Bioware/EA is introducing the first major update to The Old Republic this week, bringing up the newish MMO up to patch 1.2. There are a lot of updates coming in, from changing the UI (almost, but not quite, up to Bartender standards) to creating a ranked PVP system to bringing another Instance and Raid—I mean Flashpoint and Operation.
The biggest selling point for the update? The improved Legacy system. The Legacy system is a convoluted and complicated system of linking a user’s various toons into a family-tree type system. The player will be able to utilize different races for their chosen class, bring new abilities for other characters, and unlock mailboxes and GTN interfaces for their spaceships. Guilds will also finally have their own banks (but no guild starships yet). Darth Hater has a pretty good write-up on it here.
The update, along with the increased free access (both through friend invites and Free Weekends) should bring some excitement into the world, even prompting producer Cory Butler to say, “Update 1.2 is a huge, massive update; it’s probably one of the biggest, if not the biggest, free game updates ever.”
You have to love the optimism and hyperbole in that statement.
Servers will be down on Thursday, April 12th for the patch-implementation, so gamers can probably look forward to a weekend full of emergency patches.
Is the patch going to be enough to bring new people into the world, or will it just be new bells and whistles for the converted few? Time will tell.
