Hey there everyone!

I always have luck with Beta testing in general, but sadly this is not the case for SWTOR, however I would like to share my thoughts regardless, since E3 and now GamesCom we have plently of info and Gameplay about the game so I will share my point of view on different aspects about it until the release comes.

Story

This blog entry is all about the Gameplay aspects I will get more in detail with the storyline in the future but I can share a couple of things for now.

I'm so excited due to the fact that it will be very Jedi vs Sith centered with epic huge battles, Korriban is such a great Lore place for me, and see this one more alive than ever will be a very strong point.

The way that they will tell the story to the player sounds epic, fully voice acted quest sequences, I really can't wait for this and the fact that you will make a difference in your own plot sounds awesome.

You can check some Cinematics and basic overview at http://www.swtor.com/info/story/setting

And more detailed stuff such as planets, habitants, the force, etc... at http://www.swtor.com/info/holonet

Gameplay

Here I will discuss many gameplay aspects and mechanics of the game, having cool graphics and music is something nice but if the gameplay is bad overall then there's no point of playing it.

I haven't tested this game by myself so far, but for what I've seen it looks pretty smooth and polished as expected in a game that has spent so much time in development, one of the things that stands out for me is the combat quality andanimation, looks pretty seamless and in comparison to other MMOs, it actually looks like you are hitting something!

User Interface: It's fun to see how the UI has evolved during the development process, as far as I know the original UI wasn't praised too much as it took too much unnecesary space so they tweaked it for us and made it look more coolish and less spacey.

I'm still wondering what kind of UI customization will be implemented to the game, seeing as many other MMOs allow you to move anything or use addons (World of Warcraft, Rift, Runes of Magic, Warhammer Online) I won't be surprised to seesomething very similar here.

Combat:Pretty standard keybind based MMORPG, you cast spells that have certain cooldowns and depending on the specialization you use them in a certain rotational order to obtain the maximum amount of DPS (Damage Per Second), nothing new or unique so far but hey it works!

Flashpoints: Are what we know in other games as Dungeons will appear in this game under that name, they look pretty promising, the difficulty will scale according to the number of party members, which is great for me because I play during odd hours sometimes and finding a party during that time is a hell of a pain, you can check Gamespot's E3 2011 Stage demo for some dungeon gameplay bellow:

[video=6318093]

Operations: Their own version of the so popular Raids, one of my favorite aspects of any MMO if you ask, are going to be 8-16 players sized, while this could sound like it is too few people compared to other games I think it's actually a good thing, for example I raid 4 nights a week in WoW in a 25-man guild, and during some fights this can get pretty messy, performance issues, people randomly disconnecting and it's a mess of particle effects and AoE damage going on most of the times, so I think less players will mean better performance and more fun.

You can check Gamescom 2011 first operation footage in the embed video bellow:

[video=6329494]

That's pretty much what I have to discuss for now as I would like to keep my blog posts kinda brief, I will try to post a new blog each week and talk about the different aspects of it, you can find me on Twitterleave a comment bellow or just PM me here on Gamespot! I love to talk about games so I will be happy to reply and have a nice conversation with you.

Until the next one!