It still won’t add a day/night cycle to the game, but the next content patch for The Old Republic will bring some small graphic upgrades. These updates will only be noticeable on certain planets, and only for people with their graphic settings maxxed, but they’ll bring more realistic grass and foliage effects that will improve some of the issues people have complained about since launch in regards to the graphics:

So, new in Game Update 1.5, with Shader Complexity set to High in the Graphics Preferences, if you look toward the sun in outdoor environments such as Tython, Voss, Alderaan, etc, you’ll notice that the sun shines through the trees and the grass. Before Game Update 1.5, trees and grass would look really dark when looking toward the sun, but now that the sun is shining through them, they have that same type of beautiful diffused light that you see in the real world.

It’s a minor upgrade, but it’s nice to see something like this happen; especially when the switch to free to play usually doesn’t allow such minor graphical upgrades in other games.