Avian Gamers Network

I don't think that two identical looking Jawas are a problem

With other companions ... maybe, but who knows what might happen....

This is correct, but not complete. It is true that the color depends on the crystal and that each faction has an unlimited access to its traditional colors (for example, blue and green crystals for the Republic). But for the opposite colors, access is for now limited by the character's alignment. So, you have to follow the Dark Side to have a Jedi with a red blade. Of course, like all our systems, we are testing all this and it is always possible that the details will change a little before the game is out.

"Only the possibility of using it. Instead of access, I should rather say "usage.
So, it is possible for a Jedi to find a red crystal, but that crystal is only usable with a given Dark Side rank.

You start with 40 slots. You can pay to expand your inventory 10 slots at a time, capped at 80. The price of each row of slots gets progressively more expensive. That being said, any exact values (in terms of price and size) that you might see/hear about are prone to change as we make adjustments to the economy.

You can also pay to expand your ship's cargo hold, where you can store significantly more items.

We do not use the 'bag' paradigm that some other MMOs use - it's all one GUI.

You meet your Companions through class quests.

You get your ship through your class quests.

You will get rewards through class quests, which include some really decent items that would cost you a lot of credits to replace. Credits that you'd probably want to spend to get a vehicle earlier.

Without doing your class quests, you lose out on a significant amount of XP that you would have to fill by other means. It can be done, but it will actually take longer to get to maximum level if you try to skip the class quests.

There is definitely replay value in going the 'other' path. Quests change, there are different cinematics for different choices, rewards can differ and some parts of the story change significantly. Still it is one story, not two, so it is definitely similar to say, Mass Effect where ... spoiler ... you can save the council or get the killed, but ultimately save the citadel.

Choice in our games means that the player gets to decide how to approach the story and individual decisions, but we're not creating a freeform narrative with unlimited options, that'd be a bit too expensive.

To address a few other things:

(a) Don't expect to avoid the main story completely. You can't. If you never finish your story on the capital planet, you never get a ship and won't ever see any other planets. Which means you will end up unable to level up further as you'll outlevel your planet. In fact, I'd go as far as saying that players who think they want to skip the main story will quickly realize that they're not going to be ever competitive. It's a BioWare game and story is one of our top features.

(b) The main story line continues very close to max level. Even after that, we have quests, group quests, Flashpoints, PvP to level up with. Random mob grinding is not a preferred progression feature in our game. In fact, it's inefficient.

The reason is simple: To protect the player from themselves. Players gravitate towards the fastest/most efficient way to level and will repeat the most mind numbing boring activities over and over if they think it's the most efficient way. On the way, most will bore themselves to tears and ultimately quit the game. Hence the decision to make grinding mobs for XP much less efficient than the other ways to gain XP.

(c) If you play very completist (all quests, all group quests, PvP, space missions, etc.) you will in fact end up above level. However, since your class story ends before a lot of the world arc and other missions on a planet, you can then, at your choice, skip parts of the planet and move on. I've tried and it's almost impossible to outlevel your class quest completely, because it's just an inefficient way to play.

Once you have your ship, every planet in the galaxy can be flown to.

Of course, flying to a level 40 planet at level 12 might not be the greatest idea, but still, you can do that.

LS/DS is one gear faucet, and not a particularly plentiful one. There are many gear faucets in the game (random drops, crafting, quest, etc). Someone who chooses to eschew the LS/DS system will be able to find workarounds.

It's a delicate balance because, for example, there are often conflicts between LS/DS and companion affection. We want choices to matter, and so there are some minor results for LS/DS and affection, but we also want people to be able to 'play the story'. BioWare storytelling is, ultimately, most interesting when it's a Rorschach test, and you're not choosing to pump points up a meter. We want people to see tangible benefits for those choices, but not be so overpowering that the player feels hamstrung by them.



While in most cases it's obvious, in some cases it's not so much. A written line can take several meanings, based on inflection, and as anyone who has played Mass Effect can tell you, paraphrased dialogue choices can also sometimes disguise what the writers had in mind. For example, "I don't think so" can be used to express actual bewilderment and confusion ("I don't understand what you're getting at") or grim fatality ("None of you are getting out of here alive"). Mousing over the line can, in this case, make the intent much more clear - if you see a Dark Side icon, you know which meaning of 'I don't think so' the writers had in mind.

I'm a pretty hardcore numbers guy (obviously), and in general, I find when I'm playing that I'm choosing without mouseovers except in cases of more ambiguous choices. In those cases, I'm pretty glad it's there. That being said, there's no right answers here, everyone's play style is valid, and we do what we can to support as many of them as we can.

A favorite use of mine is for one player to go back to town and turn in quests and the rest of the group camping out in the wild. The player then turns in the quest and the group holos in.

It doesn't change the overall time to complete the quest, but it does allow the group to relax, hunt, craft instead of all spending time on travel.

I don't think this is a concern for us. After years of playing legit characters and testing, I don't even know if there is a limit we are enforcing. And since you can hide quests that are not on your current planet and turn tracking on and off individually for each quest, you're unlikely to experience significant overload either.

Yes.

There are some preconceptions about the missions system, such as that it's an infinite money machine. Quite the opposite: it costs money to send your CC out looking for stuff, typically more than you can sell the returns for to a vendor. You can hit the jackpot, but this is because you find items that are of high utility to yourself or other players. For example, you might find rare crafting materials to make ubergear. The value in these items is what you sell them to other players for.

This is a delicate balance, of course, but a player who tries to farm non-stop is going to have a pretty severe cash flow problem, and basic economics says that if too many people are flooding the market with too many of the same goods, it's going to be difficult for you to get a price for the goods more than the cost to acquire it. Supply and demand, y'know, which most of the time should self-correct.

Could you send every CC on every character out all the time? Sure, if you have infinite cash. It's my team's responsibility to be sure that doesn't happen. =)