In the old EU, he also was able to force-wipe the mind of millions- maybe billions- when he hid the Super Star Destroyer Lusankya underneath a section of Coruscant.

I hope I am not correct, but I feel Mass Effect might be dead in the water, even with Hudson back to run Bioware

A lot of things probably. The first is that there has been a massive shuffling of studios and personnel within EA, and Bioware itself. Bioware is probably under the gun to finish Anthem, so they've had more of the Austin studio (which handles SWTOR) on that game instead of this one, as well as shuttling more personnel to the other studios. Second, the game community is shrinking. Combined with the first point, why continue to have a large team work on different aspects of the game, when you can have a couple full-time guys and a few working on the other game who are on-call when major updates need to go into play. I mean, we used to get game patches every Tuesday, then every other week, and now they are even more inconsistent at times. Third, I think the way a lot of feedback is placed on this forum isn't presented in the best way. Look, I'm a community manager for a bigger sports forum, and I am the middle man between the community and the development team. People who are long-term customers are very vocal on my site about their criticism, some of it's done in the right way, others are done in the wrong way. However, I know that these teams don't have finite resources and things are handled on a priority basis. People need to put feedback out in a respectful manner, have multiple users supporting their assertions and try and work with those few on this forum to get issues to the developers, and also understand that not everything can be done overnight. I

Here is what I've dug up from multiple outlets, take it for what it is, but.I am assuming some may know this rumor already.

Yeah, EA has no intentions to put out a single player game. It's a dying breed, because companies know they can make money after the game launches with DLC and micros. Assassin's Creed is a perfect example. The first game was a work in progress, but AC2 was a critical success as a single-player game, scoring mostly 9-9.5 from reviewers. Subsequent games had them shrink the quality of the story and putting in multiplayer components. Mass Effect 3 started the same thing after the huge success of ME2. EA had a great story franchise in Dead Space, but with Visceral gone, that franchise is also dead in the water. It is a shame, because some of the best SW games were single-player only. As someone else said, a Rogue Squadron game would be great. Since they brought back Thrown, I only think it's a matter of time before Kyle Katarn comes back in some kind of Dark Forces game. Even though the genre is dying, I'd love to see another RTS like Galaxy at War as well.

I am guessing that this is going to help lay the groundwork for how the First Order came to be after the "chosen" remnants of the Empire retreat into the Unknown Regions from Jakku. As they laid out in the Aftermath series and Battlefront 2, the Contingency and Operation Cinder was supposed to effectively end the Empire in the event of Palpatine's death. Gallius Rax decided to do things a little differently. Always excited for new novels of course, and Thrown being one of my favorite characters helps this., I still miss the old canon though.

From the Wikipedia page for the game. (below)......I get why they rolled the story into one while launching basically an expansion a year, especially if they got a lot of feedback from people who were story players only. It is up for discussion if that was the best way to go about it, however. Even as a story player, I would have sacrificed those storyline expansions for 1-2 storyline expansions that went further into each character class, while also putting out more MMO content for those members of the community as well. So yeah, if they started another game this week, it would probably take them 4-5 years to launch it with the kind of content we are talking about right now. It's not going to happen, and we may never see a game on this kind of scale ever again.

Someone said boss fights, I definitely agree that they need to go back to the level scaling when the game came out. I just replayed the Sith Warrior, and the Karr fight on Hutta was ridiculously easy compared to last time. They scaled that back to the highest level of the planet (12) when in the story line, you were supposed to be finished with Alderaan at 32. That being said, I think the OP's comment about the trooper story works well. While I liked it as a whole, it was very disjointed and I felt as though it moved slowly at times. I would have also enjoyed more missions where you had the team available fighting objectives, like at the end of chapter two. Other than that, i really enjoyed most of the stories. Nothing really sticks out aside from some of them being cliche (especially the Jedi Knight and Consular storylines) but they were going to be regardless of how they set them up because of the good/evil fight. Actually, I take that back- the Bounty Hunter went from the Great Hunt to working for the Empire and taking down some high rankings Imperials and Sith- how they jumped that story around made little sense. A big change I would have done was to create a third faction, call it "Underworld" or something of the like. Break off Smuggler and Bounty Hunter to that group, and added a ninth class called "Gangster." This would allow you to play both sides as a Smuggler or Bounty Hunter, and could have seen you in both Republic and Imperial instances. The third class, Gangster, would see you be a new recruit at Black Sun, working your way up to being on of the nine Vigos of Black Sun (in Legends canon, nine Vigos ruled different sections of the galaxy and reported to Black Sun's head, commonly called Underlord.)

My theory on the lack of support for this game is definitely the opposite of them doing a sequel. I can't see it. This game is only five years old, and there is still time left for it to shine. However, Bioware has other things going on which has taken resources from the game: 1.) Bioware Austin is developing a new, unnamed original IP, which could mean anything. Assuming it's like other Bioware games, it should have superior storytelling and by a hit with the press and the gaming community. This has to be taking direct resources away from SWTOR, since it is being developed by the same studio. Also, the Austin studio was working on a game called Shadow Realm, which was announced publicly in 2014, only to have the plug pulled in early 2015. The reason given by Bioware was to work on content for Mass Effect and the new DragonAge game (see below.) 2.) Bioware has become a victim of it's own success. Mass Effect is one of the premier franchises in gaming, and they are set to release a new game in that universe next month. SWTOR had success out the gate. DragonAge is another great franchise that Bioware is working on, and their last release, Inquisition, scored very well with the press and was a game of the year candidate. The two remaining founders left in 2012, followed shortly after by Casey Hudson, who was lead for the Mass Effect franchise. Stated above, Shadow Realm was in development and then they yanked that from Austin to put resources towards the other studios. With the critical acclaim Bioware has received for their games, this meant that the resumes of their employees just jumped up a couple levels. They faced a choice as to who they wanted to keep at higher pay and positions, and then had to fill the ones who they couldn't keep, or jumped immediately for promotions. I read an article a few years ago that a lot of key talent left Bioware after Mass Effect 3, but I have not been able to find it, but it's definitely known that they weren't able to keep anyone. It's like a sports franchise building a team from the draft- for a time, you are getting a talented player for a cheap price, but you eventually have to pay them as they get experience and time in the game. Bioware can still make SWTOR a successful MMO, but judging from the lack of community presence they have going on right now, I don't think it's a huge priority for them. Maybe we might see some movement when ME: Andromeda launches and their new IP gets closer to release date.........we can only hope, right?

Everyone is going to suffer regardless of timezone. The studio is in Austin, Texas, so they are even starting early at 6 AM their time to get the game patched. Even if they took the Euro servers down early, you are talking people working midnight just to slap a maintanance patch down. I would say that's not profitable, and a waste of that person's time. You aren't going to please everyone in this instance, so best to do it their time, starting in the AM, so if something goes wrong, the whole staff is on hand to fix it and not just a couple guys assigned overnight.

Microtransactions are here to stay. Why grind the game, when you can pay to level more quickly and/or get better gear? Mobile gaming made microtransctions very popular, to the point where many people left the major developers to open their own studios, focusing solely on mobile gaming to hit this market. As a result, we've seen a lot of game franchises suffer over the past 6 years. Also, I hate that Mass Effect put multiplayer into ME3. Yeah, I never played it, so take this with a grain of salt, but I also never understood why Assassin's Creed did the same thing. Both franchises told superior stories, investing you in hours of content with the main missions as well as side missions and just exploring the worlds. However, when someone saw that multiplayer had more money to be had, all of that's out the door. ME didn't suffer YET, but every subsequent Assassin's Creed game has gone downhill in the story department when they split the team into doing single and multiplayer. I hope we don't see that decline in Andromeda.

My handle on forums and XBL/PSN has always been ThomasTomasz, so after the first character, named as such, I would use the random name generator to come up with something I liked, and would have that follow "Thomas" for the character's name.

Put another way.......in high school before I got a job, I used to love opening a pack of Magic: The Gathering cards. You didn't know what you were going to get, and the chances of getting the card you really wanted was very low, and you had to trade with friends usually to get multiples of what you need. Fast-foward a couple years, where I have a full-time job, still play MTG as a hobby with some friends, and I now have the money not to have to buy booster pack after booster pack hoping to get the best cards. I can now spend money to buy what I need to complete my deck without having to rely on that and trading. It is fun to trade and open up those booster packs? Absolutely, but it's not the be-all/end all for me, and I have options. Another way is I used to try and get autographs at baseball games as a kid. I got my share of autographs, and now I'm at the point where if I want one, I can go out and buy the player(s) that I want. I got plenty of excitement as a kid, but now, I don't need to do it. As we get older, some of us don't have the need to keep "playing the odds" if you will. We will put in the work to get what we want/need, but it doesn't need to be a ridiculous grind, which is what I am getting from all of the posts that do not like the new system.

Agreed.......I also wasn't a fan of the Valkorion storyline FWIW. Not the story itself, but if I wanted a linear experience Halo and Call of Duty, not to mention countless other games, are out there. I loved exploring each planet as I came upon them, but the last truly open world in my mind was Rishi.

As another solo player, I cosign this. I got eight class stories out of the game, and knew full well heading into buying the game and getting a sub that there was some content I wouldn't be able to play.