I just got him, and he seems to be doing pretty good dps? I wonder if anyone tried to get him to level 50 influence? There is a companion dps thread at reddit but it doesnt have some companions.

I meant the budget that was diverted to Anthem and other projects. Not how the budget was divided inside Swtor, or even inside the departments that were tasked with expansion. You underestimate the impact of budget and time constraints. Budget impacts a lot of things, especially how many content writers you can have, and from what quality, and even whether you can involve prominent figures to help with the story or at least make sure it does not break canon But what's more - it takes money to pay all those voice actors, and the actors who enact the motion capture scenes. Considerable money. Which makes one overarching, fairly linear story easier or as easy as 5-6 differentiated stories with partly or noticeably different dialog choices, outcomes and other traits. On top of that, there's also the concern of planning too - choices users may make need to be maintainable into the future expansions, not only game code wise but also they must be workable within the game world. Without even saying that they must not risk punch big holes in the game world, its consistency or manufactured reality - leave aside SW canon or storytelling. Anyone who partakes in software development and release cycles for software which must be maintained into the future would understand such problems of future maintainability - and software development happens without any concern for any story consistency, canon, or other similar literature stuff. ... Our experiences differ. I very much liked kotfe/kotet, even if it was a bit off compared to what we know as Star Wars. I liked the length of the story as well, since im finding that once we dont have to do planetary stories to level chars anymore, the class story comes up way too short to be memorable. Kotfe/Kotet writing would easily compete with the blatantly careless and irresponsible script writing of recent Star Wars movies in my opinion, and if they pushed the story writing a bit further, they could as well make it a side-story for Star Wars and release it as a movie. As i said, our experiences differ. My only problems with kotfe/kotet have been that they strayed too far from general Star Wars look and feel. And i think maybe it was intentionally so since Disney was taking over Star Wars IP at that time and the future of the game may have been in question, and there could have been a chance for Bioware to keep the game going by pivoting it away from Star Wars in order to appease Disney's desires - so that it would not interfere with whatever they were going to do with the IP they took over from Lucas. Of course this is a theory.

(spoiler) Well, i chose to join back to the Republic at the end of Onslaught, and they gave me a 'Commodore' title. Which is lightyears better and fitting than 'Commander'. And with Odessen joining the republic as a member world, things seem to be much more reasonable.

I can tell that much of that is due to the difficulty of game development - especially technical possibilities afforded by current technology and budget restraints. If a budget is limited to a certain degree, it becomes impossible to run 6-7 varied storylines at the same time. Then que the unified story, que the 'one size fits all as much as it can be done' approach. If we look at the class stories, we can easily see that they were also very short and blunt - we had the impression that they were sufficient stories because they had to be run together with planetary stories and side quests in the early days of the game. This forced us to re-run entire rigid storylines of each class only with some flavor of class story added by the individual class' story. That was a drag in your 3th alt and on... Compared to that state of affairs in early game and how short the class story becomes if you take it away from planetary stories, kotfe/kotet comes up as a gigantic story. I very much think that implementing such a phenomenally large story differently for 4 classes would be very difficult. With enough budget and time, it sure could be done. That's certain. But the budget was likely not there. If the budget is not there, then dividing the budget into 4 classes and doing sufficiently differentiated stories for each could work out. It could be combined with a larger 'event' story that's happening in the galaxy at a given point in time. Hell, actually there doesnt need to be one large 'happening' in the galaxy in every expansion. Every class can have their own lives and their own events.

I very much think that the storytelling has much improved since the game's release. KOTFE/KOTET are on a totally different level than all the former stories, even the best class stories - their main problem is not being star-warsy enough and somewhat 'stretching' the lore. I approached kotfe/kotet as 'some detour in SW world that is not so much star warsy', and therefore i enjoyed them pretty much. So much that i binge-played everything on one weekend, nonstop. It was good. There were some cheesy parts yeah, but overall, pretty solid world-building and storytelling. That Zakuul setting was a pretty good setting even if it should have stayed outside SW lore since it was a bit streching it. A Zakuul stronghold may be pretty nice come to think of it. I think all Bioware needs to do is to go back to 'people doing their own thing in the grand flow of things inside an alien galaxy' thing as opposed to having us save the galaxy every expansion. 'Stuff that i cant control is happening, and im finding my way towards my own goal through it' is more engaging than 'im the big bad hero that constantly saves the galaxy'. For example the smuggler can start running his/her medium-large smuggling/trading operation while still doing side jobs while the events unfolding in the galaxy affects his/her business. The sith warrior and inquisitor can maintain their own power base inside the empire as dark council members and as sith trying to get ahold of the position of emperor, trooper can get a small crack command of his/her own, and similar things can be set up for all other classes. There should be some 'running' stuff as opposed to someone else telling us to do stuff. They should let us build and maintain some stuff that functions as game mechanic as opposed to just decorative strongholds or running daily or weekly missions. That would be a nice addition. I really dont understand why they dont give us some stuff to do and 'live' the star wars life to some extent while they create spectacular planets, cities, cultures like Coruscant, Onderon etc. We just go here and there and run missions and thats it. It would be very interesting to be building/running something across the galaxy and doing stuff in those spectacular cities.

Yeah definitely! Even if they were rather non-star-warsy, KOTFE, KOTET were excellent story-writing with fluid execution without letting mmo mechanics hamper the story. But creating one single story and applying it to every class just does not fit. KOTFE/KOTET and what came after them were more fit for force users and maybe troopers. They didnt fit smugglers, spies and bounty hunters. When they make different expansions, this time the opposite may happen - the story may fit the other group of classes and not fit the earlier ones. So if they could find a way to make a grand story and still integrate all different classes into it while those classes are doing 'their own thing' in the galaxy, that would work. It may be a bit difficult however. Then again saving the galaxy for the 5-6th time really gets boring. They definitely dont need to run the same trope again and write 'grand' stories all the time. Smugglers should smuggle, sith warriors should try to dominate, inquisitors conspire, guardians should protect, troopers should wage war and so on. It doesnt need to be a grand story. It just needs to be 'our' story.

Im playing through Ossus and i cant help but noticing that the current 'commander-y', 'tough guy', 'authoritative' variant of smuggler voice acting which does not go well with the male smuggler at all. Its easy to notice that the voice actor is the same, its also easy to notice that he was given instruction to talk more 'authoritative' that would be fitting of a 'commander', speaking from stomach in a rather forced way - like they do in TV series haha. But it doesnt suit the smuggler. Please whenever new stuff is recorded, stop that 'tough guy' routine and give the smuggler his smuggler-y, cheerful and quippy voice back. Male smuggler was easily one of the top acts in this game - just dont mess with what's not broken. This 'commander' thing did not suit many classes anyway - the 'commander' thing suits jedi classes and maybe trooper and the 'emperor' variant suits sith classes, but they totally are out of place for smuggler, spy or a bounty hunter. It just doesnt fit the in-game universe and these characters' previous development. Smuggler should be smuggler. Give the fun, funny old version voice-acting back. ... Im Enako and i approve of this message. Now we are going back to our regular programming. News at 11.

16 GB DDR3 on Win 7 64 bit on with Swtor on Kingston HyperX SSD entirely. OS is on another SSD drive. I still get stutter and occasional slow-motion like skipping frames. But its much, much better now and playable even in combat cases where there are dozens of toons fighting with many toons and objects are nearby.

High end computer user here, with SSD and everything. The suggestion in this thread helped greatly to address the frequent lag and stutter i was experiencing during many things - during combat when abundant effects were popping up one after another, loading lag when new characters appear in the distance on the ground or at the fleet etc. I set the ramdrive size to 4gb. And even after an hour of playing around it was already 2gb filled. The thing is that ramdrive's contents (disk cache as well) goes away when you turn the computer off. I will copy/paste diskcachedata file from now on in order to not have the game reload it all over again next time.

I would pay for this feature as well. Im paying this game to be entertained, and its my prerogative to change advanced class if i want, for my entertainment.

My Sith Inquisitor is still missing the class quest at Taris. Nothing in log. In game ticket #28710970 remains unanswered.

With a lot of swtor forum threads dotting a simple google search about this, and a lot of blog posts in innumerable gaming blogs, its appalling to me that how can a dev describe the situation as "'SOME' players want this". This doesnt even necessitate logic. If your character's entire head disappears just because of a chest piece, its not something good. Lorewise its hilarious too - even obi wan had the option to remove his hood whenever he wanted. But for some reason apparently, someone thought it was a good idea to introduce permanently hooded armor into the game all the way at launch. And not fixing it afterwards still. It seems in swtor's world of star wars, people come in two groups : - Hoodies - Those without hoods Technically it seems they are concerned about the look of the armor if they just whisk away the hood with an option. But actually when you wear a hair hiding hat, this ALREADY happens. This means they arent so concerned with the model of the armor when the hood is hid. So not only they dont have a concern regarding that, but the code and mechanism is ALREADY THERE in the game. Even if the look after hood is whisked away was an actual worry, it wouldnt be too hard to make a generic 'folded/hanging hood' for such chestpieces and show it universally. This is an important immersion concept - its harder to suspense belief when you are looking at a world in which people cannot lower their hoods and have to live with their head and actually faces covered.

Im STILL waiting for this, after 2 years.

If players wont be able to arrange the furniture, and they will be pre-set, dont bother with 'strongholds'. it wouldnt be too different from any random in-game cantina in any of the cities. except with some legacy and account wide perks. you're pushing it THIS back, then at least come up with a grid system or something. for, a 'player house' in which player has no option of moving the furniture, goes against the concept of the 'house'. the very thing that makes player houses in online games entertaining for players, is foremost the ability to decorate it as they want and arrange its insides.

THE most hilarious companion among ALL the companions in swtor. its outright crazy with gus. heals like a doc, fires like a scoundrel, talks like a sailor.