Not a day went by since the announcement of the beta testing being underway and already leaked footage from the game hit the net. VG247 reported about this and provided a link to the video. They labeled it as rumor but seeing the video already being pulled from Youtube under a copyright claim by EA we can only imagine it was some real footage.

FOTOR reports that it was “16 minutes of nothing we haven’t already seen”.

It is a rather worrying development because Bioware is sure going to make further beta invitation even more scarce. On the other hand with a game as anticipated as SWTOR is things like this are bound to happen.

Sean Dahlberg updated his thread about Game Testing with the following:

Being able to have the community help us test The Old Republic is very important and valuable to the development process. The Game Testing Program allows community members to give us quality feedback so we can make adjustments and have a highly effective service and entertaining experience when we do launch. Since we have some time until the game is complete, some of the information testers have access to has not been released and may actually drastically change based on tester feedback before we go public with it.

This is why we take violations of any of our user agreements very seriously. Our expectation is that players of The Old Republic will follow the terms of the Game Testing Agreement and ensure that the confidential pre-release information we’re sharing with community members remains confidential. We will take action if that is not the case.

Anyone caught promoting confidential information (such as linking to, reposting, quoting, etc) will be contacted and such information removed from our community. Actions that can occur due to this can be simply removing the post to being suspended to being completely and indefinitely suspended from the entire service (including after we launch).

He also mentioned that you can report leaks to the Bioware community team:

If you find one on these forums, definitely Flag (report) the post so the Community Team can quickly react to it. If you find them off-site, you can always send them to bwacommunitysupport at bioware DOT com

UPDATE: I saw one of the videos and it shows some 7 minutes of smuggler gameplay. It is the starting area and very low level quests. The video shows some combat that really isn’t anything we haven’t seen before. Makes me more psyched for the game than anything, but I can imagine it could be hurtful to game promotion because it is obvious this is a not finished product and may leave an impression to the casual crowd as something that is broken instead of awesome. That is why such leaks are just wrong.

Tags: beta, leaked footage