During Gamescom the developers announced the advanced classes system. While the details were then vague, we now have more information about it straight from the official site.

Advanced Classes are specialized careers that your characters can choose in Star Wars: The Old Republic. As your character becomes more seasoned through adventure, you will be given the opportunity to undertake one of two Advanced Classes. This decision is equally as important as when you originally created your character. This is because your choice will not only make your character more distinct and powerful, but it will also help further define the role you wish to play in The Old Republic.

In addition to your Class-specific Skills and Abilities, your chosen Advanced Class will grant you access to role-defining Abilities that represent additional areas of expertise and some may even grant new weapon and armor types. Additionally, each Advanced Class will also have three sets of Skills available to further customize your character.

The chart above is not representative of any of the current Advanced Class Skill Sets, nor does it show exactly how many Skills you may potentially access. It is included to provide an example of how a character, in this case a Sith Warrior, may look as he progresses through one Advanced Class (note that the other Advanced Class Skill Sets are disabled and cannot be trained).

As mentioned above, each Advanced Class opens up three Skill Sets with a variety of Skills in each. Unlike selecting an Advanced Class, these Skill Sets are less restrictive and your character can obtain Skills from any set or from all of them!

Shared Skill Set:

While the first two Skill Sets include Skills entirely unique to the chosen Advanced Classes, the third Skill Set consists of a shared set of Skills which expand upon the core Skills of the Class itself.

One thing to note is that you use the same pool of points when training your Advanced Classes Skills, so spend your points wisely!

Advanced Classes List

Trooper

Commando

• Heavy Blaster Cannon
• Grenades
• Ranged DPS

Vanguard

• Blaster Rifle
• Energy Shields
• Defense Tank

Smuggler

Scoundrel

• Blaster ‘Shot Gun’
• Stealth / Medicine
• Burst ranged damage or Healing

Gunslinger

• Dual Pistols
• Quickdraw / Fast Attacks
• Ranged DPS

Jedi Knight

Jedi Sentinel

• Dual Wield Saber
• Saber fighting specialist
• Melee DPS

Jedi Guardian

• Single Saber / Heavy Armor
• Leadership / Party Buffs
• Tank

Jedi Consular

Jedi Shadow

• Double Bladed Saber
• Stealth
• Burst melee damage

Jedi Wizard

• Single Saber
• Powerful Telekinesis / Healing
• Ranged Control / Damage or Healing

Bounty Hunter

Powertech

• Flamethrower
• Defense / Energy Shields
• Tank

Mercenary

• Dual Wield Guns
• Missiles
• Ranged DPS

Sith Warrior

Sith Juggernaut

• Single Saber / Heavy Armor
• Fear and Darkside Auras
• Tank

Sith Marauder

• Dual Wield Sabers / Armor
• Saber fighting specialist
• Melee DPS

Imperial Agent

Operative

• Blaster Rifle / Energy Blade
• Stealth
• Burst Ranged damage

Sniper

• Sniper Rifle
• Cover, Ambush, Orbital Strikes
• Ranged DPS

Sith Inquisitor

Sith Sorcerer

• Single Saber
• Force Lightning / Force Drain
• Ranged DPS or Healer

Sith Assassin

• Double Bladed Saber
• Stealth
• Burst Melee DPS

This gameplay footage first shown during E3 shows how a diverse group of players use their abilities to complement one another in battle.

Commander Narlock readies his troops for an Imperial assault. As he does, all four Republic classes; a Jedi Consular, Jedi Knight, Smuggler, and Trooper join together to assist in fighting off the attack. Watch as each player does his or her part to take on the enemies, and beat the Imperial Troopers and Imperial Breach Droids.

Every Star Wars hero needs a companion. Han had Chewie, Luke had R2-D2 — even Jabba had the cackling monkey lizard Salacious B. Crumb. These characters complement a player’s strengths or weaknesses, and provide company for the epic journey you will inevitably undertake. Whether they’re combative, friendly, flirtatious, or even just good for a laugh, companions always contribute to your adventure.

In Star Wars™: The Old Republic™, a variety of these Companion Characters will join your cause. Some will join you for adventure, some for greed, and some for motivations that will remain hidden until much further along in your adventure. The Companions run the gamut from intelligent droids to bizarre aliens, from an honorable princess to a roguish pirate, and each class has a completely unique set of Companions.

While traveling the galaxy, your Companion Characters will provide commentary, information on plots and directions to points of interest– all from their own unique perspectives. Companion Characters may act as your conscience, and try to influence your decisions. In turn, you will influence them, and change how they develop as the story progresses. Based on your choices, some Companions will become your closest friends, others may become your lovers, and a few may even become your enemies!

A few days ago a new cinematic trailer for SWTOR leaked. Enjoy the video below!

In the years before the signing of the Treaty of Coruscant, the Sith Empire sought to crush the Republic’s morale by destroying Alderaan. See one of the pivotal battles of this conflict in our second cinematic trailer: Hope.

The Battle of Alderaan. The Republic’s gravest hour. Recently promoted to Darth, Malgus launches the first of many surprise attacks that would become his trademark during the Great War, perfectly timing the assault with a feint that pulls the Republic fleet light-years away.

Thousands of assault droids and hundreds of Sith set the heart of the Republic ablaze, and Alderaan’s few defenders are swept away with ease.

Unknown to Darth Malgus, small groups of Republic Troopers are stationed on Alderaan, some recovering from wounds, others are awaiting orders. As these brave soldiers take to the forests and mountains to fight a guerilla campaign against Malgus’s forces, the Republic fleet rushes back to repel the invasion. With time running out and Alderaan’s capitol threatened, it falls to Havoc Squad, the elite Republic Special Forces unit, to coordinate one last desperate stand against Malgus’ vastly superior numbers.

A recent thread in the admin section of Bioware forums titled Playing STAR WARS: The Old Republic (Play Guide) talks about basic in-game stuff such as controls, character creation, looting, chat system and more. It makes for an interesting read so if you want to learn more keep reading. Note that a lot of these things are prone to change by the time the game goes into beta and live.

Table of contents:

• Keyboard commands
• Slash command
• Interacting with TOR
• Changing the game’s resolution
• Character creation & selection
• Quests
• Combat
• Action bar
• Action points/health
• Looting
• Equipping items
• Grouping
• Chat system
• Bug reporting
• Logging out of the game

Keyboard Commands

• W / Up Arrow – Run Forward
• S / Down Arrow – Run Backwards
• A / Left Arrow – Turn Left
• D / Right Arrow – Turn Right
• Q – Strafe Left
• R – Strafe Right
• Spacebar – Jump
• Right Click – Mouselook
• Left Click – Turn Camera
• Mouse Wheel Down – Zoom Camera Out
• Mouse Wheel Up – Zoom Camera In
• Enter – Open Chat Box
• 0-9, -, + – Action Bar Abilities
• TAB – Cycle Available Targets
• F1 – Target Self
• ESCAPE – Game Menu / Exit Conversation
• P – Ability Datapad
• M – World Map
• L – Active Quest Journal
• X – Crouch
• Z – Show/Hide Weapon
• ? – Console Command/Chat Line
• Numlock – Autorun
• / – Toggle Runspeed (numpad only)
• C – Character Sheet
• B / I – Bags/Inventory

Slash Commands

• /dance
• /wave
• /stuck

Interacting with TOR

While many of you will already have an understanding of the basic controls, we recommend you read this guide for TOR specific information. This section is  a more detailed explanation of some of the game play systems that are central to TOR. While many elements of gameplay are very intuitive, a quick read of this section will help make sure that you are aware how systems work before attempting to test them.

Changing the Game’s Resolution

Currently, you cannot adjust your game resolution from within the game. At this time, to adjust the game resolution, you must open up the client_settings.ini file with a text editor (such as Notepad). We recommend only users who are comfortable with editing .ini files. Simply browse to the folder you installed The Old Republic, go into the HE27 subfolder, and then go into the RetailClient folder within that. Note that this file only exists if you’ve run the game at least one time.

Using a text editor, update the Height and Width to the dimensions you desire, save the file, and then restart the game.

Example file:

[Renderer]

AspectRatio = 0.

FullScreen = true

Height = 1050

Width = 1680

WindowX = 264

WindowY = 73

A future update will change this so players will not have to update a file by hand.

Character Creation & Selection

One of the first things you will see upon logging into the game is the character selection screen. If you already have characters generated, you will be able to choose one of them, or you will be able to create an entirely new character.

To create a new character, hit the “new character” button at the bottom of the selection screen, then select your gender and class (descriptions for each class are available on mouse over). From there, you can alter your character’s appearance (hair, skin, etc.) by manipulating the sliders. Once you are content with your selection, it’s time to give your character a name, and hit the “Create” button on the right to enter the game. At this time, it is possible to give your character a first and last name, however, only the first name will display in-game.

Quests

Many of the NPCs and items you will come across in TOR will offer you quests. These are indicated on your minimap by a glowing yellow icon. As your character gets closer to the quest giver, the icon will display overhead as a round yellow icon. To find out about the quest offered, speak to the start NPC, or interact with the item. Once you have accepted the quest, it will move into your active quest journal (Hotkey “L”).

Updating quest progress will also cause a tracker at the top right of your interface to show – letting you know how close you are to completing the quest. Quest givers who are awaiting your return will have a blue icon with a rotating border over their heads. Questing is not only a good way to gain experience to level your character; it is a solid source of credits and item upgrades.

Combat

Once your character is created you are now ready to interact with the game world itself. As you move through the environment, you may notice that mousing over certain NPCs will change the tooltip to a lightsaber. This indicated that the NPC in question can be attacked. Right clicking will make your character target the NPC, and once you have done so, you will see a red or amber colored ring around the feet of your target (friendly targets will have a blue ring, instead). Once in range, you can left click the target to use your default attack, or you can press any of your action bar keys (1 – +/=) to activate your character’s special abilities, attacks and heals.

Certain Smuggler and Imperial Agent abilities can only be used from a position of Cover. If an ability requires Cover to use, the tooltip will display that information on mouseover.

Action Bar

A large part of your interface is dedicated to the action bar. You should see a long row of “buttons” labeled with numbers 0-9 and also with -/_ and +/=. This bar is where your abilities are stored. To use the ability, you can either push the key it is assigned to, or you can click its location on the action bar. If you wish, you can drag and drop abilities to different spots on the action bar. You can also open your abilities datapad (hotkey “P”) to drag and drop items to your action bar.

If you are using a Cover class (Imperial Agent or Smuggler), your action bar will change depending on whether you are in, or out of, Cover.

Action Points/Health

As you spend time in combat, you will notice that some items on your interface are changing. There are three bars that should be of immediate interest:

• Health Bar: this is the red bar just above your action bar. It shows how much health you have total, and how much health you have remaining. When it’s depleted, you are dead! (Your target has a similar bar, on the right side of your screen)
• Action/Force Points: This is the blue bar in between your action bar and health bar. Some attacks will cause this bar to fill up, while other attacks (usually high damage or special ones) will “spend” points from this pool.
• Experience Bar: As you complete quests and kill monsters you will gain Experience Points (XP). This is tracked as a yellow bar at the very bottom of your interface, and once the bar fills up completely, your character will gain a level!
• Death: Upon death, your character will respawn at the nearest med center, to allow you to continue play.

Looting

Many NPCs that you kill will “drop” items that can be looted by your character. Once you kill a lootable creature, mousing over it will change your tooltip to the shape of a hand, and left clicking will bring up an interface showing what items your character can pick up. Left clicking items in the interface will put them into your character’s inventory.

Equipping Items

Many of the items your character loots, or receives as quest rewards will be either armor or weapon upgrades. To equip them to your character, hit “C” to bring up your character window, and “I” (or “B”) to open your inventory. Remove the item you currently have equipped to your character, and replace it with the items in your bags you wish to put in that slot.  Note: at this time, clicking on an item in your bags will not replace an item in your inventory — this feature has not yet been implemented.

Grouping

As you travel through explorable areas and work to complete quests, you will be presented with opportunities to group with other players to complete objectives cooperatively. Here are the basic commands for managing your groups:

• /group invite player_name – invites player to group. You can also use this command to invite your target.
• /group accept – accepts a group invitation from another player
• /group decline – rejects an invitation from another player
• /group remove – removes the targeted party member from group
• /group disband – disbands the current group (you must be group leader to use this)

Chat System

The in-game chat system allows you to communicate with other players.

• /say – sends a general message to all players in your immediate area
• /tell player_name – sends a message to the player you name
• /yell – broadcasts a zone-wide message

Bug Reporting

• If you encounter an issue with the functionality of the game itself, please use the bug reporting tool to bring it to our attention. You can access the bug reporting interface by typing “/bug” or by using the spider shaped icon to the left of your mini-map.
• Please be as detailed as possible when submitting bug reports; the more information you provide, the more efficiently we can investigate the issue you are reporting.
• Suggestion and general feedback are welcome. Please make sure you categorize them correctly as “Feedback” to help us ensure they are properly evaluated.

Logging Out of the Game

At any time during play, you can log out by hitting the “ESC” key to bring up the Game Options menu. From there you can either select the “LOGOUT” option to return to the character selection screen, or you can choose “QUIT GAME”, to exit entirely.

In the event that your client becomes unresponsive, it may become necessary to force quit the client, which you can do by pressing the Delete key while holding the Control and Alt keys on your keyboard. This will bring up the task manager where you can forcibly terminate the program by right clicking on the application and selecting “End Task”.

Pazaak, an ancient game dating back to Old Republic times, was a popular card game in which the goal was to reach 20 without going over, or at least come closer to it than the opponent. The player with the nearest sum to the number 20 won the round, and the player who won three rounds won the match. If in one round the scores of the two players were equal, the round was not counted at all.

Gameplay

There are three different decks in pazaak: the main (or “table”) deck, composed of cards numbered 1-10 (the total cards in this deck is unbound, though it tended to have four of each number). There was also one side deck for each player in the game. These decks would be assembled by the players themselves and had to have exactly ten cards.

At the beginning of the game, each player would randomly select four cards from their side deck, making up their Hand. Then the first turn of the first player would start. The player would draw a card from the main deck and play it on the table. After that, the player could choose to either place a card down from their hand, or to end their turn. Only one hand card can be played per turn, and no more cards are ever drawn from the side deck.

When ending his turn, the player had two options:

• End Turn: If the player ends their turn, they are bound to draw a new card from the main deck at the start of the next turn. This is repeated until either they stand, go bust, fill the table, or their score is exactly 20.
• Stand: If the player stands, they keep their current sum till the end of the set and do not play any other cards. The opponent, however, can still continue playing cards, unless he has chosen to stand as well. Getting a sum of 20 automatically causes a player to stand.

Once his turn was over, play moves to the next player, and their turn is played in the same manner. Play passes between the two players until someone wins the set.

The cards

There were two decks used in pazaak: the Main Deck consisted of four sets of cards numbered 1-10. The Side Deck consisted of ten special cards chosen by the player before the match. At the start of each set, four of these cards were chosen at random for the player to keep in his hand and play at any time he desired.

The side deck also had a variety of cards, and each deck was unique to the player in that he could purchase different types of cards throughout the galaxy and choose whichever ones he preferred to keep in his hand. There were two types of such cards: Plus and Minus cards, which were blue and red, and Advanced cards, which were gold. Main Deck cards were green, or in some older cases gold.

Plus Cards were blue cards that added the written value to a player’s total when played. The value of the cards ranged from 1 to 6 points.

Minus Cards were red cards that were similar to the plus cards, but instead they subtracted their value from the players total. They also ranged from 1 to 6.

Plus or Minus Cards (+/-) were essentially a combination of the two; the player could choose upon play whether he wanted to add the number or subtract it from his hand. These were the most expensive and highly valued cards. They also ranged from 1 to 6.

The +/- 1 or 2 Card was a +/- card whose value could be changed to between 1 and 2.

• Flip Cards were advanced cards that changed the sign of the written number of all the cards in a player’s table. For example, if a player played a 2&4, all the 2s and 4s on the table would become -2s and -4s, while all the -2s and -4s would become 2s and 4s. These cards were only available as 2&4 and 3&6.

The Tiebreaker Card was an extremely rare card that acted like a +/-1 card, but in the event of a tie, the player who played the tiebraker card would win. A tiebreaker card was owned by the being on Nar Shaddaa known as the Champ until he gave it to the Exile after losing his position to the Jedi.

The Side Deck was often the key to victory, as without his hand, a player relied solely on luck to win the match. Therefore, a player would have to conserve his cards, as the four side deck cards would have to last him through the entire match.

Winning the game

There were three ways to win the set:

• By outscore: After both players chose to stand, the player with the greatest score would win, provided that it was not over 20.
• By going bust: If a player ended his turn with a score over 20, he was said to “bust”, and the other player won.
• By filling the table: In some rare occasions, if a player could place 9 cards on the table without busting, he would receive an automatic win. He would still win if his score was less than the opponents, and even if they were tied.

In the event that a set is tied, no one gets a point for the set, and a new set is played. The first player to win three sets won the game, and whatever money was being wagered.

Areas of play

As a card game, pazaak could be played just about anywhere, but the most popular places to play were on ships during hyperspace transit, at the local cantina, or at special areas designated for play, such as the Pazaak Den in the Nar Shaddaa Refugee Sector.

Alternate rules

When played just to waste only time (and not money), pazaak players used Republic Senate rules, in which nothing was bet and no one came on top. The name was mockingly derived from the way that bureaucrats babbled on while taking no risks and accomplishing nothing. There was also a Nar Shaddaa version, in which the players are removing clothing.

Alternate uses

Like all games, pazaak quickly became a form of gambling, and most players in the galaxy wouldn’t even talk to someone before discussing the wager. Many people still played Republic Senate Rules, and Nar Shaddaa rules, for fun, however. A Force sensitive man known as Atton Rand often used pazaak to block out anyone who tried to read his thoughts; he would pretend to play the game in his mind, so that if anyone tried to read his thoughts, all they could see would be pazaak.

A recent thread on the official forums got a lot of attention from SWTOR fans, both those who agree with the leveling system in Star Wars and those who would like things done differently. There are those who feel a skill-based system would be better than simply grinding XP and levels.

Lead combat designer Damion Schubert felt he should chime in on the discussion and posted some interesting facts and points about skill-based leveling progression and why Star Wars: The Old Republic will not stick with the typical leveling:

Not to go into the details of what advancement systems we will have or not have inside the game but… this doesn’t always work out this rosily, without great designer care. I worked on Meridian 59, which was a wholly skill-based game, and learned a lot about the strengths and pitfalls of systems like it. One of my great pet peeves of pure skill-based systems is that they claim that they are more realistic, but they in fact can create extremely unrealistic situations inside the world.

In the original Everquest, it was not uncommon to see a player throwing himself off a cliff over and over again to improve his safe falling skill, or to see a person macroing some random text gibberish in order to improve his languages. In Meridian 59, players used to park themselves in front of low level monsters and leave the keyboard – they were unlikely to die, and could accumulate defense points in a slow, steady and totally risk-free manor. In Oblivion, the best way to build an assassin character is to hop through fields picking flowers. Jumping improves your Acrobatics (I believe), and the player needs enough flowers to grind up his Poisoning skill.

Sure, each of these could be destupidified with enough designer/programmer time and focus, but then you’re coding, QAing and exploit-proofing a different advancement mechanism for every skill in the game. And you’ll probably still end up with some silliness somewhere.

I know some people are offended by the idea of do stuff->gain experience->gain level->somehow get better at something completely unrelated. – I know I was too, young in my career when I designed M59. But one of the most important thing for advancement systems is that you get the behavior you incentivize. In a classic XP/Level based system, you are incentivizing your XP-granting behaviors (which in SWTOR is tilted strongly towards questing). In skill-based systems, it is trivially easy to accidentally incentivize really stupid and boring behaviors.

I have to say I agree with him: most of us already leveled multiple times in other MMORPG games and usually find it boring, but considering the faults of alternate character progression ways I guess classic experience and level progress is the best way to go.

In the latest SWTOR video the crew at LucasArts breaks down the combat elements of The Old Republic in this GameTrailers exclusive developer diary. The video contains a lot of in-game combat footage so be sure to watch to see how it looks to play various classes.

(if the embedded video above doesn’t work, view it here)

During EA’s most recent earnings call company CFO Eric brown discussed the future of The Old Republic and noted it will not be released during EA’s fiscal year 2011.

“We are not assuming that we bring a major new MMO to market in fiscal ‘11. We will continue to increase significant development cost as we prepare this title for launch.”

he said.

Only several weeks have passed since LucasArts and BioWare confirmed the game was supposed to be launched in Spring 2011. There’s also more talk about development cost and other things, but bottomline is the game will not launch before March 31, 2011. April or May are still possible, but like with every MMO game it’s likely to be pushed even further.

Brown concluded that they were not revealing a specific date for the game. Let’s just hope the wait will be worth it.

This week’s official site update contains Fan Friday, highlighting community creations and also giving us a new developer corner video. Finally, an official fansite kit is also released which should help boost many new websites with SWTOR themes.

You can read the entire article here. The video below contains work-in-progress combat effects: