14 DAY TRIAL // The developers at BioWare have offered some more information on the second major update for Star Wars: The Old Republic, saying that they will focus on making adjustments to game animations, tweaks to docking with planets and a new ability to roll on equipment.
They also mentioned that more options for customization and the addition of more ship models had been set aside and would be introduced in another update.
Damion Schubert, the lead systems designer working on The Old Republic at BioWare, stated, “The nature of our ships as central story areas for all of our class content, and all of the associated triggers and cinematics that must therefore be done on the ships, means that giving players new ship models, particularly interiors, is very, very hard for us.”
The developer says that rather than introducing new models the team will try and offer more customization, designed to allow players to create a ship that feels unique.
Schubert also said that an entire team at BioWare is working on upgrading the game engine in order to make sure that the game runs well on as many machines as possible, especially in Warzones and open world Player versus Player spaces.
He added, “You should see evidence of this work as soon as Patch 1.1.5, when we will be introducing a new ‘very low’ setting to shader quality, which should drastically increase the number of mid-to-low machines the game can run well on, especially in Warzones and Operations.”
Star Wars: The Old Republic has managed to perform very well when it was launched in late December 2011 and publisher Electronic Arts said in January than more than 1.7 million players are engaged with the MMO.
In order to keep the game interesting in the long term, BioWare and EA need to keep adding new content to the MMO while also fixing the problems that the player base is reporting.