The ESRB ratings are fairly complicated, and I have issues with the way they deal with same sex content. I really doubt TOR will get a ratings change though. The short version is that the ESRB ratings are based on categories of content with the option of additional arbitrary descriptors of "Mild" and "Extreme" added based on a panels opinion of the presentation of content. In theory if a same sex kiss or completely non-explicit homosexual relationship are present in an otherwise K rated game it should just be tagged as having "Extreme Sexual Themes." Which doesn't really mean anything, but is meant to give fair warning that there is content about sexuality some people may find objectionable. In practice the ESRB has hardly ever used the Extreme Sexual Themes tag and tend to kick same sex content up to the harsher category of Mild Sexual Content (which is a warning that automatically sets the rating of a game as T or M). Here is a better question, even if they did change the rating would it matter? Studies show the vast majority of MMO players are college aged, with the trend tending towards players being older than that rather than younger. Parents don't like kids, especially teenagers, playing MMOs. Why should EA devote that much worry to a group that doesn't play the game anyway?

Honestly, as this is the only topic the mods will allow for any discussion of same sex issues/content/potential content in TOR it is a little unreasonable to expect it not to go off topic. Especially since the official topic is "please tell us something? Pretty please? With a Cherry On Top?" It is all bound to come to some point organically eventually, maybe...

Very, very, true. I still think there is a chance that SGR might be new companions only. If that's true I don't think anybody would be happy about it. Aside from that I would be surprised if they didn't have some research on potential player loses (i.e. how many people that can expect to quit if they do put in SGR) that shows enough of a loss for them to want to wait for the last minute to announce. I doubt they'll really lose that many people over it, or that it would stop them implementing it. Just that there is no point chasing away subscribers and their money while they're still depending on subscriptions.

I'm pretty sure I mentioned this already but last year I saw what EA/BW requirements were for entry level CS management and they were looking for very serious PR types. So, yeah, not that surprised they have people looking over their shoulder. I am kind of curious if they're still as strict in who they have working after the CS restructuring. To be totally honest I was kind of shocked they kept as much of the team as they did for as long as they did. The money they were offering was terrible for what they were looking for, although there was a lot of that going around at the time. If you ignore all of the doomsaying that keeps coming up. If CS is saying it is still on schedule for this year, that means it has to be at least mostly done. Not "done" done, but finished with key animation and voice acting so it is mostly coding at this point done. At this point BW has to have details they could give us, but for their own reasons they don't feel they can. I still think at least part of it is concerns about the coverage of the release of SGR snowballing in the current media climate.

One of the things BW has said that I found very interesting is that there will be a much faster rate of content updates after F2P goes live. It isn't like there is anything that can speed up production that much. Other than hiring more people anyway, which we know they haven't done. That kind of implies that they have a bunch of stuff in or near QA in-house beta right now, but they're pacing its release so they don't overwhelm the QA or live teams. Which implies that if SGR is coming this year they have to have it more or less done now. If that's true than it means an announcement is just a matter of PR types deciding on timing.

Weren't there already problems with the Hutts? Something about people having issues with the types of stereos in the Clone Wars CGI movie.

It wasn't a retcon. I actually dug out my old Tales comics to find the issue Wookiepedia claims is the first appearance (BTW anything that is in SW canon that comes across as very stupid and didn't come from the RPG probably came from Tales). There was a cameo by a Miraluka as a part of a big montage of Jedi doing "cool stuff." This is the description: <Goofy 40's Newsreel/Clone Wars Narrator Voice> "Shoaneb Culu, Miraluka Jedi, demonstrates Uncanny ability with THE LIGHTSABER! The Miraluka of Alpheridies are born without eyes - - BUT see EVERYTHING... IN THE FORCE!." </goofy voice> In the picture that goes with that narration it looks like the girl in question is using telekinesis rather than her saber. Did I mention Tales sucked?

Seriously! I hadn't really thought about this much until this thread came up, but now I can't get rid of the, deeply nauseating, thought of what effects movement would have on the fluid dynamics of the CSF behind their new "face pouches."

I have a little of this too. I'm MtFTrans IRL, and playing as a guy is very uncomfortable for me. The way the male NPCs treat female PCs is really creepy though. I'm actually Bi, but the way guys come on to the PC weirds me the hell out. They come on so strong my first thought is usually "mental note: do not accept drinks from this guy EVER." I don't know who wrote some of that stuff, but they need somebody to slap the stupid out of them if they think it is okay to talk to girls like that. And don't even get me started on how female IAs actually get Light Side points for using sex to get their way.

The most likely reason SGRA wasn't in at launch is pretty much the same reason for most problems with the story. TORs development was taking too long and badly over budget and so they spent the last 9 months of development rushing to get something out the door. Another thing they've never said about SGR is that it would be on existing companions. From BW's prospective I could see some advantages to only doing a couple of universal endgame only companions. The big downside to that though is that it might not be enough to bring back players for whom lack of SGR was a key reason for leaving.

I'm from the NES generation and I know the feeling. The short answer on the ME3 thing is that multiplayer was one way to unlock the best end. There were like five different ways to do it. Multiplayer was one of the big ones, but so were playing some Ipad promotional minigame and importing ME2 save games.

When they said that I think they were only referring to EA and not its subsidiary companies and development studios. Which isn't really saying much as EA sports is about the division that makes games anymore. Also I'm pretty sure they just meant that every game would have the option of multiplayer content, not that there would never be another EA game with a single player mode.

Have you, like, not been to the TOR homepage lately? They're already adding everything you'd expect to see in a full expansion. The business and F2P arguments against SGR drive me crazier than just about anything. Subscription based models do not work very well anymore. Five or ten years ago MMOs had a higher degree of player loyalty based around the social experience of the game. That was before social media became so dominating of our everyday lives. Now the friends people make in MMOs just become part of their social network, and it disincentivizes players to keep keep playing (and giving subscription money) after they get tired of endgame grinding. These means less money for a company if there isn't equal player turnover. Freemium models, on the other hand, allow those players to pop back in if there is new content they want, for only a small fee, and the focus on expanding endgame content encourages new players to pay for advantages to get to that content quickly. The real beauty of it is that it doesn't matter about rates of player turnover. For 10 players spending $100 a month on content that covers 100 players in older subscription model. Of course not everyone will spend like that, but that is just an example of the most basic way in which F2P is a better model. It is something that will mean more content since people will have to pay for it a piece at a time., and you know, companies like money. BW knows SGR is something people want. The ghetto-esque nature of this thread can make it feel like there aren't that many people interested in it, but it is a very common complaint about the game across the internet. BW knows people want it, and they would very much like for those people to give them their money. BW also knows that people who come back for SGR are pretty likely to spend money on other things in the new F2P game. That is a big part of why I think SGR probably has a higher priority than a lot of people seem to think. There are better potential net gains from SGR than the things that people think are top priority project. While a new operation might encourage a large number of wavering players to stay on for a time, players SGR brings in may include a percentage of the type of heavy spending dedicated players that an F2P game needs a large core of to stay profitable.

They also said it would come when they started doing story expansion and that there probably wouldn't be many, if any, official comments about it until it was implemented. I've gotten the impression that a lot of people think this is a pretty stupid view, but I think we'll probably see SGR as part of the Mekab content. So, we can probably expect it whenever Patch 1.5 comes out.

... She also didn't so much "learn it" as was able to "use it when possessed by an evil spirit". Do you think Revan was possessed by and/or serving eldritch horrors that drive men to madness by their passing?

I doubt there is anything that isn't fan art. To be clear, as far as I know, they don't have eyes. Under the coverings is unbroken skin covering empty holes in their faces. Like a surprisingly large amount of the EU, I think the Miraluka originated with the Star War table top RPG. After the EU got big in the 90's following the Thrawn trilogy a lot of the authors and developers that were brought in did quite a bit of cribbing from the game manuals. Pretty much any race that has an overly complicated (and fairly stupid) background can be assumed to originate with the RPG. Their status as a "force sensitive race" is more or less short hand for "mage-hybrid classes only", and the origin of the lack of eyes is just a bit of a cool background to explain away that status. Given that, no one I'm aware of has ever poked too deeply into the background of the Miraluka. I'm pretty sure kotor 2, TOR, and Jedi Knight are the only major appearances of members of the species, and only kotor 2 spent much time talking about their background.

They don't have anything under there. It is just blank skin where eyes would be on a human. The clothes/shades/whatever cover the area becuase it is said to be very creepy looking. They're supposed to still have vestigial eye sockets that are only lightly covered by skin. The Miraluka are one of the "near-human" species, which means they're a race that evolved from humans after living on a particular alien world for many generations. IIRC The Miraluka homeworld is a somehow habitable world that orbits a radio star, meaning that there is almost no radiation reaching the world in the visible light spectrum.

The way he sounds isn't an homage to Darth Vader, that is just what an all Baconator diet will do to you.

The Aing Ti have a unique view of the force. IIRC the actual line about how they viewed the force was as a "Rainbow of Perspectives." So, they were pretty big on the grey side of things. Also, IIRC (from the original crappy C canon RPG guide that created the Aing Ti) they aren't force sensitive yet. There is a ridiculously convoluted story about how the species didn't gain force sensitivity until they were exposed to weird cosmic rays (fantastic four style, yo) from some spacial rift thing that popped up about a millenium after TOR. Aside from that, didn't The Emperor Palpatine have some kind of space-time manipulation ability that was a major plot element in the (quite terrible) Dark Empire series?

I think we can safely say that we've heard some new stuff about story. They've been pushing Mekab as being a story expansion and they keep saying there will be a faster pace of new story content updates after its release. The Hood interview was also pretty interesting on the story front. The question I haven't really seen anyone ask in this thread is, that since Hood indicated that most of the future story content would be universal rather than class specific, does that include SGR? When they were asked at the guild summit they evaded the question of if SGR would be available on current companions.

I remember trying to work this out for the SW story once. I came up with about 12 years, but cues I based that math off of escape me at the moment.

They aren't quite that bad. I would even go so far as to say a couple of them are okay. While the initial "hook up" scenes aren't always the best, the way romance arcs in general work is more like they retool how general companion interactions are to give them a quasi-romantic quality. This is a little more accurate: "Hey, 'sup" ":sniff: I'm having angst about my dark and troubled past." "Baby, I want you to know I am there for you. Just tell me what's wrong." ":sniff: ...k (tells the truly tragic story of how these two dudes used to roll them for milk money everyday in 7th grade)" "Let's go find those guys and KICK THEIR ***!" "Yayz! I wuv you sooooooo much!" /bows Thus is great romance born.

Just to say it, I do like space battles. I think it is a fun minigame and I consider a little more enjoyable than doing other current endgame content. I really wouldn't mind if they did a couple new high level battles. That completely banal point aside, the thing I don't get is do these people think they're just starting on SGR or something? They've presumably been working on SGR for at least a year. Do they somehow think it is a better investment for BW to ditch that massive amount of work on partially developed new content? And what exactly do they think a cutscene team is going to do that would make PVP or Raids better? These guys aren't level designers, it is a whole different skill set involved in working on SGR vs anything anyone who complains about it ever wants...

There are some games that set a vague precedent, but not really a true one. There are a few more games that are basically Sims clones, or near enough, that are also rated T (although a couple of them have actually been kicked up to an M). There were several games over the last decade that had cut same sex content that could still be accessed through either a minor hack or a bug. Some games have avatar swaps that allowed for what was basically a bit of SGR headcanon. Beyond that, well... Kotor, and a few other games with what can only loosely be called romance, sort of count. Depending on how much of a romance you regard Juhani/Revan as anyway. Not that what was there could be called much of a story. It was a conversation and a half that ends with them deciding that despite being in love they can't be together while they're focused on their epic quest (despite every other romance doing so) followed by a complete lack of any sort of resolution or ending. This sort of aborted romance arc probably does count, but it is hard to really see it. It doesn't really go anywhere and usually lacks even as much as a hug between the couple. One of the Star Ocean games (IIRC 4 - whatever it was called) probably should count as a precedent, but the content was a type of "bad end" that was very hard to get and if you understand all of the connotations of what the Japanese call an "S-Class Relationship" (romantic friendship w/o benefits) it wasn't exactly much of one. It was sweet and somewhat well developed though, and it would be nice if it set a precedent to some companies that SGR doesn't need to be cut from JRPGs. Beyond that pretty much any game that had (what will probably be) TOR style SGR has been M. To be fair, a lot of those games would have been M anyway (which in a bit of circular logic is probably why they had SGR in the first place), but there are quite a few that didn't really feel like an M game but were rated that way anyway (probably because of SGR, but who can really say). Also, Chaac, as an avid Sims player I agree that SGR in The Sims is awesome. You're actually making me feel bad, I haven't played in a couple of weeks now. I think I might go do that for a few hours.

Like I said a couple of posts ago, The Sims doesn't really count as an example since, as a sandbox game, it doesn't have a same sex *story* per se, only the potential for a player to create their own. There is a difference between that and a game with an inbuilt gay romance. That sort of thing (apparently) makes a difference when issuing ratings. Also, anything in the US rates even a tiny degree of sexuality much more harshly than fairly extreme violence. There is a great deal of history behind this ratings stuff, a lot of it very nasty if you know the particulars (seriously, if you want to feel very bad about humanity read up on the origin of the Comics Code as well as HUAC, The Black List, and the MPAA). No joking around though, read through ESRB issued ratings sometime, there has literally never been a game rated lower than an M with a full fledged gay romance. I think TOR will probably be the first.