Thoughts about Game Update 1.2

We had some time on our hands this weekend and we played a bit on the PTS. We did some warzones, played around with the interface, did some questing..all that kind of stuff. We didn't had any chance to play the upcoming Operation & Flashpoint but we might surprise you later on this week. We've also had a look at all PVE & PVP armors, we did some screenshots, got some stats and compiled some info for you (Lizzy will post it soon, we still have some editing to do, so stay tuned).

So, what's our impression so far? We love it...and if you bare with me, I'll tell you why.

Overall Performance

First let me tell you that the engine has been tweaked and fine tuned, the game runs a bit smoother now and, with the same hardware, I managed to gain somewhere around 10-15 extra FPS within most Warzones. I didn't had a chance to compare the Fleet's peak hours since on the PTS, people don't stay there that much, but with 70 players zoned in, the game performance was unaffected. I know that Bioware didn't finished tweaking the engine, but Game Update 1.2 is the right step, in the right direction.

Legacy

I think that Legacy is the star of this update and many of you will enjoy it. I won't tell you anything here that wasn't told before, but I'll give you a brief teaser.




Class Icons

That's right, we now have class icons right above the player's head that will tell us what class is he/she and what AC.






Interface

Oh man, we love the new interface...you can now move and resize the bars/windows to your liking...the game will save them to a char profile and you can have it anytime anywhere.



Pressing the + key near the quickbars will also bring us a menu now from we can choose the full customization option, the default option, our saved option and the retro option:



And here's the Retro look:



But there are also some small additions to the interface that drew our attention, such as:

Background Audio

Continue to hear the game's sounds, even if the game is minimized. You know what that means right? It means you can queue to the Warzones, go browse something on the Internet and when you hear the WZ pop - back to the game! Great huh? It works also when somebody is whispering you and so forth...so as you can see, there are multiple uses to this one



Character Texture Atlasing

Adjust the texture atlasing of your character model. In translation, your character will look awesome..and I mean it. Of course, this will have some impact on performance but I couldn't test this since I had no FPS loss or any type of performance issue with this enabled.




Casting/Action Bar redesigned

As you can see from the screenshot, the action/casting bar has been altered - in a good way. We likey!



Combat Logs

As you know, Game Update 1.2 will bring us combat logs. The first version of the combat logs are a bit raw and are done via an external file export. Here's the option within the game options:



The file will be then added to a 3rd party combat log parser, which will interpret the logs and get you all the numbers. You can also interpret the raw logs yourselves using this chart (Bioware's Greg Zoeller was kind enough to provide us with the interpretation)




Suppress Crew Skills Mission Rewards while in a Warzone

Yey! No more pesky pop-up windows when your companions come back from missions while you're in a Warzone. Small but great feature!



GTM is also suffering some (good) modifications

The first thing we noticed was the ability to search for anything without needing to select any category or to search something in advance.



Conclusion

We kinda love what we've experienced so far and we have high hopes for this upcoming update. The game is smoother than ever, the Legacy system is great, the game engine behaves better and there are a ton of new fixes and features. I can safely that the game is going into the right direction. The game still have bugs and some aspects that aren't pushed to this Update (yet) but again...I don't think they can manage to push so many things. The skeptics voiced that the game will bring some more additional bugs to the table with this update and guess what..I agree. As I said many more times before, it's one thing to test a patch/update to a small mass of players and it's another to actually test it at a massive scale. It's impossible to have a bug free game and as history has thought us, no gave has that. Let's hope Bioware polishes this update to the max so we can enjoy it at its fullest!