Star Wars: The Old Republic release date

[charlemagne]

Raid just means that you need more than one full group to clear it.

In LOTRO, normal group content = 6 people, raid = 12 or 24 people.

[Civil War Man]

Combat is pretty slow paced from what I've been told, much like KOTOR. Your auto-attacks will make up a large portion of your damage with you having certain "go to" abilities that won't quite be spammed, but also won't offer a lot of variety.

That would definitely suck if true. Leveling my Paladin in WoW was excruciating enough, and I didn't start playing in the "seal, autoattack, go make a sandwich" days of Vanilla.

[TheFeniX]

That would definitely suck if true. Leveling my Paladin in WoW was excruciating enough, and I didn't start playing in the "seal, autoattack, go make a sandwich" days of Vanilla.

I hope what White Haven said is true and my information is way off-base. I've just been unable to find (and unable to bothering hunting harder) any video on the actual game mechanics, so I'm taking 3rd (4th and 5th) party information I've been told.

[Pint0 Xtreme]

What I meant is that Blizzard rendered the "speech" of NPCs as text. Sometimes you would just sit there waiting for it to scroll past in the chat window, because they tried to do these epic, suspenseful scenes that way. E.g. summoning the last boss in a raid. Many people never ever got the backstory of these encounters, since they were to busy making the last tactical preparations before the battle. Another thing that always annoyed me were the quest texts. Why would anyone WANT to read hundreds of words of interchangeable drivel, when you could just scroll down and get on with playing?

I've always enjoyed Bioware-style conversations and I'm hoping it alleviates some of the problems in WOW where quests more or less have no real meaning. What's the point to having rich lore in your world if you're not compelled to learn about it? I just wished they took out the damn "Kill X number of things" quests. Killing things should primarily be the obstacles to your quest, not the goals of it.

Combat is pretty slow paced from what I've been told, much like KOTOR. Your auto-attacks will make up a large portion of your damage with you having certain "go to" abilities that won't quite be spammed, but also won't offer a lot of variety.

That would definitely suck if true. Leveling my Paladin in WoW was excruciating enough, and I didn't start playing in the "seal, autoattack, go make a sandwich" days of Vanilla.

There is no auto-attack; this is the official word and I can confirm this having played it a few times.

[Narkis]

Combat is pretty slow paced from what I've been told, much like KOTOR. Your auto-attacks will make up a large portion of your damage with you having certain "go to" abilities that won't quite be spammed, but also won't offer a lot of variety.

That would definitely suck if true. Leveling my Paladin in WoW was excruciating enough, and I didn't start playing in the "seal, autoattack, go make a sandwich" days of Vanilla.

There is no auto-attack; this is the official word and I can confirm this having played it a few times.

Indeed, I'm playing at the currently ongoing beta weekend. No auto-attacks anywhere.

[AndroAsc]

How is the story RPG element going to be present into a MMO? Does everyone of the same class/build play the same side quest together? Can this be played as independent solo mode? Bioware should have just made KOTOR3, I hate MMO as they are just time suckers.

[charlemagne]

The "story RPG element" is hardly anything new for MMOs and I think it can work just fine in TOR, I bet the "main quest" is just like playing KOTOR.

Consider Age of Conan, it has a character-specific "destiny quest" that plays out the same for every player, but in-universe it's one long solo quest line special to your character (that also explains why your character can't die with in-universe reasoning). Since AoC used Bioware-style conversation mechanics ("old" Bioware style, where you get multiple lines to choose your answers from) this worked out pretty well actually.

Lord of the Rings Online has the "epic quest" that is the game's "story mode", where your character's or your group's adventures cross the Fellowship's journey multiple times. It has been reworked to be solo-able but it can be played in groups, and since your character is hardly the Messiah you're playing in most RPGs (you're powerful but obviously no match for the likes of Gandalf or Aragorn) it works well either way.

[Mr Bean]

Well good news charlemange and bad news, bad news is your half right. TOR leans more towards Dragon Age (The first one) in that from what I'm hearing (Second hand) the first third of the game your class determines your story, much like how Dragon Age your origin determines your starting area and first story. But the time from class specific work to main story is much longer in TOR. Not to say you can as a Bounty Hunter starting on Nar Shardda instantly run off to Courscant to run quests there with Jedi but each class tends towards a home planet with quests that start there and have your traveling elsewhere to complete and per my friend who was only to happy to violate NDA for me there are quests that share the same endpoint but few that share the same start point. IE one example they already gave on Tattione in public was about how a Sith starts the quest in charge of a dig site trying to get things moving and the NPC react to you as the boss while an Imperial Agent is only sent there to track down information for an investigation quest and the NPC treat you much differently. At the end both the sith and you are beating up Sand people to find your captured workers but in the Sith's case it's because he's in charge of the case, in the Agents case he needs info.

But the great part of that is, once the Agent has his info he could leave if he wish or stick around to help out the Sith who's now has to investigate the ruins the workers uncover.