Bump.

Just returned since leaving the game out of boredom/lack of content in early February. Can someone please give me an update on some of the things which have been added/improved? New armor sets? Raids? Etc?

Pretty much this. The first Darth Bane novel does a fantastic job narrating this process when Bane decapitates Sirak while he begs him for mercy.

There really weren't THAT many good Jedi. And by good I mean like hero status good like Anakin, Obi-Wan, Yoda, etc. Most Jedi were not able to stand up against a good amount of blasters. You should read Darth Bane: Rule of Two. They have a lot of excellent fight scenes between the Jedi and Sith armies, and it describes how a lot of Jedi (and Sith) were both cut down by blaster fire, speeders, etc. That's why Vader was able to breeze through the Temple with relative ease. In fact, the 501st WITHOUT Vader more than likely could have gotten the job done. I think it's written somewhere in the RotS novel that Sidious sent Vader on the Temple mission to further his descent into the Dark Side.

What are the definitions of the Old Republic timeline wise? I'd think that you could squeeze in the Darth Bane trilogy into the Old Republic category.

I don't think that SWG was on life-support. It wasn't doing well, that's for sure. But I feel like the game had mostly recovered from the NGE around 2007. I will always prefer Pre-NGE SWG to Post-NGE SWG, but at that time the game felt that it had become what I think the developers had wanted it to be when they made the big change. Sure, the subscription list wasn't top notch by any standard, but it was doing a lot better than some of SOE's other games. Typically with SOE we see a common trend that shows that a game is dying, and is probably going to be shut down soon. It always starts with going F2P, and then SOE implements some other gimmiks to keep people intrested, but ultimately the announcement of shut down is released. With SWG it was different. The F2P came months after the announcement to shut down, and it was only available to active subscribers, and access for new subscribers was shut down. I really believe what the Developers posted on the forums about them being taken by surprise with the shut down. They were activly pumping out new content, and the things that they were putting out around 2009-2011 were pretty big projects, really, and I don't think so much work would have been put into them if they had been thinking that the game was going to shut down. What happened is that the contract that LucasArts had given to SOE for the Star Wars IP was going to expire and they had two choices. Either renew the contract, or shoot the horse. It doesn't surprise me that Lucas decided to pull the plug. After all, Lucas loves monay, and it was obvious from the initial announcement that SWTOR would be a lot more successful than SWG after the success of the KOTOR games, and BioWare's reputation for making a good story. LA decided to go with the option of what would make them the most money, and that's really no shock. But it was probably for the best. There really is no way that both games could have survived together. Once SWTOR was released only a handful of loyal players would have been left in SWG, even after the initial sparkles of TOR had worn off, and people were going back to their previous game - the subscriber rate would still be a lot lower than before TOR was launched. Had that been the case, then there's no doubt in my mind that SWG would have gone down the path of previous SOE titles like The Matrix Online, and go F2P and everything else that encompasses a dying game. If that had happened I think the whole thing would have been a lot sadder than when the announcment came out of the blue. SWG did do a lot of things right, though. But, I credit that to the style of the game being a sandbox. I think there are things that every game should take from SWG, mostly it's crafting and player housing system. But then again, there are plenty of things from other games that SWG should have taken. It really is dissapointing though how it all went down. SWG went out with a wimper, not a bang.

Played 2004-2011. Gave one example.

SWG was great, but some things definitely needed to be fixed. The crafting system was very great, but I'm not sure how I felt about crafted armor and clothing having no level requirement, even when stated with 35's in them. Brb running around with my level 22 Bounty Hunter with the same gear as my level 90 Bounty Hunter minus Heroic Jewelry & Weapons.

Why is it always the Jedi who ignite their sabers first in duels vs sith? I would think that a Jedi would try to find any diplomatic solution, and only use their sabers once they were threatened by one first. Think of all of the instances in the movies where we see Jedi igniting their sabers first. -Anakin & Obi-Wan vs Dooku (1) -Anakin & Obi-Wan vs Dooku (2) -Kenobi vs Grevious -Windu & Masters vs Sidious -Obi-Wan vs Anakin (Obi-Wan ignited first, even though in the book Anakin did) -Yoda vs Sidious -Luke vs Vader (1) -Luke vs Vader (2) You would think that it would be the Sith that drew first. Anyone know why this is?

This. SWG never actually had any storyline that lasted a particularity long time. The longest I can think of is back in NGE during the Legacy quest line which took you from 1-60ish, and even during that I couldn't really make sense of everything that was going on. The different theme parks were kinda cool, but they were all finishable in less than a day.

When I was around 8 I think I saw my fist SW film, still on VHS before any DvD versions came out. Would watch the original 3 in my friends basement. I loved it a lot, but SWG really sealed the deal for me being a star wars fan.

what kinda stuff does luke pull later on?

Darth Bane: Path of Destruction is so far my favorite SW book. I've probably read it at least 6 times. There are some other good ones, but it's just so full of Sith and Old Republic lore AND being very well written makes it hard to beat. I go back to it while trying to get through other SW books.

This is cool, thought you guys would like it. At 1:20 is when the Imperial March starts.

I haven't read the book yet. But hold up.

Really? We had about 3 years of Malgus being built up as this end all, be all extremely powerful and deadly Sith Lord which led the assault on the Jedi Temple and everything else....and we kill him in one Flashpoint? Don't get me wrong, I liked False Emperor a lot, in fact, I think it could have been it's own separate Operation, but it just felt like Malgus was WAY too easy to take down for how much he was built up. I'm really hoping that we see more of him. I'll be pretty dissapointed if this was the end for him.

Going back to the original question, I believe the Jedi were tipped off about the Sith around 220 BBY. That's when, reportedly, the Jedi felt a tremor in the force which led to a lot of speculation about the resurgence of the Sith.

Hahahaha. Oh wow. Oh wait you're serious. Hahahaha.

Haha. Where on the box did it guarentee you the graphics options that you want? Also, point to me any place which points to having AA and other sort of graphics options as basic functions? If it is not that hard to put in, then why don't you pull up C++ and write up a couple thousand lines of code and send it to BioWare so that we can all have it? Did you even play beta? Yeah they had AA and other things in beta, but it put too much of a strain on computers. Even my computer, which is fairly new (just over a year), would run very hot with the game just after 2ish hours of gameplay. Did you ever stop to think that Developers DO NOT create games that can be ran on top-end rigs? They create games that can be ran on the average joe potatoe. They took all of those things out because for one thing they weren't working properly, and for another reason they wanted to make it easier on other rigs. Why are you ************? The game still looks great. I don't even notice the change between Beta and now. Running this game on maxed settings looks better than WoW maxed out, anyway. But if you really think that not having AA makes this a half-assed product, then please don't let the door hit you on the way out. I can guarentee that nobody will miss you.

Wait, so....the players *****ed and *****ed about how th egame has no AA feature, and so BioWare decided that they should put it in as soon as possible (because from what I've seen on the "We want this" threads over the past month, AA has been in basically every one of them). And now that BioWare did a rush job to put it in, the players are surprised that it's not perfect? Seriously? The only people to blame for the poor implimentation of things in the game are the players who wanted it the day before yesterday and caused the Devs to rush it.

The duel between Anakin and Obi-Wan in Episode 3 is how I've always thought about saber combat whenever I read any of the Old Republic books. Especially some of Darth Bane's duels.

You really can't draw any conclusions from the fight from watching the movie. You'd have to read the book to fully understand how the fight went down. Obi-Wan and Anakin had spent countless hours dueling each other, they could both basically predict the next move the other would make. This is probably the main reason why the fight was drawn out so long. Another thing is that Anakin did, in fact, become fatigued and lose concentration over some things. Obi-Wan sensed a moment of lax in Anakin's thinking, and used this moment to use the Force to reverse some motors in Anakin's mechanical hand, and cause him to drop his lightsaber - which Obi-Wan then caught (only to be tackled by Anakin). (He used this same trick with the Force during his duel with Grevious to disarm him). It's also interesting to note that in the book Anakin drew his lightsaber first, not Obi-Wan. When Anakin jumped and Obi-Wan caught him in his knees and elbow, this actually was not intended by Obi-Wan. He had swung his saber to counter Anakin's strike, but Anakin had missed Obi-Wan's saber by a small angle, and because Obi-Wan's saber was already swinging in position he ended up severing Anakin's limbs. I think that the whole "high ground" thing was stupid, though. I think Lucas just couldn't come up with a different way that he could get Anakin maimed.

Vader wouldn't have ever gone to Tatooine. In the EU it was described as the place where Vader felt most of his pain, and linked it to everything bad that had happened in his life. He purposelessly avoided stepping foot on Tatooine out of fear of awakening what was left of Anakin Skywalker in him.

The book goes into detail in that chapter and it talks about how the medical droids had used less than ideal metals and alloys for constructing his prosthetic limbs, and that they had cut corners with making sure everything was snug and didn't pull on his skin and had worked properly. Vader had to use the force largely due to the fact that his suit was not completely perfect, or anywhere near perfect actually. The whole thing caused Vader a horrific deal of discomfort. I can only guess that later on Vader made improvements to his suit and made it more comfortable, but during the early years Vader definitely could have been taken out by any Jedi that was exceptionally skilled with a lightsaber who also could have proved to be a very serious threat to him. It also states later in the book that Sidious only viewed Vader as a sort of puppet now, and he only handed out snippits of Sith knowledge every now and then in order to keep him wanting more - but he had no intention in telling him everything once he was in the suit.

"Raised in the heel, the cumbersome footgear canted him slightly forward, forcing him to move with exaggerated caution lest he stumble or topple over. Worse, they were so heeavy that he often felt rooted to the ground, or as if he were moving in high gravity. What good was motion of this sort, if he was going to have to call on the Force even to walk from place to place! He may as well have have resigned himself to using a repulsor chair and abandoned any hope of movement". That excerpt is from Page 58 of James Luceno's Book Dark Lord: The Rise of Darth Vader.