Top Five UI Tips for New Players

The default UI settings in The Old Republic work better straight out of the box than in most other new MMO launches, but for new players it’s still worth spending a few minutes tweaking some of the default settings to improve your gameplay experience. After extensive tweaking and testing of the various settings that can be adjusted through the in-game Preferences menu, we’ve compiled some tips and tricks to help save new players some of the guesswork, and get their UI set up quickly and easily.

The list below is far from exhaustive, but provides pointers on some of the biggest “quality of life” improvements you can make with some simple toggle settings or sliders, or hidden gems of the game interface you might not otherwise even realize existed.

All items below can be accessed through the in-game Preferences menu. Simply hit the ‘Esc’ key, and choose preferences from the menu options. Once open, on the left hand side you’ll see a list of categories as shown in the image to the right. The tips below will all be found under the "Controls" and "User Interface" categories.

Set Camera Max Distance

No matter what game I play – regardless of genre – one of the things I’m most particular about is camera control while playing. The default camera distance to your character in The Old Republic is quite a bit closer than in most MMOs, and while this is great for immersion and lends itself well to giving the game a distinctly RPG vibe, I typically prefer to have increased spatial awareness.

If you plan on diving into Warzones spatial awareness becomes even more important, so tweaking the max distance of the camera is a core adjustment to consider right off the bat.

Auto-Loot and Area Loot

Two simple tweaks in the “time savers” category, turning on both auto- and area loot can save you a lot of needless clicking to loot enemies after combat.

• Auto-Loot – This will allow you to immediately loot all items on right click rather than having to confirm that you want to each and every time.


• Area Loot – This is great for when you just defeated a group of 4 mobs and each one has items to loot. Rather than clicking on all 4 individually, you can loot them all with a single right click.

Additional Quickbars

By the time you reach level 10 and select your advanced class, chances are you’ll find the default quickbar simply isn’t enough to contain all of your available skills. As has become a staple in MMOs, The Old Republic allows you to add new quickbar rows to the bottom, right, or left side of your screen.

This same section also provides you two additional quickbar options:

• Enable Cover Bar – For Smugglers and Imperial Agents, this will allow you to toggle the automatic swapping of the main quickbar when entering or exiting cover. This is toggled “on” by default.


• Companion Expanded Quickslot Placement – Whenever you have a companion active you are able to toggle the full display of their quickbar for more control over what abilities they use in combat. This can be done by pressing the tilde key (~) with the default set to display in the bottom center quickbar position. This dropdown allows you to move this to use the left or right quickbar areas instead.

Enable Companion Comparative Tootips

This one cuts out a lot of guesswork when trying to determine whether or not any armor or weapons you obtain would be an upgrade for your companion. Turning this on will show you a tooltip for both your character and companion when mousing over an item in your inventory, and was even set to “on” as the default for most of beta, but was mysteriously toggled off by default in newer builds. Regardless, this is a huge time saver from the moment you obtain your first companion onward.

Operations Frames

I found this setting most useful when paying as a healer, especially during Flashpoints or Warzones. In a nutshell, there are three settings you may want to consider tweaking here:

• Use Operations Frames as Party Frames – This toggle changes to the default party window to use the Operations frames instead. Best when used with…


• Health Width and Health Height – As the names imply, these two sliders allow you to resize the health bars shown in the operations frames and can be a huge help for healers.

Bonus Tip: To reposition the party / operation window, right click on the small icon at the top to move or resize it.