SWtOR Update 1.3 details announced

Star Wars: The Old Republic released it’s first major update to the game, 1.2, also known as the Legacy Update not too long ago. And before the dust has had time to fully settle they’re revealing details for the next update, being called Allies.

The emphasis in the Allies update is towards the many social aspects of the game which many players are struggling with at this early point. First and foremost, the game is installing a badly needed group finder function. After the initial rush of players in the game when TOR was first released, average server population has plummeted. And as a obvious consequence, players who want to take part in group content have found it damn near impossible to find one other person up for the heroics, let alone three.

This is good news for the leveling crowd, the group finder function will allow them to find groups almost instantly for flashpoints and the heroics of whatever planet they happen to be questing on. It’ll also help the level cap players find groups for the hard mode flashpoints and operations. Whether or not they’ll be able to finish these or not with randoms is another matter entirely.

The next big change is the character transfer function. At the moment, to say most of the servers have a minimal population would be giving them too much credit. (I logged on the other day to find three people online on the entire server) So Bioware are giving players the ability to jump ship and go to one of the more populated servers.

I have mixed feeling about this change. If the update was just implemented with no other parameters in existence, I foresee everyone stuck on an empty server rushing to the two or three most populated ones. Thus overpopulating them and levaving the empty ones even emptier. I mean, I’s love to play on a server with a hundred people in each area, but not if I have to wait in a queue for 30 minutes every time I log in.

I can’t imagine this is something the developers overlook though and I hope they’re smart about the implementation of this feature as to avoid the massively mismatched servers.

The previous patch brought the Legacy system, however, some options will still unavailable in the menu, and were teased for this update. Called Legacy perks, there are a number of new features players can unlock that will affect their leveling game. The Legacy system was put into place to encourage players to roll as many alts as possible. These perks will make that experence all the more varied.

Some, for example, increase the amount of experence players get from PVP, thus leveling them more quickly. Others increase the amount of affection players gain from their companions, meaning they can unlock their companion perks more quickly. And some are as simple as allowing you to unlock your mounts much quicker than usual. There are a bunch more, but they’re all listed in the game already, so go have a look for yourself.

Continuing down the road of customising your character, the update is going to allow players to upgrade their appearance to whatever they want with adaptive gear. At the moment, a lot of the level capped players are running around with the same few optimal outfits on. Adaptive gear will allow players to take whatever social/orange gear they have and apply their optimal gear’s stats to that. Thus allowing players to look however they want but still be able to compete in the highest difficultly content.

On top of this there are going to be augment tables which allow you to upgrade nearly any item in the game, this in conjunction with the adaptive gear will allow players to customise their appearance in nearly any conceivable way. Although there is no news about allowing male players to wear the slave bikini, sorry fellas.

Update 1.3 doesn’t have a launch date as of yet, but it doesn’t look to be very far off as further updates are being planned throughout the year, including 1.4 which is supposed to be very content heavy, rumoured to include new companion quests and world quests. More news as it comes.