» Question » Does being light or dark create any advantage?

Nope - the only thing associated with LS and DS choices, aside from their effect on your personal storyline, is the gear that you can get - as you gain more and more LS or DS points, you can unlock special gear specifically oriented toward one of those two morality sides.

I do know that one one my friends said that when playing Empire, he rolls a LS character, and when playing Republic, he rolls a DS character - that way, since most of the Republic people go LS and most of the Empire people go DS, he gets most, if not all, of the DS/LS gear drops that work for him when they appear, as he's usually the only one in his group who can use them.

Food for thought. :)

Supposedly not, although nothing is every completely balanced. The SWTOR developers want the story elements to be free though. They don't want people to feel pressured to play the story a certain way in order to be acceptable to Operations groups, so if there is a difference it will be small and shrinking with patches.

Side note: It has been stated that it is possible to do some extreme things, like kill or drive off a companion. If you did that you would lose access to a companion, which makes playing the game a little harder. But they did say that they wouldn't surprise you with it. If you're doing it it will be made clear to you that that's what's happening, and only people dedicated to that action for some reason will do it.

So, basically, you can make it a little tougher on yourself, but not accidentally, and in general the different choices should be balanced in the long run.

There is not supposed to be an advantage to alignment (dark side vs light side). There is an issue with Neutral Alignment though, neutral alignment is considered a 3rd alignment. This is an alignment that is neither light or dark. You can achieve this by making alignment choices that cancel the previous choice. Remember, alignment is 1 fluid scale. 50 Light Side points will cancel out 50 Dark side points and will cause you to maintain 0 alignment.

So the problem with Neutral Alignment, on the beta, was that there were very little to no Neutral Alignment gear available at high levels. This is something that the devs are aware of and have stated will be addressed. When is a good question though.

Besides that, there really isn't an advantage to Light side vs Dark side gear... besides appearance.

The items from Dark Side/Light Side vendors are literally identical except for their particle effects.

As for quest choices, one choice may involve killing a few more enemies than the other or something, but there won't be any substantial differences. The Bioware devs have demonstrated again and again that they are very committed to making sure people don't make story decisions just for gameplay.

in the grand scheme of things no, it wont be a game breaking difference. some gear requires either datk, light, or neutral alignment. however it seemed likely the gear always had mirror pieces for the different alignment. so it was more of a cosmetic difference.

the "big" advantage seemed to be dark side characters could "persuade" at gun point for a handful more of credits. not a game changing amount though. there were also some quests where not killing people meant that they gave you a reward later too. so its probably roughly equal in the end.

it will mainly break down to how you want to play they character. so just go have fun with it.