Just finished up watching the SWTOR live stream, thanks to Dulfy. I missed it live due to kids activities, such is life. I followed on Twitter, but watching the stream was pretty awesome. This is the kind of information a lot of us were waiting for. Overall, I am pretty happy with everything I heard. It looks awesome. HOWEVER, I was sad that they still didn't talk about the Alliance system. Apparently, we'll find out about it very close to launch for some reason. So, what did I like?
Polish. Everything looks so polished. I don't know how to describe it, it all had a great look to it. I like their new use of purple. It all looked new.
Quality of Life. There are lots of small changes that are really awesome. Temporary Ability Bars now pop up for things like Huttball and your Heroic Moment. That will make life so much easier. Legacy datacraons? Awesome. Searchable collections? THANK YOU! So many little things which will make the experience much better.
Level Scaling. This is the big one. When you go to a planet with a lower level range, your stats will downgrade to the upper limit for that planet. So a 60 on Coruscant will have the stats of a level 18. Abilities and such are untouched, only stats. This is sure to cause some controversy but I think it is a great change. Levels these days just separate players and make content obsolete. Such a waste. BioWare has spent time to make rewards from heroic missions scalable, so you get appropriate rewards no matter what your level. This topic deserves its own post.
Akk Dog. Eric did show off one of the new kinds of companions you can get, an Akk Dog. No story with this guy, just combat. A pretty big hint that the companion system is going to be much more expanded in 4.0.
19 days to go until early access!