Although Dantooine has not been officially announced as a planet in Star Wars: The Old Republic, we repeatedly see it crop up in the marketing: namely within the Threat of Peace webcomic. With the recent influx of planet reveals, we thought it would be a good idea to reevaluate other locations we may see in future updates. Since BioWare is known to give hints to unreleased content, we feel it is in the community's best interest to take a closer look at one of the first known planets of the Star Wars universe.

We previously touched on our opinion regarding BioWare and LucasArts focusing on avoiding common MMO problems as a basis of our speculation articles. Many of the common problems relating to the retention success and failures were highlighted in BioWare Austin's Co-Studio Director Gordon Walton and consultant Scott Hartsman's GDC session, "MMO Retention -- Learning From The First 25 Years." During the talk, these industry veterans provided some insight into possible retention strategies in Star Wars: The Old Republic. We spent over a month listening to this presentation, debating all of its points, and dissecting it to find all the clues we believe are hidden within.

Powerful Sith and practitioners of the dark side proliferate the history of the Star Wars Universe. Although most casual fans may only know Emperor Palpatine and Darth Vader, anyone following the Expanded Universe knows there is a much deeper pool to draw examples from. For those that follow the extended fiction, few Sith names resonate like Naga Sadow. With BioWare and LucasArts crafting a new history for Star Wars: The Old Republic, we thought it might be a good time to look back at this powerful Sith Lord and speculate how he may effect what we will see in TOR.

In a previous article, we presented a chart showing the depth of customization players might expect after making the path choice in Star Wars: The Old Republic. BioWare's RPG signature usually includes foreshadowing an important decision with prior experiences and choices made during one's personal story, so the major decision of path choice shouldn't result in a surprise. Although we expressed our opinion of the depth and variety of customization that should exist after making this permanent decision, we didn't detail how we suspect you will initially acquire and progressively improve skills in what we call the "core class." Therefore, we here at Darth Hater decided to elaborate on our prior class combat speculations and delve deeper into what we feel "core class" really means.

After reviewing many of our recent speculation articles, we felt it was time to take a step back and reveal the core foundation of the logic that drives our conclusions. We strongly believe BioWare is approaching game design in a significantly different manner than what we see in other MMOs: instead of simply copying primary game elements and introducing a few new ideas, we believe the core principle at BioWare is to completely avoid significant MMO flaws through design innovation that wont negatively affect other areas of Star Wars: The Old Republic. Therefore, we believe these design innovations will compliment each other and integrate seamlessly throughout the game.

When attempting to solve common MMO problems such as stale character progression, faction or class imbalances, BioWare must use the Star Wars universe itself to creatively consolidate their design innovations. We think BioWares fourth pillar of Story actually has to permeate even further into the other pillars of Combat, Progression, and Exploration and these pillars are intertwined in such a way that they seem to solve these issues from the outset.

As the news coming out of Austin continues to pick up speed, mining information is becoming much more exciting. The response to our recent speculation articles inspired us to delve deeper into what we were previously told about Star Wars: The Old Republic with surprising results. We used our recently acquired knowledge to give context to older news items, and realized BioWare was giving us hard facts all along.

As we touched on in our previous article, we believe all the developers public statements solidified BioWare's direction of class design. We searched high and low looking for clues, kicked around hypotheses, made charts and graphs, followed several threads in the Character Class section of the Star Wars: The Old Republic official forums and we discovered that the answer to every class two paths were possibly outlined plain as day in the Holonet.

By: Emlaeh & Zenkei

"Eight unique classes" is a statement BioWare often repeats in multiple interviews, as it illustrates the solid theme they are using to approach designing the combat of the classes of Star Wars: The Old Republic.

This very clear statement is starting to get muddied when speculating upon how the various classes will specialize themselves and work together in a group.

Looks like the forums are busy speculating about this week's Friday update again. Droopy_McKool spotted a nice little tidbit at Drew Karpyshyn blog:


This makes sense, as it is typical for BioWare to release a Developer Blog the first Friday of the month.

The Star Wars: The Old Republic official forums received a visit from Rob Chestney earlier today. The community was treated to some insider information about the comic, and possibly the game. While Rob does remind us that the following information does not officially confirm or deny any official stance, there are some interesting things to be gleamed in the following quotes.

With the recent updates in Star Wars: The Old Republic news, and the steadier stream of information in general, the community is eagerly anticipating a possible anniversary announcement. Although it is taking place on a Wednesday, it wouldn't be unheard of for BioWare to have a surprise for their fans. Additionally, one of our writers here at Darth Hater, Xanamiar, noticed an odd post by Alyssa Gobelle in the developer tracker called "test" that was promptly removed. Could there be a present waiting for us tomorrow morning?

The current data released about Star Wars: The Old Republic has unveiled five planets so far: Tython, Korriban, Nal Hutta, Ord Mantell, and most recently, Coruscant. Obviously the Star Wars Universe is gigantic, and full of iconic planets, beyond just these five, so now we are going to take a deeper look at the planets that have been featured in previous media. This includes planets which appeared in the KOTOR series, as well as those that appeared in the movies.