Region servers will become available when Star Wars: The Old Republic launches locally on March 1; the official SWTOR Twitter confirmed these servers will be physically located in Australia.

Those who have or create an account on international severs before February 28 will have the chance to transfer characters to local servers for free, after launch. Notifications will be sent to eligible players.

A Standard Edition of the MMORPG will go for AUD$79.99 AUD/NZD$89.99/HK$389.00/S$64.00, with a Digital Deluxe Edition on offer exclusively on Origin for AUD$89.99/NZD$99.99/HK$465.00/S$76.00.

Pre-orders from participating Australian and New Zealand retailers will net an in-game colour crystal, to change their weapon effects, but all players will net a Founders’ medal.

“We appreciate that our fans in these countries have been patient and we are excited to deliver this same great customer experience to players this March,” BioWare’s Greg Zeshuk said.

Star Wars: The Old Republic launched in the US and Europe in December, but while no retail release graced Pacific territories, BioWare and EA gracefully turned a blind eye to extra-territorial sign ups, while promising to work on a local launch. The RPG has been labelled the fastest-growing subscription MMO.

Space is limited and will be “invite-only” with some invitations already sent. Interested guild leaders which have not been invited already, can fill out the application here.

Here’s a excerpt from the broadcast, pulled by GamePolitics, via Opposing Views:

“In a new Star Wars game, the biggest threat to the empire may be homosexual activists! Hello, I’m Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council in Washington, D.C. In a galaxy not so far far away, Star Wars gamers have already gone to the dark side.

“The new video game, Star Wars: The Old Republic, has added a special feature: gay relationships. Bioware, the company that developed the game, said it’s launching a same-sex romance component to satisfy some complaints. That surprised a lot of gamers, since Bioware had made it clear in 2009 that “gay” and “lesbian” don’t exist in the Star Wars universe.

“Since the announcement, homosexuals have been celebrating the news, but parents sure aren’t. On the game’s website, there are more than 300 pages of comments–a lot of them expressing anger that their kids will be exposed to this Star Warped way of thinking.

“You can join them by logging on and speaking up. It’s time to show companies who the Force is really with!”

We’re unsure if Perkins also attacks the heterosexual love scenes in SWTOR, which as usual in a Bioware game, go to a black screen, because we’ve yet to listen to his session.

However, if you are in the mood to listen to such hate-spewing trash, by all mean do so by clicking here.

There seems to be two slightly overlapping camps with Star Wars: The Old Republic when it comes to both the launch and recent patches – some are very happy to see something as polished and professional as SW:TOR, saying the game is reintroducing the RPG into the MMORPG framework, whilst others have serious concerns over perceived imbalances across a range of functionality, and a lack of core features including UI and data analysis for theory-crafting. These points and more are discussed fairly openly, and Gabe goes on to provide some rather interesting responses.

The full range of topics covered through the interview include:

• Flashpoints
• Questing and Immersion
• Balancing Skills in PvP and PvE
• PvP Level Brackets
• Faction Imbalance
• UI Customization
• Crafting Professions
• Endgame Character Development

Here’s the interview in full, for your listening pleasure.

Thanks, Joystiq.

There’s more details here. Thanks, Massively.

Unless there’s change, such as the introduction of dynamic play and a lot less of a focus on instancing, many planets risk becoming ghost towns. WoW managed to stop this by placing important cities in various areas across all of the continents. SWTOR needs to take the next step and push players into truly defending their chosen side.

MMORPGs are the most fickle beasts in gaming’s ecosphere. Developed unlike any title, the experience is a very slow burn, a drip fed crawl through various worlds, cultures, battles and social interactions. The design schematic becomes the story of a lifetime, a career rather than an event or series of events, as is the usual course of action in most games.

But whether an MMO lives or dies has almost nothing to do with the quality of the graphics, nor the enthralling nature of the story. While many casual players will come and go, sub and un-sub, it’s the addictive, repetitive elements of the endgame and the constant stream of minor changes that ensure the longevity of any perpetual experience. Hardcore gamers are tough to please. Browsing almost any forum on the web will feature at least one thread of players complaining about nerf.

So it’s with some aspect of sorrow that I predict that SWTOR will most likely find itself in the doghouse, fighting for F2P scraps with its brethren (who were also once powerful and idealistic). What will make the transition harder, and more rabidly fought, will be the sheer amount of money pumped into the game by its venerable overlords. EA is desperate, after WAR, to bank a subscription-based cash cow which draws players away from Activision’s own well-known property.

My pessimism may prove amusing and slightly silly to some, especially in light of my glowing review (on another site) of the very same game barely three weeks ago, which found me showering Bioware with praise and admiration. But what makes the game so groundbreaking is that the story becomes the focal element, and yet that’s the same reason players will abandon it. While fun at first, almost all MMOs that feature the “cat herding” raid system of play become reduced to gear farming and spreadsheets. Story is a dear ninth on the list of priorities, next to the colour of Tier 2 armour and a new mount.

The design of the game becomes almost counterproductive to the most successful parts of most MMOs – PVP battlegrounds and PVE instances. While SWTOR very admirably tries (and succeeds) to add substance to pretty but generally shallow battle runs, by the 70th time your guild treks through the place they’ve already found ways to skip half the mobs and most of the dialogue. Without story, as I’ve found running a few flashpoints, most of these dailies are actually pretty short.

Afterthought

PVP is almost definitely an afterthought, and while I’m not personally a fan of battlegrounds, they tend to make up a significant portion of non-raid endgame. SWTOR should be congratulated, again, for attempting to add substance to another usually shallow part of MMOs, but there are still far too many balance issues in relation to skills, the (staggeringly small) size of the battleground and the sheer inability for anyone to understand the basic idea of how “Huttball” works.

Then there is the shamble of Ilum. Bioware, in the almost complete absence of any actual world PVP, haphazardly decided to drop some quests on this planet, which was supposed to push the two sides to trade blows for gear. Unfortunately, it ended up being so broken that when the developer attempted to fix it in 1.1, it became even worse. Try getting out near the opposing base without getting stomped. Thanks to server imbalances, it’s very likely that you won’t be getting any of that gear.

The issue here is that during Bioware’s very laudable attempt to make KOTOR multiplayer, they forgot to add the same level of finesse and craftsmanship to the social systems. While many will praise the lack of an LFG system, others will find having to spam general chat every time they want to run a heroic frustrating. The guild system is laughably basic, with absolutely zero incentives, bonuses, achievements or unlocks to reward even being in one. But hey, you can get badges for doing conversations together.

The game flows so well when you are playing it solo that it’s almost an inconvenience to drag someone else into that experience. Every part of it feels so tacked on that even running raids at 50 feels unnatural. There needs to be almost wholesale change to the way the entire game operates for players to find a reason to stick around once they’ve completed a few of the main story quests.

The game flows so well when you are playing it solo that it’s almost an inconvenience to drag someone else into that experience. Every part of it feels so tacked on that even running raids at 50 feels unnatural. There needs to be almost wholesale change to the way the entire game operates for players to find a reason to stick around once they’ve completed a few of the main story quests.

First of all, Bioware needs to decide whether space will play a meaningful role in the game. There is a mass of untapped potential to branch the game out from the fun-but-meaningless rail shooter to something that involves some of the ship-to-ship battles we’ve all enjoyed in the movies. The developers have hinted at “guild capital ships”, but are yet to explain any context.

Secondly, the guild system needs to be overhauled from “chat channel” to “powerful clan”. Give us rewards for playing together and helping each other out, or provide us with special objectives during flashpoints or via PVP. Provide us with something that other games haven’t, like special guild-only raids granted through progression rewards. Put into practice what you and every other developer have promised to do with guilds: make them have a true impact on the world.

Thirdly, overhaul how players interact with each other. Make it easier to find groups or guilds, make it simpler to return to your ship with an entourage (or even alone, Jesus). Expand on PVP offerings, fast, by making them more organic and dynamic. Make contested areas actually “contested,” by forcing players to complete non-instanced objectives to capture part or all of towns and areas. Simply dropping PVP quests around the place doesn’t exactly invite fair or entertaining play.

And lastly, start to take full advantage of the license. This is Star Wars for Christ’s sake. Where are the wars? Where is the risk of planetary destruction? Where is the galactic threat emanating from? Unless there’s change, such as the introduction of dynamic play and a lot less of a focus on instancing, many planets risk becoming ghost towns. WoW managed to stop this by placing important cities in various areas across all of the continents. SWTOR needs to take the next step and push players into truly defending their chosen side.

According to the piece, SWTOR’s artwork was outsourced to China, Estonia, and Russia; motion capture was filmed in LA and Vancouver; voice acting in English, French and German was recorded in London., New York and Paris; while quality assurance testing took place in Argentina, India and Romania.

Furthermore, the studio set up the game’s technical operations in Virginia and, as previously reported, the customer service center operates out of Galway.

For coordination purposes, there was and still is a shuttle which flies the Bioware Austin team to and from a EA’s headquarters in Redwood Shores, California as needed.

Elephants in tutus, indeed. We have a hard enough time coordinating our sock drawers around here – we couldn’t fathom trying to organize a project this massive.

Thanks Joystiq.

According to the site, SWTOR won out over the others due to being able to maintain said accessibility while “maintaining a fun environment for those who enjoy solo or group play.”

One of the “most unintentionally” accessible features was the game’s addition of companions, and the MMO was lauded for including “full subtitles, queueable actions, multiple action bars, area looting, auto looting, and built-in mouse sensitivity.”

Built-in features such as auto-facing enemies, maps being colorblind friendly, and having subtitles, were other features highlighted as providing more accessibility to the disabled.

“The developers do have room for improvement by adding features such as click to move, close captioning, and the inclusion of mods to allow things like UI movement, text size changes, and small changes deemed necessary by the player base,” said the site.

“However, with Star Wars enabling the ability to use on-screen keyboards, voice activation software, and mouse sensitivity settings, the game can be forgiven for a few shortcomings while hitting the major targets.”

This isn’t the first time a Bioware game has been acknowledged by the site, as Dragon Age: Origins on PC was awarded as Accessible Mainstream Game of the Year in 2009.

Thanks, Shack.

Brean Murray Carret & Co issued a note to investors on Thursday morning, slashing its price target on EA stock from $22 to $28. Analyst Todd Mitchell said he had “creeping concerns” over Star Wars: the Old Republic’s profitability.

“Specifically, initial sales appear to be below expectations, and casual observation of early play is causing us to rethink our churn assumptions,” Mitchell said, as reported by MarketWatch.

Investors were so spooked by the warning that EA stock took a beating, dropping almost 3% to $17.75.

EA and BioWare have expressed nothing but satisfaction with the launch so far.

According to an official post on the matter, the exploit in Update 1.1 allowed users to spawn and thus camp around turrets on the PvP servers, and the update also caused an imbalance which game the Imperials a significant advantage.

“Our intended design for Ilum Open World PvP is that players are instantly killed when entering the enemy’s base safe area, just like in Warzones, and that the defending faction can take taxis to other points within the zone,” reads a post from PvP lead Gabe Amatangelo. “In Game Update 1.1, this is not working as intended. We have found the issue preventing this from happening under server load and will be publishing an Emergency Patch to address the issue.”

For those who used the exploit to their advantage in an extreme manner, Bioware’s associate community manager Joveth Gonzalez said the firm knows who you are, and repercussions may be forthcoming.

“I just wanted to be clear and let you all know that we’re definitely aware of individuals who took extreme advantage of this situation and we will be carefully evaluating and taking action as necessary,” he said.

Thanks, Shack.

Speaking in a design note on the game’s official website, Jame Ohlen said the update was just the first in a series of content, as the team has many plans in place as it continues “expanding and exploring the galaxy.”

“There’s much more to come,” he wrote. “We have another major update planned for March and future content arriving throughout 2012 and 2013. We plan to release new Operations, Flashpoints, Warzones, Space Missions, single player content, vehicles, and companion characters.

“We’ll always be improving our existing game with additions like guild banks, PVP ranked matches and interface customization. Our Legacy system expands in March, bringing more options and a new level of depth to the existing character classes.”

Ohlen said to also expect “a few surprises” between game updates, as “you never know when the Republic might strike Dromund Kaas, if a mysterious alien fleet could appear in the Core Worlds.”

“Changes are coming, and they’ll affect everyone,” he said. “We fully intend to support Star Wars: The Old Republic—and our players—for many years to come.”

You can read patch notes pertaining to the update through here.

Servers will be brought offline starting at 2.00am CST/12.00am PST/3.00am EST/8.00am GMT/9.00am CET, and are expected to be down for around 8 hours.

Earlier today, an official forum post, stated the planned update would be delayed due to problems brought to the developer’s attention by “diligent players” on the Public Test Server Forums. Originally scheduled for release today, Rise of the Rakghouls was then rescheduled for release “within the next few days.”

More information is available through here.

“Game Update 2 is much bigger in scope [than Game Update 1],” game director James Ohlen told CVG.

“It’s further out from launch, so we can have much more of the team focussed on it. There’s Part 2 of Rise of the Rakghouls, a brand new planet called Denova which has an 8-16 man Operation and a new Warzone. So that’s three big pieces of content.

“We might also be able to get some new space game missions into it. In addition to that we have single player content that you’ll be able to go through as well.”

Additionally, BioWare has teams working on implementing the Legacy system of alt management, guilds, and PvP gameplay.

But that’s just the next content dump – Ohlen revealed BioWare isn’t thinking small.

“We have people working on content that won’t be showing up in the game until 2013,” he said.

“We have writers already finishing off content for that, so I can already play through stuff from 2013 content – just not with voiceovers.

“We’re planning really far ahead, and we have to do that because our content is more complex than your typical MMO content. It requires voiceovers, cinematics and all that.”

Thanks, Gamefront.

Speaking in an interview with Gamespot, the game’s director James Ohlen said the system was inspired by how important the family dynamic was in the Star Wars films.

“We wanted to have a system that encouraged players to create alts and to play the game through the different story paths,” he said. “So the legacy system is meant to do that. It essentially allows you to, instead of just having a bunch of alts that have no relation to each other, you can actually create a family tree where your alts can be related to your main character, either as, you know, a sibling, a son, a father, a family friend, or a husband and wife.

“You can actually choose the relationship your characters will have with each other. And then you gain legacy experience points and legacy levels, and with legacy experience points and levels, that gives you–that allows you to unlock abilities, perks, a whole slew of different advantages, essentially, that all the members of your legacy tree will be able to enjoy.”

Ohlen said Bioware hopes “to push [the system] towards players who enjoy the level-up game”, and it will contain abilities which will make leveling up more enjoyable by allowing players to customize the experience.

SWTOR’s Legacy System unlocks at the end of chapter one, which is around level 30.

Speaking with Eurogamer, Ohlen said if you look at other genres, such as shooters and strategy titles, the same mechanics used today are the same ones implemented 20-years ago.

“If you look at a Battlefield or a Call of Duty or a Gears of War or even a Half-Life – those games use the same tried and true interface and the same tried and true game mechanics of the first-person shooter genre that’s been around for 20 years,” he said.

“If you look at real-time strategy games, they kept the same tried and true interface and the same tried and true mechanics that existed for 20 years. Same with adventure games, same with platformers, same with fighting games, sports games.”

Ohlen said he doesn’t understand while other games can be considered genres, while MMORPG’s usually aren’t. He attributes this presupposition to the fact World of Warcraft has “dominated for so long that people just think of it as just a single game genre.”

“But it is a genre, and we wanted to appeal to fans of that genre – we don’t want to turn them away by making something that’s radically different,” he said. “And we wanted to take the lessons that have been developed in that genre over years and years and years and basically refine them, much like other companies do with other genres.

“So, I don’t know, it’s just the way it is, but I don’t see us as not being innovative. We’re actually a lot more innovative within the MMO space than comparable games in other spaces like the first-person genre, the action genre – games like that.”

Despite some of the comments to the contrary, the game has been doing well since it launched in December, and as Ohlen noted, maybe even “a little bit better” in the US than in Europe.

“Star Wars [the brand] is a little bit stronger in North America than in Europe,” Ohlen said. “The expectations on what the game was going to be for a lot of people was kind of different to what we were building. We were building essentially a classic MMO with BioWare storytelling set in the Star Wars universe. And there were a lot of people out there who wanted us to reinvent the universe and come up with a game system that had never been done before.

“And that was something we weren’t doing, so it was going to be disappointing for those people.”

What Boware did succeed with, offered Ohlen, was “creating a game that’s very fun and addictive,” which in the end, is “what’s going to make this successful.”

[pic]

Rise of the Rakghouls will introduce new, higher level group content, game feature additions as well as balancing and bug fixes. It also features a new Flashpoint and a new Operation as well as level 50 bracketing for PvP WarZones, the addition of anti-aliasing and changes to Open World PvP on Ilum.

Flashpoint: Kaon Under Siege is located on Kaon, a neutral planet in the Tion Hegemony. In the content, four Republic or Imperial players must go to the planet in order to eliminate the Rakghouls outbreak, and secure the allegiance of the Tion Hegemony. This Flashpoint will be available for level 50 characters only and will feature Normal and Heroic modes.

Operation: Karagga’s Palace is a continuation of the game’s second launch Operation. In the Operation, teams of 8 or 16 players will be up against Karagga and the Hutt Cartel after the Hutts abandon their neutrality and breach agreements made on both sides. Both factions will send teams to confront Karagga and determine his intentions. This Operation will feature Normal, Heroic and Nightmare difficulty modes.

“A month ago when we launched the Early Game Access program for Star Wars: The Old Republic, we promised our fans that this would just be the beginning of our journey together,” said GM and Bioware co-founder Greg Zeschuk. “Rise of the Rakghouls adds a lot of the things our community has been asking for – additional higher level group content, features like anti-aliasing, PvP bracketing and more.

“In the future, game updates will be even more substantial, as we promise to continue to not only add to The Old Republic, but to also improve and refine the experience with the full Legacy System and new Guild features.”

The game update releases on January 17. The next update is planned for March 2012 and will include new Flashpoints, Operations, WarZones and new game systems.

Check out screens and the video below.

Speaking with Eurogamer, Ohlen said while it’s a relief no one has finished all of the end-game content just yet, some are getting close, so Bioware is working hard to release more content for the game.

“It didn’t really surprise us [how fast people got to 50] because people were able to play from 1-50 in the beta, and some of the people just figured out what the absolute fastest way was to play through the game, so they kind of had their whole strategy set out,” he said.

“We had people that were playing for 72 hours straight. It’s hard to say whether that was one guy or one guy and a buddy. We don’t have that information sadly. I shouldn’t give the specific hours. I can say it was under 100, which is way below our average time. Our average time is much closer to 200 hours in terms of how long it takes a player to get to the endgame.”

Ohlen goes on to say Bioware isn’t worried about players reaching end-game so soon, as some developers “kind of take the wrong lesson from that.” Instead, the firm feels as long as the player’s experience from 1 to 50 “was really really good,” they will be willing to continue playing the game when the next round of content rolls out.

“We knew with the light side/dark side system that there would be an urge, especially for min maxers, to go completely light side or dark side,” game director James Ohlen told PC Gamer.

“We have a system for people who want to stay more in the middle. But that’s something coming up in a later release. It’ll let you play a ‘Gray Jedi’. Basically you don’t need to go to the extreme to get rewarded. You can have a different playstyle.”

Ohlen said BioWare didn’t want to force players to take one of two extreme routes when it came to morality, ignoring role playing, in order to get the most out of their builds.

“We were careful about the rewards for Light Side and Dark Side as well. We don’t want to make them too impactful on the endgame because it would mean players wouldn’t be allowed to join an Operation unless they were absolutely Light Side and or Dark Side,” he noted.

“However, once we get to the next stage of our light side/dark side system, you’ll see the rewards. Light Side, Dark Side and the grey items will all get more powerful.”

Thanks, Gamefront.

Speaking with Eurogamer, SWTOR director James Ohlen said most performance issues the development team have noticed are from bugs, so any issues with black screens or drops in frame rate can be attributed to the PC in use.

“For the most part, 95 percent – oh I can’t give you the exact percentage – most of our players aren’t really having performance concerns,” said Ohlen. “However, we know that it’s important that there is a smaller group of people usually with lower-end machines that are having problems in some areas.

“One of the most important [ways] for us to grow our service is to continue to bring in more players, including those players who only have low-end machines. So we have a client team, a team of programmers, whose entire job is to optimize the code, find out where some of the issues are, and then fix that up.

“Most of the performance issues are localized though. They’re things that we can track down. I would call them bugs.”

The development team as been on a bug and glitch fixing spree of late, and promises patching and updates of some sort “almost every week”. One such issue the firm is looking is the lack of improvement when switching between medium and high texture setting in the game. While players have noted the lack of change in character models, higher-resolution textures are noticeable only during conversations.

Furthermore, over on the public test server, the medium texture setting has disappeared with the only options now being low and high, with the later still looking no different to medium.

In response to the issue, senior online community manager Stephen Reid said the firm was aware of the issue, and the team was currently “tracking down the details with the development team.”

The MMO’s out now.

According to Guinness World Records, the MMORPG contains over 200,000 lines of recorded dialogue, outweighing any other game or film.

BioWare founders Greg Zeschuk and Ray Muzyka accepted the award at SWTOR’s midnight launch in December.

The new record is included in the latest release of the Guinness World Records: Gamer’s Edition, as part of a feature spread on Star Wars. It’s available now in the UK and Australia and hits the US on January 19.

Thanks, Massively.

Speaking in a post on the official forums, Ohlen said to expect balance changes, and other minor fixes, as such issues are of “the highest priority.”

“They are reviewed by senior leadership on a daily basis. Bug fixes usually take longer than a week to get into the game because we need to fix the issue and then test the fix. Some bugs take longer than that because of the complexity of the issue,” he said.

“There are issues that we will fix immediately. These are rare and not every issue can be fixed in this manner. We usually reserve these ‘emergency fixes’ for bugs that are stopping players from playing the game or to exploits that could unbalance the entire game if not corrected.”

Ohlen said previously that Bioware will be adding “new game systems and content in future patches”.

A small patch with a few fixes was released yesterday. You can look over the patch notes here.