Darth Hater

Damion Schubert
Currently, you can recall your companion at any time from a mission. You lose any progress he has made, as well as any upfront costs, but he returns immediately. This may be adjusted as we test further, but it seems to offer a decent balance.

You can also have a companion stop crafting an item at any time. In that case, you lose no materials (but all progress will be lost).

Damion Schubert
Each planet has chat channels that allows you to communicate with other players on the same planet. Yes, we have different channels for general, pvp, trade, etc. You will be able to turn off the channel, flag another player as a spammer for Customer Support's review, and ignore problem players.

Disregarding whether or not they are realistic (and the presence of technology makes them much more realistic here than in fantasy games - you only have to look at a CB Radio for an analog), chat is very good for the community. Of particular note, some of our best content areas are the awesome multiplayer fights our worldbuilders have been setting up. If to fight those, you had to go to town and wait for someone else to wander by, life would suck, and this content (which I want to stress, in my opinion, is usually wicked fun) would never get done.

We currently don't have any global channels that cover the whole game. General rule of thumb in an MMO is that if your chat channel has more than a certain number of participants, it becomes spammy and unusable (something that we'll be keeping an eye on in our earlier planets).

Damion Schubert
Like many questions here, there are lots of layers to the answer.

The short answer is that I know the feeling you're describing, where you're effectively being pushed down a tunnel of content and you feel like there is no 'there' there beyond the content necessary to finish your quest. Star Wars: The Old Republic doesn't feel like that - in terms of world navigation, TOR is much closer to the wide open feel of a classic MMO.

That being said, different planets have vastly different levels of movement capabilities, most likely due to their terrain. Tattooine, being a desert world, is wide open and free. Tython, being a mountain world, is much more constrained, and city worlds like Nar Shaddaa tend to be the most constrained of all. Still, players can move pretty freely where they want to in the worlds, and have travel options to backtrack pretty optimally.

You know that pretty map screenshot you saw? We've invested a ton of time and effort into our maps because yes, on occasion, you can get lost... and we don't want that to happen too often.

HOWEVER, it is true that The Old Republic is generally structured in quest hubs. As a general rule, our class quests send players through most of the quest hubs one by one. A player could, conceivably, play linearly if they wanted to by just hitting the quests at the quest hubs, but there's nothing stopping them from backtracking - and if they did play that way, they'd miss content that happened to be off the beaten path.

Oh and by the way - Happy Thanksgiving.

Stephen Reid
Some of you may have received an email from Magid, regarding a survey concerning Star Wars: The Old Republic. As there has been some confusion, we wanted to let everyone know that it is indeed valid.

We are partnered with a third-party agency, Magid, to conduct some focused playtests for TOR. These are part of our ongoing Game Testing Program. As part of that testing, a number of emails were sent to registered community members like you who'd opted in for game testing.

What to do now? If you were sent an email and haven't clicked through to the survey yet, well, go ahead and click. If you haven't been emailed, don't bother asking someone else to share; the surveys are individually linked to email addresses. If you are selected for testing, well let you know with an official email, this time!

Of course, I have to remind everyone that everything to do with Game Testing is bound by the Game Testing Agreement - and that means if you're selected, apart from telling people that you've been selected, everything else is confidential.

Happy Thanksgiving to all Stateside!