Undoubtedly one of the greatest disappointments if the Massively Multiplayer Online RPG Star Wars: The Old Republic was it's on-the-rails shooter that it passed off as a space-combat simulator. After having spent most of the first twenty levels working and grinding your way towards an awesome-looking spaceship, to find out that you had pretty much no freedom to soar about the black void in freeform was a crushing revelation. Instead we had an extremely cinematic shooting sequence that was exhilirating for all of two to three runs, before it became incredibly repetitive.

It is thus a huge relief to find that Bioware Austin has not been blind to this, having spent the last few months working on a massive update that is meant to remove this aspecct of the game and instead replace it with the promised 12v12 dogfighting amidst huge capital ships that we've been craving for. Hell yes.

So, thanks to the weird free-to-play structure of the game, this would be doled out to the various tiers of subscribers at different times, subscribers being able to play it as early as December 2nd, while the rest given it a couple of months later.

Time to jump back into the game it seems.