Still gorgeous.

Yes, I have, as a matter of fact, as if anyone looking at screenshots alone do not have enough legitimacy to offer adequate opinions. First impression, besides the atmospherics which I thought are absolutely wonderful, was the dust sliding over the metal ramp down from the starting point. NICE detail. The fact there's now something akin to high dynamic range with the sun and the sky in general, awesome. The sun shining through the tree branches, beautiful. And there are in fact rocks and leaves and such scattered about on pathways, so it's not like players are missing out on detail. What's missing is the low-quality watercolor textures from days gone on. Can't say I'll ever miss them. So yes. I've been out there.

Doesn't seem too soon when you're stumbling over each other on Yavin and yet there's only 10 of you on the planet, no extra instance has been created yet except for PvP, and you're standing in line 6 deep waiting to click the nest and no one's interested in grouping. Doesn't seem too soon when everyone's killed all the techs, the only ones who drop quest updates to advance the Face Merchants heroic, there is no other map to go to, and there's no such thing as a PvP map on Coruscant. Doesn't seem too soon when you want to do the bonus quests on Hutta for destroying the turrets on a heroic but someone's gotten there first and they spawn far slower than other mobs and there's no other map available.

I reject this notion outright. We certainly do not know the developer's collective thoughts on a far-fetched notion of lag-producing hanging-out people, and lag is relative. Latency between a given user and the server is different for everyone, and then there is zone sharding with different instances of a given planetary experience opening up and closing as its population swells and drops down over the course of the day.

This.

I"m all about atmospherics and textures. I like the changes.

I walked all through the MS stronghold and quest did not update. Updated after walking just a few feet into the NS stronghold

This week's GS objectives to have a companion with you in a healer / tank / dps role while killing 100 non-player enemies is a lie. Score goes up only if the comp participates in the kill, not when I wipe out an entire encounter's worth of mobs in one hit by myself. So it's NOT that you're dragging the companion around and you're doing the killing, the comp has to participate in the kill or score does not go up, so far the case with Darth Hexid in tank role. I'll figure out the other roles later but that's what it's looking like so far. Edit: So far the DPS role works as advertised. Tank does not. Edit: Heals also working as advertised.

I'm in multiple guilds on the same server. Would be nice to see guild names on char select plus sort by guild

Loading screen said "An EA employee will never ask for your password" which is nice, and thank you for that, but how about changing to read Broadsword?

Should Broadsword follow through with this request and establish a one-time reset, a player will use the one-time reset, and sure as I'm sitting here, watch as that player hits the forums screaming to the high heavens that they need to reset it again. FOUR warnings before making your choice. Four. Count em. Your justification — the idea that the second spec wasn't needed or one's play style changes endgame — points to fickleness, the very problem of a one-time reset. There are far too many reasons players could offer up to justify endless resets. And there's a problem with that. Consider this. The game publisher, first EA, and now Broadsword, has not offered resets, one-time or otherwise, and from a very cynical programmer's perspective, for a very good reason. Unforeseen situations cropping up, or worse — really stupidly-coded crap — are the reasons hot fixes exist. We see it all the time. A patch is horribly misconfigured, produces unintended consequences, or opens up previously unforeseen opportunities for exploits, the whole gambit. So much easier for a programmer to craft a T-SQL script (or whatever tool they use to update the database) to add skills than to remove and replace them. So blame me for my extreme cynicism from witnessing the game publisher's um, wonderful coding prowess over the years, but there's just way too many opportunities to absolutely royally screw the scripting up, subsequently ruining the character's playability. A scripting error could leave a character with half the abilities of one class, half of another, the wrong skill tree for the class, or worse, no skills at all, substitute the wrong class entirely, overwrite what did not need to be touched... a whole bevy of nightmarish coding scenarios. Cue the avalanche of help desk tickets and players torching the forums demanding compensation for their downtime. What a great way for players to think "you know what, there's other games out there, I don't need to put up with this." The devs have been smart not to offer resets.

Luckily from Broadsword's perspective, players don't get to define compensation-worthy moments, Broadsword does. We were still paying our subscriptions for all those years since the beginning of the game that we had to wait 2 to 5 hours every patch. Just the number of patches and hotfixes in 2.x alone were insane: 12/10/2013 2.5a patch 12/11/2013 2.5b patch 12/17/2013 2.5.1 patch 12/19/2013 2.5.1a patch Add up all that patch time over the years, that's a lot of patch time, and we were never compensated for being locked out of the game during the time it was being patched. Nor were we ever compensated for the time lost when login queues were so badly hosed nobody could get in, or so overwhelmed because too many people were trying to log in at once and the authentication servers couldn't handle it. This game used to have 17 servers, not just 6, and before that, nearly a hundred if not more. Lots of little weak, puny, servers unable to withstand much, all with ignorant lockout times with zero compensation. Over the years, we've also had several rollbacks in this game in which a rollout was just so disastrously destructive to game play that it had to be yanked, which meant any time played during the rollback period was just vapor. In some of those cases, we got double xp. Those were definitely compensation-worthy moments. Point being, we players can pull out any number of examples of downtime / lack of access to the game that we might feel we're justified for having compensation, but in reality, there's a cut-off to that, and players bellyaching about it is not it.

Can we not, in this day and age, figure out how to re-scale, or heaven forbid completely retexture, resized geometry? This looks just plain gross. https://file.garden/ZdDDzgIVGzlYE8YL/SWTOR/Lazy Odessen graphics.png ...and don't dare call it efficient use of resources for low-end computers. It's 2024. It's time we grew beyond graphics like this. Luckily, the powers that be soon will no longer support DirectX 9 in any way shape or form, so either the game gets a new DX11 / 12 API, or the game is yanked once the level of support is yanked. A new DX application programmer interface is not a magical fix, someone still must go in and fiddle after it's upgraded, but at least it opens the door to better graphics. Devs did great on the KOTFE/KOTET chapters, Onderon, Ossus... what the hell happened here? Edit: I'll have to say this, just to be fair. There are moments in cut scenes and just traveling around where sometimes I suspect that the DX API has already been upgraded because some of it looks really, really good. And then... some things... don't. ...and then I remember that people would be burning down the forums complaining their ancient boxes can't play the game any more because DX11 does have higher harder requirements. SO. DX aside, there's still plenty that can be done with the current geometry and textures to fix the eyesores.

That's the only place on a Sontaran where they're vulnerable. Obviously a miss-shipment in supplies has occurred.