I have been approached by several Zergadins members asking me “Hey Panzer, now that SWTOR has hit patch 1.3; is it worth coming back to check out?” Now I’ve never been full throttle into Star wars – I enjoy the futuristic feel of it, but I am by no stretch of the imagination a fan boy like some of our community. I didn’t jump into the game with closed eyes thinking that this is star wars and no matter what the game looks like I am going to enjoy it. Anyways, keeping that in mind here is a very unbiased opinion of the changes that the new patch has introduced.

First things first – this is a patch. It is not an expansion. You will not see any life changing new content such as a new class or a new world to explore. There are no brand new raids introduced that changes the dynamics of the game, nor was there a huge dump of new fancy gear to deck your characters out in. However, what they did add that caught my attention was a dungeon finder tool.

Dungeon Finder: My first review of SWTOR I explained I felt that the game was barely an mmo and this may have been partly to blame for the old server being as dead as it was. You spent all your time questing and basically ignoring the group quests because it just didn’t make sense to waste time with. From the perspective of a PVE’r a tool like this is a very valuable asset, one that SHOULD have been added on the release of the game. With this tool it (like most dungeon finders) it allows you to quest while the game does the tedious task of looking for a group for you to. I found myself dungeon leveling and seeing brand new dungeons I didn’t even know existed – simply because the time it took to prepare your own group (tank, healer… etc) would literally be an all day event. It definitely adds to the game being able to play with other people.

PvP ranked warzones: I haven’t played much with these; however, I imagine that they just copied WoWs concept of rated BGs and rolled with it. They introduced some fancy new gear to scream “I’m a pvp’r, bitch!” and away they went. PvP in SWTOR never really appealed to me much, but I know how important it is for some players – basic battlegrounds and very straight forward “kill” style game play. Animals.

Legacy crap: They added a whole bunch of new things to help you and your alts level quicker and more conveniently. Depending on your legacy level (which is like an experience bar that all your toons share) you can unlock goodies like repair bots, mail boxes, field respec options, and some goofy emotes… but at the end of the day this feature really doesn’t add a huge difference to the game.

Graphic Settings: This ones for you, Hellwolf. From what I’ve seen they have gone to great lengths to allow computers that had trouble running the game before settings to allow it to not suck. I was running the game for about 5 minutes on my work computer yesterday (lowest settings of course) and I was running smooth as glass. They added a handful of adjustsments to allow better tweeking of the game as a whole. So not only could my POS computer run it, but my home system I could make look like a million bucks with the top end settings.

So long and short of it, if you didn’t enjoy the game before, odds are this patch won’t fix it for you. If you enjoyed it, but found it irritating that there weren’t enough features to make it easy for you … well… that’s basically what this patch is. It helps you stop wasting time and get to playing.