One of the most popular BioWare series is Dragon Age. There are those who love it and those who loved only one (the original but bit DA2, for example). The game series has a large following who are probably excited to hear about Dragon Age III: Inquisition. There is now more information coming out about this latest title from BioWare and what we can expect from the game. On the official site of DA3, we can find an open letter from Mark Darrah the executive producer. In this letter he confirms the game is coming (not completely news to all of us): I am pleased to confirm that we are, in fact, working on the next Dragon Age game. Not a big surprise to most of you, I know. We have been working on it in some way for about two years now with the bulk of our efforts ramping…
BioWare and LucasArts LiveStream Q&A Event
With patch 1.4 just around the corner, BioWare and Lucasarts will be holding a LiveStream event. In this, the they will answer questions from the community concerning the content within each Game Update. The first LiveStream Event will discuss Game Update 1.4 – Terror From Beyond, and the team will be taking questions via Twitter, Facebook, and the Official Forum. LiveStream Event #1 BioWare and LucasArts are excited to announce a new monthly LiveStream Q&A Event. The objective of this new LiveStream event series is to answer any questions our Community has concerning the content within each Game Update. Below is all the information you need in order to watch and participate in the first monthly LiveStream Event. Star Wars™: The Old Republic™ – LiveStream 9/21/2012 4:00pm to 4:30pm CDT The first LiveStream Event will discuss Game Update 1.4 – Terror From Beyond. This Game Update brings a brand new…
BioWare’s Doctors Announce Retirement from Gaming
BioWare founders Greg Zeschuk and Ray Muzkya both announced their retirement via posts online Tuesday afternoon. Known as the “doctors”, they founded the company in 1995 after receiving their medical degrees at the University of Alberta. They are also credited as executive producers for Baldur’s Gate series, Mass Effect, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, Shattered Steel, Jade Empire, and the Neverwinter Nights series. They are well known and well loved in the gaming community, especially among BioWare fans but it looks like SWTOR would be their last project. The official BioWare blog posts: Today, BioWare co-founders Ray Muzyka and Greg Zeschuk have announced they are retiring from BioWare. Both have written blogs to discuss their retirement – click HERE for Ray’s and click HERE for Greg’s. Please join us in wishing them all the best in the future. Also, Aaryn Flynn, General Manager of BioWare Edmonton & Montreal shares his thoughts about Ray and Greg and what is coming up for…
Individual Server Forums Coming today
AllisonBerryman posted an update on the forum regarding individual server forums. Finally they are arriving, so let the flame wars commence! Starting tomorrow, we’ll be opening individual server forums. This means that the old Server Group Forums will be closing, so if you have any posts you’d like to save (such as recruitment posts or other posts you’ve put effort into), please do so at this time! They had groups of servers in a forum before. Given 9 pve and 6 pvp groups and 2 RP groups, the number of groupings are going to outnumber the number of servers.
Server merges happen today, plus allowed characters bumped to 12 for everyone
We have known for a couple months now that Mega servers were on the way. We have now reached the last part of the process as BioWare merging the last servers today. Earlier this summer we launched the Free Character Transfer Program which offered players the option to transfer their characters from specific origin servers to selected destination servers. Following the success of the Free Character Transfer Program, and after closely monitoring server populations, we have now taken the next step in our on-going server population balancing process. We have upgraded destination servers in order to support a significantly higher number of players. As of tomorrow, all characters on origin servers will be automatically moved onto the upgraded high population destination servers. By centralizing our player populations on these higher population destination servers, we feel that we can offer our players the best possible Star Wars™: The Old Republic™ experience. As a…
Tips for Stat Tracking in SWTOR
While we know that gaming is supposed to be all about having fun and accomplishing objectives, the reality is that in games like SWTOR, you are going to need to do a bit of legwork in regards to stat tracking. Whether you are tracking loot, affection, or gear, you are going to need to track stats. This is doubly important for raiders. Here are a few stat tracking tricks and tips. Excel Offers More Functionality Over Notepad The two most popular forms of stat tracking are notepad and excel. Notepad is great for those of you that are not in guilds or those that don’t want to the headache of managing raids. However, for the rest of you, Excel offers much more functionality for stat tracking as you can format your sheets and workbooks for your entire guild in an easy-to-read and manage format. Set Rules for Raids If you want to avoid drama that naturally ensues in…
SWTOR Guide to Lightsaber Crystals
Star Wars: The Old Republic has many interesting features like the rare crystals that make your lightsaber different colors. These are fun to collect and some of them can be a real challenge. Here’s a guide to some of the color crystals in the game. Remember that these can change at any time. We will try to update the guide accordingly. Remember to check out this post on Light saber hilts. Common Crystals You can find the blue, green, red and yellow crystals in Artifice. These are the most common gems so they are the easiest to locate. You can also find them in the vendor sabers gear. The orange color gems are “high level artifice” that can be reached at level 400. In Alderaan, the orange crystals drop from Ulgo Siegebreaker, Corusant Worldboss and Nar Shadda Worldboss. Black Core Colors There are four black core colors in the game. You can…
TOR TV: SWTOR Explained #9: Meetra Surik Part 2 (Jedi Exile and Kotor 2)
xZeroTolerence55x have uploaded the second part of the Meetra Surik the Jedi Exile from Kotor 2. story. If you have no clue who Meetra Surik is, she was a charismatic female Human Jedi Master who, while still a Padawan, followed Revan and Malak to war against the Mandalorians, in defiance of the Jedi Council. Because of this she was exiled from the Jedi Order and came to be known as the Jedi Exile. Just prior to Revan and Malak’s fall to the dark side and the Jedi Civil War, Meetra Surik returned to Republic space to face trial with the Jedi Council and was stripped of her connection to the Force, exiled from the Order and spent several years wandering the galaxy. The near extermination of the Jedi Order at the hands of the Sith Triumvirate resulted in her reconnecting to the Force and leading a desperate fight to stop the Sith. During her mission to stop the Sith, she…
High Population Server Tech Testing
Test Center News for SWTOR has some interesting information up today. This comes right after we were talking about PTS testing and who gets in. Basically, they will be opening a new public test realm server in order to test for high population. So this means a lot of people will be invited in. Here are the details from SWTOR: The first step in this process is opening up a new, temporary Public Test Server for testing. In order for us to successfully test this new tech, we need your help. To facilitate your participation we have copied all characters from our East Coast servers to this temporary Public Test Server. If you have any characters on an East Coast server, you can now log in to this special Public Test Server, find your copied characters, and begin testing this important feature today, September 13th. So how do you do…
Select Guilds Allowed Transfer to PTS for 1.4
1.4 is coming soon to SWTOR and players are excited to see it for themselves. Some are so excited, that they are hoping to get into the public test servers to check it out for themselves. The only problem? It seems some guilds are getting in while others are left waiting and wondering. A user on the forums asked, “Can BW please advise if anyone is getting character copies to the PTS?” Joveth Gonzalez, Online Community Manager for SWTOR offers this as an answer: Before PTS went live, we were in contact with a few of the guilds that have helped us test content in the past to see if they would be willing to test out our new content. Because our resources for character copying are very limited, we decided that it was best for us to work closely with these guilds than not have any high-end testing at…
BioWare pledges six-week content update schedule for Star Wars: The Old Republic
BioWare Austin General Manager Matt Bromberg recently spoke with AusGamers about Star Wars: The Old Republic’s free-to-play option and future content updates. PC Gamer has more on that story and what it means to us. With the free to play model coming soon, many existing players want to know what we can expect from future updates to the game. So PC Gamer asked about the timelines for future updates to Warzones, Flashpoints and Operations. PC Gamer reports: “We’re committed to a roughly six-week schedule for major updates — a new Warzone, Flashpoint, Operation, and event — on a regularly frequent cadence,” Bromberg said. Bromberg also reiterated planned incentives for recouping paid subscribers with closed accounts when The Old Republic’s new account system executes this fall, saying, “We announced that subscribers who have lapsed are already qualified to get Cartel Coins, which will be the in-game currency in the game once…
Maintenance today September 13 + patch notes 1.3.8
BioWare are taking down the servers to do an unscheduled maintenance today. What the issue is seems to be unclear, bit Patch notes will be made available shortly after the servers come back up We will be deploying a patch and performing an unscheduled maintenance this Thursday, September 13th, 2012. Patch notes will be made available shortly after the servers come back up. The servers will be down for two hours on Thursday, September 13th, 2012 from 2AM CDT (12AM PDT/3AM EDT/8AM BST/9AM CEST/5PM AEST) until 4AM CDT (2AM PDT/5AM EDT/10AM BST/11AM CEST/7PM AEST). All game servers will be offline during this period. This maintenance is expected to take no more than two hours, but could be extended. Servers are back up. Below are the patch notes: 1.3.8 Patch Notes 9/13/2012 General Corrected an issue that caused a significant performance drop for some players after patch 1.3.7.
Star Wars Fan film: Star Wars Armies of the Fallen
If you are a follower of our blog, you know we are huge fans of Star Wars: fan movies. Back in the summer of 2010 we featured a movie by Martin Klekner called “Star Wars: Shadows of the Past” Now he is back, and deserves a tone of support for the awesome job his is doing. Check out his Concept Teaser for his upcomming star wars fan film Star Wars: Armies of the Fallen. Plot: Several years have passed since the end of Shadows of the Past. War has been raging ever since. Fallen’s revolution changed the whole Empire, it turned the Master’s realm to shreds. Fallen’s armies, though weak and unorganized at the beginning, were forged into a deadly and unstoppable weapon. Now all that’s left is to strike a final blow and confront Master directly. Created by: Martin Klekner Music by: Tomas Zemler Voiceover by: Austin McComb
Interview of Gabe Amatangelo
SWTOR Life visited Gamescom this year and also had the great opportunity to interview Principal Lead PvP Designer Gabe Amatangelo about SWTOR. We have seen other interviews with Gabe but it’s always great to see what else he will say and do. Here some info from SWTOR-Life about the interview and then check out the video below to see it all for yourself: “”The first booth I visited at Gamescom this year was Star Wars: The Old Republic booth. I was curious as to what will I find there. What I found were people playing the new warzone Ancient Hypergates and, to my surprise, Principal Lead PvP Designer Gabe Amatangelo himself chilling and waiting for the press to come. I spent more than half my time in SWTOR playing PvP on the maps this man designed so I opened with: “You ruined my life by wasting sooooo much of my…
Developer Dispatch — Terror From Beyond
Game Update 1.4 is coming soon and with it one of the most dynamic and difficult Operations in Star Wars™: The Old Republic™. SWTOR is changing for the better and with free to play on the way, we are also seeing updates that are slowly bringing out things the game will end up with in F2P mode. Game update 1.4 is highly anticipated and the time is nearly here. Are you wondering more about what you can expect? We have a great video/trailer with a sneak peak of Terror from Beyond straight from the developers themselves. BioWare tells us more about it in this official news post: In “Terror from Beyond”, you will be called upon to face a mysterious new threat that has emerged from one of the most obscure places in the galaxy: the Gree planet of Asation. The Gree have been safeguarding ancient technologies on the planet…
Game Update 1.4 is now on PTS, here are the patch notes
BioWare have already hinted alot about the upcomming patch 1.4 with there dev blog the other day. Now we get to try out the patch on the public test servers. Seems like a ton of great changes overall. Match to chest for companions, offhand modification, new gear level, addressing the pvp gear gap, return to where you were after a lfg queue… lots of stuff that they have listened to people asking for. Check out the patch notes below: Highlights Terror from Beyond, a new Operation, is now available! Travel to the remote planet of Asation, where the Dread Masters have commandeered an ancient Gree Hypergate in order to unleash untold horrors upon the galaxy. Terror from Beyond features 5 powerful new boss encounters that can be challenged in 8- and 16- player Story or Hard Mode, offering some of the most challenging group content yet! A new set of PvE gear…
Daniel Erickson is “Actively looking for new opportunities”
We learned in the past that making assumptions based on a person’s LinkedIn profile is not always the best idea. Some people take a little thing such as change of job description and blow it into something it’s not. However, if you take a look at Daniel Erickson’s profile, you will see that he says he is “Actively looking for new opportunities”. This lends itself to a little bit of conversation. The Lead Designer/Creative Director at Bioware/Electronic Arts works in the gaming industry, an industry we know is booming and at the same time, one that can change with the snap of your fingers. It takes an entire team of people to build and launch a game and after that launch, all of the same team members are not needed to stay on. Layoffs usually happen and those creative people have to search for a new job or a new…
Are Black-Cyan Sabers Coming in SWTOR 1.4?
It’s apparent that black based sabers are really popular in SWTOR, especially with end-game users. Everywhere you look you see people with them and fewer people with more traditional colored sabers. Playing on this trend, we might see some new sabers in 1.4. Rare crystals are very popular in the game. It’s fun to hunt for them and to have the bragging rights of having a rare saber color. But if they make it too hard to get, players get frustrated so what you often see is tons of people with the ‘rare’ saber because it was so popular, which of course, drops the rarity of it. If the black-cyan sabers are coming, this might be just what we see with them. They’ve been around the game for awhile now but not attainable, except through exploiting a bug but now we may finally be getting Black-Cyan sabers to SWTOR. In…
The Fan Favorite Reward is “The Party Jawa”
If you’ve been waiting to hear what the Fan Favorite would be, the info has finally been released. Not so shocking to me personally, it was the Party Jawa. I had a really good feeling when I saw the choices this would be the one to come out on top. SWTOR/BioWare let us know in this official post: BioWare and LucasArts are excited to announce that “The Party Jawa” has won our Fan Favorite voting contest. Over the past month, our Facebook Fans have had the opportunity to choose a favorite item to receive as a reward when Star Wars™: The Old Republic™ launches its new Free-to-Play option this Fall. Although it was hard to pick a favorite, The Party Jawa won by an overwhelming majority! The Party Jawa celebrates a player’s status as a veteran of the galaxy with a unique and fun animation. The Party Jawa will be rewarded…
BioWare Responds to Questions on the latest Developer Blog
A few days ago, BioWare posted a blog update by Senior Designer on Star Wars: The Old Republic Austin Peckenpaugh. The blog post was mainly about class changes and balance in the comming major update: patch 1.4. With that, the forums went crazy with questions for BioWare and so far the mods have been good with a few examples on how the new system will work in the future. Read our copy/paste below, or check out the full thread on the official forum. Allison Berryman Consider the following examples under the new system:ex. A: Player A stuns the target for 4 seconds. 1 second after the stun is applied, player B stuns the same target for 4 seconds. The target is controlled for a total duration of 5 seconds. Player A stuns the enemy for 4 seconds | effective control duration = 4 seconds | enemy gains 800 Resolve 1 second later,…
Ilum Improvements Coming in January and More from Gabe Interview
Game Breaker talked with Gabe Amatangelo at PAX about revamp’d Ilum coming in January + closing PVP gear gap w/level 50 bolster and much more. You can see a video as well as read the full transcript of the interview on their website. Here’s a snippet.. On future content releases: We’re going to be having a faster cadence of delivering content and features. There’s going to be around a six-week cycle where you’ll see something new, like there’s going to be the new operation, the new warzone, the new HK-51 Belsavis area, things of that nature. On layoffs: You have different needs in development when you’re going to launch as opposed to after launch. A lot of it lies in the formation of the tools. You put a lot of work and effort toward getting the tools and you get more efficient with them. It’s kind of this sliding scale…
Noxxic Gaming Guides and Interview
Here at SWTOR Strategies, we’ve been bringing you great SWTOR news and info as well as Star Wars and MMORGP news and info since before SWTOR’s release. Well, we found something else really cool in our research- gaming guides from Noxxic guild. In particular, we found their SWTOR guide but then we saw they also have guides for many other great games, some of which you might also play. The crew over at Noxxic were nice enough to take some time to talk to me about their guild, their website, their guides and what they are all about. So here’s the interview for you to learn more yourself and be sure to head on over and check out their guides! Lisa: Can you tell us a little about Noxxic, the games you play and what you’re all about? At Noxxic, we only have one goal and that is to provide…
TOR TV: SWTOR Explained #8: Meetra Surik Part 1
xZeroTolerence55x is back with a new video telling the back story ( lore) of Star Wars: The old republic. Finishing off the story of Revan we now see the story of the Jedi Exile which is the person you play in Knight of the Old republic 2. This is an awesome movie to check out if you haven’t played KOTOR 2 yet.
1.3.7 Patch Notes 9/5/2012
As we mentioned a few days ago, this weeks Scheduled Maintenance: was was postponed do to labour day. But now the server are back up, and BioWare have patched the servers. This time BIoWare is fixing one of my greatest annoyances since the servers merge – the unique Legacy names. Finally players are able to have the same surname as others – just like in real life. Anyways, below are the patch notes: Flashpoints and Operations General Players will no longer be prevented from traveling to their group’s in a Flashpoint or Operation due to the instance being full. Group Finder Group Finder now retains a character’s role selections when joining or leaving a group. Items General The event outfits (the Rakghoul Containment outfit and Sand People Bloodguard outfit) now bind to Legacy instead of binding on pickup. Muse Vestments no longer clip incorrectly with character heads. Helmets, circlets, masks,…