#starwarstheoldrepublic
MMO Star Wars: The Old Republic has been churning along pretty well since its launch late in December of last year. Developer BioWare is now preparing to release update 1.2 for the game, which will add a rather significant amount of content. More »
The 1.2 update currently on Star Wars: The Old Republic's test servers includes several changes and a lot of new content. The PvP system is getting some attention with the addition of a new Warzone and persistent rankings to separate the serious players from the more casual. You'll get new Flashpoint and Operation content, which are dungeons and raids in The Old Republic, and finally be given the ability to customize your user interface...
EA is the target of an anti-gay letter-writing campaign.
The company has received "several thousand" letters objecting to its inclusion of same-sex relationships in recent games...
#ea
The past year has seen a great deal of discussion about the existence of same-sex romance options in EA and BioWare's Mass Effect franchise and their MMO Star Wars: The Old Republic. More »
#starwarstheoldrepublic
The Florida Family Association, best known for badgering companies into pulling advertising from TLC reality show All-American Muslim last year, is hard at work ranting about a new target: BioWare/EA game Star Wars: The Old Republic. This isn't the first temper tantrum that supposedly pro-family groups have thrown over The Old Republic, just the most recent. More »
#worldofwarcraft
Look, World of Warcraft still boasts a bigger population than some small countries. But there's been some shrinkage in recent months. Could the Force be a reason for the dip in subscribers? More »
#starwars
BioWare's galactic MMO Star Wars: The Old Republic normally costs money to play, but not this weekend. And by "weekend" I actually mean Thursday through Monday, because as EA rightly assumes, if you can't afford a subscription, you might not be doing much on Friday anyways. More »
Your frugality has paid off: Star Wars: The Old Republic is free to play this weekend. Starting on Thursday at 12:01am CT, you'll be able to create a new character and play up to level 15, and have access to Origin World, Capital World, the Fleet, all Warzones, and your character's first Flashpoint. No trading with other characters, though.
The free weekend comes to a close on Monday at 2am CT, at which point BioWare and EA will freeze your character in carbonite. If you decide you want to purchase the game, you may resume that character.
If you've been dying to try Star Wars: The Old Republic but haven't ponied up for the game and a subscription, you can get your feet wet this weekend. A free trial runs from Thursday, March 15 at 12:01 a.m. CDT until Monday, March 19 at 2:00 a.m. CDT, and requires no payment information to get start...
#watchthis
Have you ever played a BioWare game where a dialogue option you chose resulted in a completely unexpected response? I certainly have. In fact, I distinctly recall cursing into the night, "Dammit, that's not what I meant to say!" More »
"Do nothing different and you fail," states Dallas Dickinson, Director of Production at BioWare. He and Vice President of Production Richard Vogel spoke at this year's Game Developers Conference about their company's MMORPG, Star Wars: The Old Republic, and the challenges they've faced (and are faci...
#starwars
Today BioWare released a video outlining the sweeping changes coming to Star Wars: The Old Republic in game update 1.2. With the evolution of the game's Legacy system and new Warzones, Flashpoints, and Operations in the pipes, is it sad that what I'm most excited about is new lightsaber colors? More »
BioWare has been busy. The 1.2 update to Star Wars: The Old Republic, scheduled to go live sometime in early April, will contain quite a bit of content, from a new player verus player Warzone and player versus environment dungeons to guild features and class rebalancing significant enough to refund all skill tree points. Game Director at BioWare James Ohlen provided plenty of detail about what is changing and why...
Mass Effect 3 is still a day away in the US and four days away in the UK (unless you happen to know of some way to make your PC’s IP address appear to based in Hong Kong, in which case you could play the game right now) but we are left with another option if we’re craving immediate Biowarian intergalactic adventures. If you don’t have a subscription to Star Wars: The Old But Mysteriously Similar To The New Republic but know someone who does, you could be in luck. Starting tomorrow is the Friends Trial, which means subs can invite in chums for a week of free play and access to everything the game contains up until level 15.
#starwars
Quick, what class do you play in Star Wars: The Old Republic? What faction? If it took you a moment to answer, you could probably do with one of Jinx's new line of SWTOR-inspired chest coverings. More »
#starwars
When Star Wars: The Old Republic launched last December across Europe and America, players on the other side of the world were told they would have to wait until some time in the indeterminate future before they would be allowed to join Bioware's first MMORPG. More »
I'm going to let you in on a little secret: despite what you may read in various comment sections on various gaming websites called IGN, people like to play MMOs. They like to play them a lot. This is, according to an interview with Kotaku, especially true of BioWare's MMO, Star Wars: The Old Republ...
#starwars
The average player of the massively multiplayer game Star Wars: The Old Republic plays the game between four and six hours per session, according to one of the chief architects of the game. More »
Star Wars: The Old Republic launched almost two months ago, but even within the first two weeks players began to hit the MMO's level cap. Developer BioWare had a good deal of endgame content ready to go from day one, but one particular component, the world-PvP area Ilum, has consistently left a sour taste, at least for me...
Every editor at IGN wishes he or she had the time to personally respond to every semi-sane comment from the message boards, but we don't. However, in an effort to raise the level of discourse, we've decided to pick out some of the most interesting comments on Nick Kolan's recent Star Wars: The Old...
EA has announced Star Wars: The Old Republic will be officially launching in Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong and Singapore on March 1, 2012.
Fans in these regions will be able to play the game on regional servers.
Additionally, players in these countries who currently have or have had an a...
Lucasfilm has renewed its licensing deal with the Lego Group for 10 more years, meaning if you have a kid right now he can grow up with a guaranteed supply of Lego Star Wars video games and toys. If you don't have a kid any time soon, look at this as an opportunity to delay growing up for another decade.
Lego is currently developing products based on Star Wars: The Old Republic, and will be following up its most recent Lego Star Wars video game, The Clone Wars, some time during the next 10 years, we'd guess. The Lego Star Wars series has sold more than 30 million units worldwide since its launch in 2005.
#lego
We saw a lot of Lego sets at the New York Toy Fair on Sunday. Sadly, Minecraft Legos did not make an appearance, but we did get to play around with figures from Star Wars: The Old Republic, The Lord of the Rings, and a whole bunch of superhero franchises. More »
Filed under: PC, Sony PlayStation 3, Microsoft Xbox 360, First Person Shooters, Online, RPGs, MMOThis is a weekly column focusing on "Western" role-playing games: their stories, their histories, their mechanics, their insanity, and their inanity. Morality systems have become role-playing. Or at least, a significant amount of people have come to believe this. To take one example, this review of The Old Republic is premised on the concept that BioWare's style of moral choices are effective character-building mechanics. It's a fine review, but it's one that I can't agree with because I find the model of game morality used in The Old Republic and many other role-playing games ineffective at creating a moral system.
In order for a moral choice to have weight, it needs to have two components. First, meaningful choices have to cause the player to lose something in order to gain power. Something has to change, or be expected to change, within the game in order for the decision to matter. In Mass Effect, at one point in the game, you have to choose which of two party members to rescue - the other dies. Or, in Fallout: New Vegas, working with Caesar's Legion turns the New California Republic into an enemy, and vice versa.
Second, a moral choice has to be a difficult choice. The old adage "If doing the right thing were easy, everyone would do it" applies here. This is where games usually fail. They can do it with little choices, like with stealing even when you won't get caught in New Vegas. Take the owned items and you'll lose karma, which might be a small hit compared to the benefits of a new weapon. Alternately, in some games, honorable characters will simply refuse payment for quests, forcing money to be acquired by other means.
Star Wars: The Old Republic already has a lot of content, but eventually it's going to need more. More for players who've already got a maxed out character and want to continue to level, and more for players who want to start new characters and not see the same old content again. To this end we've wracked our brains, beefed up our knowledge on Star Wars lore and come up with a few suggestions of potential planets to include in future updates and expansions...
#starwars
Riffing on the Family Research Council's outrage over same-sex NPC relationships in Star Wars: The Old Republic, talk show host Conan O'Brien and team cobble together some footage of the science fantasy franchise's most famous gay couples. More »
