to store and try to fill out all sets and the level of organization it took got crazy. Half of each bank tab dedicated to a specific gear piece and all of them stored in the same pattern so I was able to see what's where... i.e. the top right most corner of every gear type section is that particular trooper set or is blank if I don't yet have it... It took all but one bank tab of space to store all the sets in those crates and I really doubt the new system will have less. It'd be super nice if legacy storage got dedicated tabs for specific classes to just help manage the metric tonne of stuff we'll be getting bombarded with... or in my wildest dream... get stored like cartel market items do in some sort of collection database you can use to track what you have and don't yet have and pull out a copy of stuff you've acquired... not mods obviously but shells and tactics and the likes that's supposed to be transferable. Thu I guess augments ruin that dream... Or maybe a variation of the option we already have on vendors with the filter options to show you stuff only of a particular discipline you choose, or something like that. Basically I really really hope that UI and item management wise more is being considered than effectively just freeing up some space in what already exists and no more.

Buffing up mobs doesn't make the game harder it just makes the leveling and grinding dailies more tedious. Oricon pre nerf had pretty much everything op desires plus a bunch of cc on the mobs that were placed so it was an artform to skirt around without pulling or better said getting pulled. Didn't make that place hard, just tedious as heck.

To be taken with a truckload of salt but here: http://mmogfails.blogspot.com/2019/05/bioware-leadership-is-out-of-touch-with.html?m=1 Bolded the SWTOR relevant parts. Could be fantasy, the alleged source supposedly said jan 2018 SWTOR is to be shut down in any scenario, Anthem being a hit or flop. (link in blog) Or it could be that we actually dodged a serious bullet. Either way seems like the sooner Anthem fully kicks the can the better, as terrible as it to say that for people that bought it.

I'm not one for boycotts but Solo was the first ever SW movie I missed in cinemas. TLJ left such a bad taste I just wasn't feeling it. However I'll go watch E9 for sure, once. But Disney has to get their head out of their posteriors in regards to what they do with the franchise next. I cant facepalm enough that some people are still on about "brand fatigue"... Endgame is the 5th MCU movie in less than 18 months since Black Panther in January 2018 and it's smashing box office records. SW done goofed bad with the sequel trilogy, that's pretty much obvious now.

It's pretty safe to say that if the philosophy is to have more max item rating drops with varied set bonuses we should brace ourselves for more not less RNG stress when hunting for that particular set or the other. Which might be mitigated by speed of drops. Or it might not be.

The troubling thing is rumours now have it EA devs across the board are taking a cut to their yearly bonus as a cost saving measure & to stave off letting people go due to the poor BF and Anthem showing... with people at BW at risk of being let go in further steps. Specifically people at BW Austin, being the ones now "live servicing" that mess of a game from Montreal. Spirits can't be high at the studio right about now as several people probably work(ed) on both. Hopefully collateral damage to this game is minimal. I think it is pretty safe to assume they have them. They just want more of them, seeing how vertical progression is the new direction they want to go in. This approach hits 2 birds with one stone for them, they get some ideas to incorporate they perhaps haven't thought of and they are seen to be cooperative and communicative with the player-base *cough* watch how its done Anthem *cough*. I mean sure one can see the sky falling in it but I bet such a person would have been a pessimist in any scenario imaginable.

I think it is nice to see the tech updates they talked about a while back in action. Quest objectives seem to be on another level in terms of having a visual efect in the game world. Cautiously optimistic going forward into the new expansion.

New places to go is always good and them trying something different with expanded horizontal gearing has me intrigued. Guess the plan is to have that and to expand it going forward instead of a Ossus item rating bump. Guess we'll see how it works out. Poor guy doing PvP balance heh. Also lol at the same discussions re CGI trailer every expansion. You gotta spend money to make money. If you're here now you'll be here come September no matter what. Word of mouth that no trailer enabled them to have 7,76% more content won't grab the attention of people frequenting gaming news sites and forums that have been gone for years or never tried this game before however. At the end of the day it's basically a question of math, did past expansions that had a trailer show enough of a sub bump to make it worthwhile to still market this product heavily. If you like this game you should be hoping that's a yes. When investing in exposure becomes a waste of money you're seeing the end of the road.

Compared to the old one it's great and actually fit for purpose now. Only being let down by lack of cloth physics. Guess that was one of those nice things we'd like to have but are just too hard....

KOTOR 2 is what TFA is to the Lucas SW... The price of well thought out characters shouldn't be settling for the overarching narrative to be one more in the laundry list of "last of the XY". KOTOR managed to both have an intriguing cast and plot combined with a distinct era of SW fleshed out for the first time. As it stands ones evaluation of K2 depends entirely on the take one has on Kreia's story... I'll admit that the pondering question of whether she's the one person in SW mythos that's seen the proverbial light or just a crazy old hag broken by betrayal is mildly intriguing... but I don't believe pulling a soft of-screen reboot of the galaxy to the start of the OT, TFA style, was at all worth it or for that matter needed just to explore that. The potential burned in the title crawls of K2 and TFA is criminal. If one thinks her philosophy is the 2nd coming of Darth Bane K2 is best thing since sliced bread, if she feels meh the entire game feels like a damp squid as a result. Yaaay I get to be Luke only Ben is TLJ level of cray cray...

What worries me most is that BW, once the premier story driven RPG studio, dropped the ball on the very thing they were once masters of - story. To not have a vision of what story you want to tell and how for years, leading it to sabotage the entire project, is shocking. Feels like that not having a vision has, if not anthem like derailed, at the very least hampered every BW release post ME1. With all due respect to Charles, who does his best making it up as we go no doubt, SWTOR included.

Seems like Disney agrees so the GoT creators are said to be doing Old Republic era movies. Dare we hope for a Revan trilogy? Personally I don't get the plaudits KOTOR 2 has in some circles... After KOTOR dreamed up an era of unlimited potential... the sequel rebooted the new unvierse into the OT "last of the jedi" rehash. I mean it had quality writing and plot, but if you're talking wasted potential, KOTOR 2 should have its photo next to the dictionary definition. TOR had to jump centuries again to re-established the scenery KOTOR 2 mucked over for no reason other than lack of originality. One can't deny Obsidian doesn't do quality work but they've seemed badly short of imagination from the get go. Even the latest project is basically just a deja-vu fiesta. It'll be better made than Fallout no doubt but come on... it's another Obsidian re-do of the already seen.

My suggestion would be to story wise going forward utilize established characters - companions that are left canonically for sure alive - a lot more. And not just as a to-do list to tick off via alliance alerts or short cameos but as workhorses going forward. Pretty much everybody else recognisable is dead by now anyway. Have imp and pub companions fill the slots of throwaway characters in the form of say the tall emo hair jedi and the twilek snarky spec ops.... can't really remember their names despite doing the jedi under siege story for 10+ times, and that's a point in itself me feels.

I find it amazing it is not absolute priority n1, let alone lower priority than guild heraldry, which lets be honest, who really asked for... The hottest CM items have traditionally been weapons, and we know for a fact the most played classes are force users that share the same main-had weapons... at the same time the player-base is predominantly casual and use alts, so I imagine a lot of people tend to stick their best gear into a legacy set and share that with mirror classes & potentially other alts via legacy storage. Which directly de disincentivizes spending CC or credits on those sweet looking lightsabers they pump out... I know I've been using the gree legacy lightsaber for years now, which I just updated to 258 to use on 3 juggs/knights... and I really cba to swap mods around every time I swap a toon or grind another 258 just for the looks. Nor do I care enough for looks to gimp myself intentionally for it. I've got BIS, I'm using BIS even if I don't technically "need" it... especially when I can pull it out of storage with a couple of clicks. With a tab I'd much more likely buy and use special non legacy bound weapons just for the looks. Tho I guess the metrics show BW I'm a minority, hence lower priority heh

This news makes me hopeful the DYN changes enable a less static game world going forward. There are a few examples of story milestones having a permanent visual effect on the open world environment and it would be really really cool if there would be more of that. One of my pet peeves over the years actually, feels like christmas. As far as the preview window goes, the attacing animations preview is nice, hope it also previews the sound of the weapon.

The real tragic thing for Anthem is that humorously enough EA/BW failed to learn the lesson of TOR despite having the same people work on that game... If you get off to a shaky start the narrative substantively determines the trajectory the game will take for the foreseeable future. Doesn't matter how much polish you do post fact if the initial impression was poor, you won't get the success you would have it you started off with a polished product. That's why smart companies like CPR and Blizzard take their sweet time with their titles. And EA has notoriously little patience to do serious post launch rehabilitation of titles so it's not exactly a safe bet Anthem will get the level of attention it needs going forward.