OK time for some pics and more details as i proceed, for now, big news is new patch 1.5 comiing in a few days, some changes happening in the game and new content being added, this is a big patch another sign of the deep commitment Bioware is making to this MMO for years to come.

the game is huge, and was launched last year by Bioware which is no stranger to the Star Wars series having made one of the best game, Knights of the Old Republic I, and they have obviously learned a lot since then. This game is huge, over 25 GB in size and they plan to support and add to it for years to come. They have done a wonderful job on it.

Once you buy the game and install it, either online or via box or disk..or download it for one of the free three day trials, you then need to pay for game time by the month, either with an advance pay card or montly with credit card or pay pal. You start the gamew with superb movies and background, the Sith have invaded and looted the capital city of the Old Republic .this takes place 3000 years before the story most know of Star Wars, and about 150 years after the story line of the KoTOR games I and II, the sith are rising again and the Jedi Order has retreated to Tython the planet of their origin to rebuid. You choose your affilaition, eithe Jedi or Sith, Light or Dark side..and then your gender and basic class, and based on that after your character is designed, you get to start on a number of Origin planets. Each is huge with many stories and events that builds your character and trains you in the game. This leads you on and as events unfold you learn the story and see the events both in game and in very well made videos and cut scenes that will show your character in complete detail including whatever items and clothing you may have chosen. You collect, loot buy and sell items of all kinds, including weapons, clothing with defensive capacity, and many other items and you learn about the story from places that add to the Canon in segments that constitute a growing encycolpedia you can also get larger bits when you find Holicrons hidden around the various game worlds.

Your character is fully voiced in game and in the dialog responses you cam make and your choices can have immediate and long term effects, and affects your light or dark side advance as well. The art style is perfect for the game and the saga and morphs perfectly between the cut scenes and the real game. they did very well with that.  It is NOT photo realistic and i am very grateful for that, i am very tired of photorealistic detail that is so demanding on computers and so boring to see. 

This game runs well on medium systems and with low setinggs runs well on low systems too. I have tested both. It is really well designed. And fast. Even with a full server it runs fine. There are over 50 servers and over a milion players so far and you can join both Guilds and individual ad hoc groups as you play that allow you to chat at various levels, there is a detailed in game chat system, e mails you get in game from game character including attachments, and things you reciefve you can give and recieve gifts and gain and lose your companions  affections and allengiance with how you act, treat them or what you give them.

you also get a personal space ship at about level 15, after your second planet and that is your player home and also the centre of crafting that your companions do for you ....you play individually in youir own story and that is handled very well, you can also play in groups and some missions can only be achieved with groups and the groups are usuall specialized.

 Some important things to know to start:

Alt+z removes the UI so you can take pics, there is a lot of UI so it is nice

z key - unsheathes or sheaths or holsters your weapon

P key Opens the menus for you and your companoins and pets ..yes you can have pets who follwo you too

You can fast travel by "binding" to various Binding Podiums located in main areas.

You can also fast travel using air speeders to locations you have been to or air taxi in cities..this is very cool because it is real time and you see the world as you travel

you can heal using med packs and also heal using Force powers, you can heal your companinns and some of them can heal you and each other...you also can loot dead enemies and sell the items to vendors who are located everywhere and sell you armor , weapons, med packs gifts and much more

you can craft using various skills but your companions do the actual crafting but based on skills that you choose. You choose skills that will open up possiblities for your character path that you choose.

in game you can talk to others who you are in groups with or just post in general, but free trial people cant do that. Only subscribers..and only subscribers can use the offical forums.

you can call your companions at need, and your companions can go sel stuff to clear out your inventory ..invetory gets full fast, and you can expand it but it is expensive to do that.

You can get personal speeders that greatly speeed up your play but they are very expensive, a millino credits for some.

You choose Skills onlyl three at a time and can "unlearn them" by cllicking on the skill on your skill list and deleting it if you want to change yoru game path but you cant change your advanced Class or your name once you have selected it so be careful.

Visualy it is stunning and huge, the largest game world i have ever seen and very detailed..there are dynamic NPCs everywhere ..and new story elements all over, you will see an icon floaitng over any in game NPC with a mission or a story element for you.

 that is a good start for beginners, and comes from my learning and discovery. PM me with any questions.

and some pics from Coruscant which is the second planet you see in the game, the Capital of the reborn Republic, after the sack of the capital by the sith and the uneasy peace ended the Galactic War....

Avenue of the Core Systems, the Senate Plaza

Coruscant Space Port, ports are fully detailed and completely realistic in size and scale..ie Gigantic... and there is a complete system of ports, space ships and travel between the many planets, over 20 i think

the first view of the city of Coruscant takes your breath away....

the scale of the Capital Coruscant is awe imspiring and all of that is REAL 3D, the air car takes you to locaks thru actual phuysical streets and avenues ...full scale...real time...

Senate and Avenue of the Core Systems

the detail and the NPCs which are everywhere are very realistic....it is all in moition and feels totaly real...

Space port view from Senate Plaza and myself and my droid...

the lower levels of the city is where much of the action takes place there are many misions, quests things to discover and many battles to be fought, this is the space dock for the Old Galactic Market....ravaged in the riots after the fall of the city to the Sith and now filled with dispaced homeless in their millions...

My first human companion, Kira..all the cut scenes are fully voiced and all of your dialog choicies that you speak are too...fine choice and hundreds of thousands of spoken dialogs in the game, pro over a million.

the art style is much more appealing and workable than I thought it might be from reports, i can see why they went this way with the style it allows the lynch synching to be near perfect and the in game vids of which there are hundreds for each missoin work very well and there is no friction visually between them and the real game....works very well...

my main in game character Kira and another party member a droid and myself...you can have up to five party members and they have their own missoins independently of you and can collect and do the crafting of resources for you...they are adding more featurs in the upcoming patch.

More soon, i am at level 14 and loving it.

Had some fun last night with one of the toughest missions what is rated as Heroic 4, which means you are supposed to do it with a party of addional members, but i got into it with just my companion by accident and ran right into a bunch of higher level foes, a LOT higher.....and and a LOT of them

by hard work and sacrifice we made it and were able toe complete the Trouble in Deed mission to steal bac k the deed for a store owner that had been kicked out of his store by the Justicars...and as a reward i got a cool new higher level robe with good armor strength, my companion and I celebrated by cleaning out the droids from the Works and helping restore some broken infrastructure... i continue to be amazed at the scale and detail of this remarkable game....but it is hard work

Sounds like this is turning out to be a disaster for Bioware, they lost 25% of their subscribers over the last month

http://kotaku.com/5908338/star-wars-the-old-republic-loses-400000-subscribers

I keep hearing the gameplay is typically MMO and almost a WOW clone, if that's true i'll probably won't be playing this

Originally Posted By markornikov (8 MAY 2012 4:16am)

Sounds like this is turning out to be a disaster for Bioware, they lost 25% of their subscribers over the last month

 

http://kotaku.com/5908338/star-wars-the-old-republic-loses-400000-subscribers

 

I keep hearing the gameplay is typically MMO and almost a WOW clone, if that's true i'll probably won't be playing this

From what I've heard, they did the story elements pretty well, but once you are past those, and in the end game, the game loses most of its appeal, so a lot of people simply play through it until they have seen all the story-missions, and then quit. 

I left after the first month.

As Fnord said, the story elements were good, the dialogue, class-focused and "Flashpoint" quests were great.

However the "meat" of the game, the whole of everything inbetween that, was a lot of your generic mmo-style fetch/kill
"x" of these quests.

The main thing I disliked even before the game was out,a nd what I knew would be one of the main complaints of the game, is the combat. It's just not fun/different or "Star wars" imo. This game could have been so much more if they were willing to take the risk.

IF they would have made melee/shooting combat as good as Jedi Knight, had space /ground flying/vehicle combat like in the X-wing vs Tie fighter/Rogue Squadron and THEn build upt he story elements that Bioware does great at, it would have been easily one of the BEST Star Wars games out there and showed what mmo's could be.

However they didn't wnt to take chances, like almost any mmo out there, they just are content with following WoW's style of game thinking "Well it's so huge, that's what people want!" but they ignored all the failed wow clones and games that are switching to f2p for a reason. PEople are tired of WoW style mmo's, we want something new/different. Look at all the fuss over TES

The MMO market needs to change, just imagine if all the fps games today were still copying Doom, or the "WWII" era.

ok i see, once it's dirt cheap i'll take a one-month subscription and playthrough the main quest, because i do love Bioware's storytelling.

It's a shame they've wasted so many years developing an WOW-clone. Even though ME's gameplay is a bit too dumbed down, it still would've been better than this

sadly i got to Level 34 and quit. .it was a pain and a bore and the endless fights that you could not win with the level you were at were frustrating to no end. It was pointless to continue for there were just more bosses that were either elite or so high in skill that you were killed in seconds with no chance of eventualy victory. One single thing that woudl make it workable would be to change the damage model to may ANY damange cumulative on ANY foe, making it possible to defeat ANY enemy with enough attacks. That would make the game sotry possible to enjoy. Otherwise, you are forced to either buy enoough over priced high quality equi8pment that often you cant buy until you dont need it or you ahve to find higher level players to help you and they can lord it over you and say what a dumb ass you are over and over, that was my experience and it was no fun at all in the end.

the worlds themselves were nice, but they too were limted. and the space combat was a joke a total waste and terrible simplistic shootiing gallery style ...

in the end each world was essentially a natural environment or a urban environmetn with a labyrinth of enemies. The one world that had some intersting areas was Tatooine, the desert Dunes was beautiuflly done but really artifical as well.

A total waste of time and money, i spent two months in there and it will be my only experinece at such MMOs.

The game is already becoming free to play this fall, why would anyone actually buy an MMORPG if they become FTP that soon 

http://www.swtor.com/free/