I haven't played WoW since burning out on Raggy 25HC progress back in August, but feck, seeing that amazingly responsive combat again makes me wanna resub. Very good video. Let's see how BioWare responds.

QFT. Also, while the people who push the boundaries of what is considered possible in their respective game can be abrasive at times, competing with each other is always good fun (and healthy). 1 week later ;x <3

AKA 0x, 0x and 1x. Considering most people are used to between 4x and 24x (AA type depending) it's a pretty terrible implementation. Turn it off and force a higher one in your graphics card's drivers.

But then they'd make a really nice logo when trying to get a company to buy it, but then sell them one at 1/5th the resolution. It's what they're best at.

Oh god, I hope to god you're trolling with this one. I cannot even comprehend how you could have physically typed that sentence without cringing. Cast bars mean something in this game? As compared to WoW? Right. So, in WoW, if I have a 1.5s cast Mount, or a 2.5s cast Heal, I'll get the speed boost of a Mount after 1.5s or my target will be immediately Healed after 2.5s. Now let's look at this game, same scenario. After 1.5s casting my Mount, if I move I'm instantly dismounted, because the ACTUAL cast time of the Mount is more like 2s, not 1.5s, regardless of what the UI is telling you. Casting a 2.5s Heal, well, you expect your Tank to recover HP the moment your cast bar finishes, right? Nope. Your 2.5s Heal actually has a 2.7-2.9s cast time, again regardless of what the UI is telling you. "This isn't WoW, cast bars mean something". ****, don't think I've read something that stupid in a long time.

Nagas will always fail after a given period of time due to a pretty big design fault as I discovered when I took mine apart. When you press either of the two main buttons (Left/Right Click), two plastic prongs actuate a corresponding button on the mouse's base. Over time these prongs erode, leaving a white dust on the inside of the mouse. While you can clean away this dust the first few times to essentially breathe some new life into the mouse, the prongs eventually erode so much that they cannot physically actuate the buttons anymore. If your handywork is good, you can easily repair this by fixing something of the right length to the end of the prongs so that they fully actuate the buttons again, but for most people the mouse is dead. I've found in general that Razer products are sub-par when it comes to build quality (this goes for their keyboards, mice and headsets). I swapped to a Logitech G9x after my 2nd Naga failed for the same reason and, while it took some getting used to no longer having the 12-button sidepad, I haven't looked back since.

Evidently you have no idea what the term 'Modding API' actually means.

Song is Heart of Courage by Two Steps from Hell, if anyone's interested. Edit: Might be wrong there, can't quite pin down which one it is. Army of Justice? On topic: Nice preview so far. Looking forward to the full thing

Using an XFX Radeon HD5850 Black Edition, which is pretty dated by today's standards. Game runs smooth as silk at 1920x1080, so I'm not complaining.

Listen, I agree with you, SW:TOR runs hotter than other games that are much more graphically demanding that this one. However, I have HWM running all the time. Since I cranked my fan up to 45% a few days ago, I've never gone above 70*C playing SW:TOR, even at prime time with tonnes of people on Fleet. If turning up the fan(s) on your own card isn't helping, there's a problem with your cooling. Yes, BioWare need to optimise their game. It runs hotter than it should. Hot enough to fry cards? Not unless your cooling is sub par.

Clicky for Idle Temps After Buying/Selling on the GTN for the past five or six minutes, new Temps: Clicky Edit: When my card's fan was still set to Auto (27%), I'd probably see 35*C Idle and ~75*C on the Fleet. In conversations with NPCs the card would peak at 86*C. With the fan now set to Manual (45%), there's no discernible change in sound, yet it now Idles between 25*C and 28*C and, as you can see in the pics, settles at ~49*C on the Fleet.

Stupidly I realised my card's fan was still set to Auto (so at like 27%). Cranking it up Manually to 45%, there's no change in sound but now it idles at 28*C (my case's ambient temp) and runs SW:TOR at an average 55*C, but can vary between 48*C and 66*C. Overall am much happier. Silly thing is, I could have sworn I had the fan cranked up already. Ah well, I'm an idiot. It's still true that this game heats my card up further than much more graphically intensive games, though (BF3 maxed out averages at like 43*C, so SW:TOR is still running roughly 10*C hotter the majority of the time).

Really? Every alt I level up, I do the 1 Warzones Played daily as soon as I get to the Fleet at ~lv 16 and always have 12.5k+ HP. A well equipped lv 20-25 with Bolster will be sitting at 13k HP in a Warzone too. How you have less than 12k HP as a lv 50 is beyond me.

i5 750 @ 3.2 GHz 8GB DDR3 CAS-8-8-8-24 @ 1333 MHz XFX Radeon HD5850 Black Edition @ 775 MHz / 1125 MHz 1TB 7200RPM SATA 6Gb/s HDD As you can see, my rig is pretty crap compared to yours yet I also don't have many performance issues. I run with a steady 60fps (Vsync forced on through Catalyst) everywhere except the Fleet where I fluctuate between 45 and 60fps. Interestingly I experience the same load times as yourself - For me, the first 25 levels worth of planets (so everything up to and including Nar Shadaa) load really quickly, like 8s on average. However, all planets after Nar Shadaa take at minimum 25s to load, sometimes more. Wouldn't surprise me if they optimised and polished the first 25 levels worth of content more to impress people at launch and get them hooked. I'm sure they'll improve those load times eventually (fingers crossed, anyway). I've been thinking of grabbing a decent SSD for my Windows install & SW:TOR, though I've heard some people already with SSDs are getting pretty long load times on some planets regardless. Will have to see.

Near all the other Action Bar options is a tick-box for "Enable Cover Bar".

Rating. Also, any update on that vid you're making Xcore?

While the game cannot directly cause your graphics card to overheat (and by overheat, I mean reaching the maximum safe working temperatures), it does seem to have an issue where it runs hotter than other games that are more graphically demanding. Idling in the Fleet my card sits at about 68*C. Running around worlds doing Quests it'll settle at around 72*C. This is all fine. However - When in a Conversation with an NPC, this is where things get interesting. The 86*C peaks I've been seeing (that I mentioned earlier in the thread), appear to be happening only in these Conversations. Anyone else only seeing large rises in card temps during Conversations?

My rig is the opposite. Skyrim on max settings with graphical improvement mods, I average 60-65*C. BF3 on max settings it can peak at 70*C. This game even on low settings? Can peak at 86*C. Yeah. :-/ Better cooling? HAF922 with multiple 120mm fans. Card idles at like 30-35*C. Better GFX card? Why? I can run the game with a constant 60fps (50~ on Fleet) with max settings. What is strange is that this game can peak my card at 86*C regardless of me being on low settings or tweaking the .ini for very high settings. That indicates a problem with the code somewhere.

Let's look at the main HUD for example: Clicky. Highlighted here in red is useless artwork that does not need to be there: Clicky. And now in green are the useful parts of the HUD: Clicky. Here are both the green and red parts together for comparison: Clicky. Now, the total area of the combined red and green parts is 161,125 px squared, of which only 76,226 px squared are actually useful. In other words approximately 52.7% of the bottom centre HUD is completely useless artwork. Now, the above comparison did not take into account the Buffs/Debuffs frame because I wanted to discuss that particular widget here in more detail. Currently there are multiple specs in the game that rely on efficient use of proccs in order to maximise their output (for example, Madness Sorcerers / Balance Sages). In this case, the procc is Wrath | Presence of Mind, which has a 30% chance to make your next cast time nuke fire instantly and deal +20% more damage. When levelling up, it's very easy to spot these proccs because you'll only have 1-2 other Buffs (ie, spotting the Wrath | PoM icon is trivial). Unfortunately this is not the case while in an endgame PvE / PvP scenario, where you will have many more active Buffs. A Sorc / Sage needs to consume this procc before an overlap can occur (ie, the skill proccs again and you effectively lose the first), but this now requires you to stare at this tiny section of the UI instead of enjoying the actual fights / not standing in fire. This also applies to Debuffs on your Target. Spotting which Affliction DoT is yours is trivial while levelling solo or completing small flashpoints, but becomes exponentially more annoying as you move on to 8m / 16m operations. Playing a Madness Sorc / Balance Sage optimally becomes a a chore as you stare at these tiny icons rather than enjoying the actual encounters. Not good. At this point I'm gonna link you an annotated picture of my WoW UI from back in June/July before I quit: Clicky. Now, I've only annotated certain parts, and I want you to read this part carefully: The parts of that screencap that I've annotated are ONLY showing information that is also displayed in the current SW:TOR UI. The reason I say this is because I want you to ignore the Boss Timers, Recount, Threat Meter etc. We're not discussing those here. We're discussing how the SW:TOR doesn't present its information in an efficient manner. So in the picture you can see I've moved and resized various elements depending on their importance. For example, I don't care about my Buffs that last 60mins, so they've been moved to the top corner of my screen out of the way. I also don't care about the majority of my abilities, so they've been scaled down and put in another corner. I do, however, care about MY debuffs on the Target, so those have been filtered and scaled up. I also wanna see the Target's Buffs for if they go Immune, or if they gain something that means I must stop attacking that Target, etc. Debuffs cast on me are important, so they've been moved to the centre of the screen and scaled up to be massive. This way I can react much more efficiently to certain mechanics. In the encounter I screencapped, there is a Debuff that is placed on you which will explode and do massive AoE damage once it expires. Being able to easily and clearly see the remaining duration of this Debuff is vital. And, most importantly, I can see my important Buffs and Proccs near the centre of my screen, and thus can react accordingly and maximise my DPS. I want you to notice one thing: All information has been scaled and relocated according to its importance. There is no useless artwork here: Health/Energy bars use up most of their parent Unit Frames, Action Buttons have no pointless gaps between them and are perfectly square, etc. With the screencapped UI, I could watch the fights. My spell priorities were second nature and so I could literally just enjoy an encounter with only the occasional quick glance away from the action being needed. Throughout Tier11 and the start of Tier12 (before I quit the game), I was ranked globally in the Top10 for Demonology Warlocks on almost every single Heroic encounter, with multiple Top3 parses. And let me tell you, I spent the majority of my time watching the actual encounter, not staring at tiny little Buff Icons and whatnot. TLDR: The current SW:TOR does not present information in an efficient manner and actually requires you to spend a ludicrous amount of your time staring at tiny Buff/Debuff icons instead of enjoying the encounter at hand.

Ignore him, he's a flagrant troll. At least I hope he is, because if he's truly this naive I fear I'll have to ditch atheism and take up a religion, just to pray for humanity's sake.

Oh **** guys, this dude's trolling is off the charts.

The Story Quests are good. That's about it. Objectives are far too spread out. You spend like 60% of your playtime whizzing around on your Speeder looking like an idiot. This becomes worse and worse as you get to the higher level zones. They're the same thing we've been doing for the past decade - Kill mobs. Loot items. Interact with item on the ground. Kill boss guy. Take item to some other guy. Etc etc. Slapping voice acting on top of that doesn't instantly make it awesome. There aren't actual consequences to most of your actions. Oh, Light/Dark, who cares. You have to go 100% either way regardless so that isn't really a choice. I can't think of a single time where my choices directly alter my story later down the road. Meh.

No, you're just aweful and play at 5 APM. Hence you don't notice it.

If they pull their fingers out? Maybe 240k. Their biggest problem is that they've invested a disproportionate amount of their budget into non-sustainable avenues of the game. Voice acting can only take the game so far - it needs actual content to keep people interested. I've already cancelled my sub, personally.

Cool Keep up the good work, looking forward to the vid.