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BioWare dates SWTOR patch 1.1, details future Game Updates

Pace of post-release content "more aggressive" than WOW.

The pace BioWare will release beefy content patches for Star Wars: The Old Republic will be "more aggressive" than even World of Warcraft, the company told Eurogamer.

These SWTOR content patches will be known as Game Updates.

Rise of the Rakghouls - patch 1.1 - will be the first of these, and will be released this Tuesday, 17th January.

But BioWare has also revealed to Eurogamer details of a second Game Update in March, and a third Game Update "as soon as possible" after that.

"For the first patch we have the first part of Rise of the Rakghouls," SWTOR game director James Ohlen informed Eurogamer. "For the second patch in March we have the second part of Rise of the Rakghouls.

"Rise of the Rakghouls is quite an epic story, it's really really long and really really epic. The development of Rise of the Rakghouls has happened over the past year, so we've had people working on it off and on for a long time, so people are going to be quite impressed with it."

Rise of the Rakghouls adds a Flashpoint on the planet Kaon for level 50 characters only. Here you'll attempt to stop a Rakghoul outbreak. You can be tackle this Flashpoint in Normal or Heroic mode.

There's also a new Operation called Karagga's Palace for eight to 16 players. Here you'll face Karagga and the Hutt Cartel, in an effort to find out why Karagga broke agreements with both the Republic and the Empire. This Operation can be tackled on Normal, Heroic and Nightmare difficulty.

Ohlen said the second, March-bound Game Update will also feature a new world - "And on that world we have a new Operation, which is playable by eight or 16 players."

"We're also going to have a new Warzone," Ohlen added. And new systems.

"So we have most of the Legacy system coming in our Game Update two," said Ohlen, referring to the Legacy feature that encourages and rewards players to make additional characters.

"I'd say we're gaming to be more aggressive than the industry standard World of Warcraft in terms of how often we release our post-release content. "

James Ohlen, game director, SWTOR

"We also have more guild functionality coming in - we're going to be introducing guild banks."

"We're also going to be introducing changes to the space game to basically make it more usable to the endgame players.

Ohlen continued: "We're going to be adding PVP ranking. This is really important to the PVP community; they want to be able to compare themselves against each other. So we're porting that in. So we have a lot of different game systems and a lot of different content coming in March."

Some "other stuff" the SWTOR team is working on besides these Game Updates is, "We want to make the galaxy feel more alive". "So we have a team that's entirely focused on events in the galaxy," Ohlen revealed. "We'll be giving more information on that in the future."

"We have multiple teams working on content and game systems and we already have people working on the third patch."

What will be in that third patch, Ohlen wouldn't specify.

"We know people expect the game to continue to grow. And this is kind of the test for players - our players want to know are we going to continue to grow the game, are we going to support the game? And the answer is yes," he said.

"We've got our entire team focused on releasing new Game Updates on a regular cadence and making sure that we continue to work on balance issues and bug fixes.

"I can't give you an exact date on the third Game Update," he said, "but I'd say we're gaming to be more aggressive than the industry standard World of Warcraft in terms of how often we release our post-release content.

"We know that that's something we have to do because we need to convince our fans that we're serious about this."

SWTOR patch 1.1 was added to the game's public test realm recently, and patch notes divulged accordingly.

Part two of Rise of the Rakghouls will be in the March SWTOR Game Update.