Here’s our new The Old Republic content.  And it’s not terrible.  New HK droid companion is very exciting.  We love HK droids.  New space mission is awesome.  I’ve played all six(?) variations more times than I can count, anything new is better.  New warzone and Operation?  Well, sure, if I could find other people to play with.

New planet I’ve never heard of? That’s less cool.  Now, to be fair, if you have a favorite planet, it’s probably in this game.  Most of the big ones, from the movies or the EU are in there.  And the one’s that aren’t make sense.  No Cloud City makes Bespine pointless.  The first moon of Endor is just Ewoks and that monster thing from the Ewok movies.  Yavin IV was actually fairly interesting recently, but I’m fairly sure Exar Kun already died.  Now it’s just a bunch of empty temples.  That bring said, there are hundreds, if not thousands of already established planets to explore in the Star Wars Universe. Making up your own is dumb.  We let you have Voss, now give us planets we know.  Hell, we’ll meet you halfway.  You could add Selkath.  That’s your planet, but it’s at least established in the Star Wars Universe.

Other less exciting news, news so unexciting that they didn’t even bother putting it in this trailer, if the new race.  Cathar.  Cathar? Fucking Cathar?  No one cares.  Wookie, Mon Calmari, Quarren, Togruta, Nautolan, Kel Dor, Shistavanen and Devaronian. That’s eight species, from both the original and prequel trilogies that I just thought of off the top of my head, and they’re all more interesting than effing Cathar.

Finally, the big news is that the game is going “Free to Play” until level 15.  I’m sure it’ll work a lot like the WoW “Free to Play” in that it will probably cap out some of the skills as well as the level.  It’s not really free to play as we recognize it. More of a really extended trial.  Which is a nice idea, but we don’t really need more people at those levels.  The first two worlds for each side have plenty of people.  Not as many as when the game launched, obviously, but enough that finding a party is not really an issue.  The real problem is level thirty two.  You’re on a planet with eight damn people.  The chances of three of them being the level needed, having already reached the correct point to activate that quest, and being the correct classes to work with you are pretty damn low.  And that’s on the “busiest” server there is.

Well, hopefully this new trial thing will get a bunch of new players playing.  If not, we’ll just have to wait for the server migration option to come up, and then we all agree to move to the same server.  That’s not an optimal solution.

A dungeon finder.  Finally.  We’ve between asking for this for months, but they’ve been saying some bullshit about how a dungeon/group finder would “really take away from the exploration of the level up game”.  What the hell does that mean?  I want to run through your heroic quest, and I need to find three other people to do it.  It’s that simple.  Even when the game was packed, it was an annoying proposition, trying to find a party with the character types you needed.  Now that the game is less popular it’s basically impossible.  I’m currently on the busiest server they had to choose from when u created my character.  And most nights there are somewhere between ten and fifteen players on the whole planet.  Good luck finding three other people who are also at the correct point to play that quest and are the three other classes you need.  Impossible.  Problem with the group finder is that it’s still not going to bounce from server to server.  So you’re still stuck with those fifteen people.  Just now it’s automated, instead of having to constantly spam the chat with “DPS LFG heroics!!!”.  Improvement.  It would be better if we could team up cross sever, at least for instances.  But they believe it would hurt the “social aspect”.  Apparently under the mistaken belief that there’s a social bit of this game.  There isn’t.  You run your instance, or heroic mission together, then the party splits and everyone goes into their own thing.  If you’re lucky, you might get a party that runs a few heroics in a row.  Nothing about the way the game is designed encourages staying in a party.  In fact, most of the story segments specifically prohibit other players from entering.  Either this game needs a major overhaul to the basic concept, or they need to drastically improve your ability to build a party quickly.  This is a start, but it’s not what we really want.

The other bonus is the ability to move your character.  That’s cool.  You find out one of your friends also has a level thirty character, but he’s on another sever.  That’s terribly disappointing.  “Well, who wants to roll a new character and grind for two weeks so we can play together?  Neither of us?  That’s a surprise.  Well, have fun playing with… No one.”  This is better.

The thing they really need is to smoosh the severs together.  Having no other players around is nice when you’re grinding, our killing monsters for a quest, so you know no one else is going to yank your kills.  But I’m paying a monthly fee to play a massively multiplayer game.  I’d like a few other players around, if for nothing else than running the heroics and instances that I mentioned before.

Oh, and they can keep taking about how they’re not going to go free to play.  But the game is clearly failing, so it’s going free to play sooner than later.  My personal request is that we allow people like me, who are still willing to pay the monthly fee, to keep doing that.  Free to play seems like a cool idea. A game that I don’t have to pay for?  Awesome! But it’s always terrible.  I am happy to pay fifteen dollars a month for the game if it means I don’t have to pay two dollars for every little upgrade or improvement that I come across.  It’ll almost certainly cost me more in the long run, but not feeling like I’m playing some sort of panhandler simulation will make the extra cost worth it.