It’s Halloween and everyone is enjoying a good scare. To celebrate, Joanne Laroche invite The Old Republic fans to post their Halloween Star Wars related costumes on the swtor.com forums. The best costumes will be featured in the upcoming Fan Friday and we took the liberty of singling out a few of these in the gallery bellow.

One very scary photo was submitted among the family friendly pictures. The costume is in fact so scary that we have to recommend caution to all those with weak hearts or even good taste. We are not sure whether this is an actual forum user or just a random image from one of the star wars conventions, but the scare factor is there nevertheless, which makes it a perfect Halloween image.

Click on this link to view the scariest Star Wars costume ever. WARNING! What was seen can not be unseen!

We just received a mysterious message through our contact us form and it seems we are not the only Swtor fans to get it. The official forum is full of people that got it as well. The message reads as follows:

Subject: ## Incoming Transmission from a faint signal…

Message Body:
## Incoming Transmission from an old Republic signal…
## Initiating trace
## Signal cannot be located!

## Receiving transmission burst…

“where it all began…in a Violent display, lIght meets dark…GrEat
power still remaiNs hERE”

YMESCJMFXZWTGYEUSGMUHLWTARYVIEMFKLSBGC

## End Transmission
## Signal lost!
## Attempting reconnect…
## Searching…
## Searching…
## Would you like to continue searching for the signal…?_

There is a cipher that decodes the upper cryptic sequence of characters. To help you out right away, the key you need to start deciphering is tython. This will lead you on a great adventure with a lot of puzzles and brain breakers. The most intriguing part for me was the use of a cipher seen in KOTOR, which shows great knowledge of the creators of this puzzle.

May you be warned that this is not something created by Bioware and there is no beta access as reward at the end of the path (and that is why everyone spent hours on this trying to solve it). Nevertheless it is a great experience and I suggest you test your intelligence by this great game. If you get stuck you can ask in the comments and we’ll give tips, or you can visit the thread started on the official forums and browse through 50+ pages for solutions :).

I have a lot of convention news withdrawal. I was spoiled by the convention season and the constant stream of news coming our way. It fed the hole created by not being in the SWTOR beta. Luckily, SWTOR fansites are plentiful and have great articles and content for you to browse through on a dreaded Monday and we are here to list it all for you.

Fansite Mentions

Lets get all the PAX info out of the way first.

TOROCast has released several quality articles created based on info they gathered at PAX. They took notes on Stats and what they do and shared it in a very informative article.

Darth Hater has its own PAX article that sums up all the General info they learned from the hands on experience. Two page article covers all the General Notes, Stat Modifiers, Character Sheets, Equipment and Loot they were able to record.

To round up the convention related news we have a bit of late news from SWTOR Station and their Gamescom coverage. They just released a new video from Gamescom that shows Daniela & Hergen (French/German Community Manager) and some speeders in action as well as Hutta’s spaceport video footage. Visit SWTOR Station for the full article and you can watch the video bellow:

Blog Mentions

Our Friends at Scary Booster have a great blog post “Let’s talk planets”, discussing how multiple planets and travel and story between them will work in a MMO environment. Check out their article and join the discussion in the comments here.

Podcast Mentions

Galactic Holofeed has entered its 1 year of SWTOR podcasts. Suzina and Kalvod guide us through their impressions of the Designing the Light Side Developer Dispatch and speculate in their knowledgeable and informed way about the Smuggler abilities. Clicking here will take you to their site and the Transmission 52 article.

Corellian Run Radio discusses PAX and all the info we got from there.

TOROCast just released their Episode 69 “Jedi do it with the Lights on”

In a thread we started on the official forums before GamesCom, we collected some question from the SWTOR community. There was an overwhelming number of questions and although we would like to be able to ask all of them we were happy to get answers to at least a few. The focus of GamesCom is Space Combat and advanced classes and in accordance to that we got to ask the following questions:

Will there be guild capital ships
Talked a lot among the design team. At launch NO, but popular feature with designers including Daniel Erickson (James Ohlen pointed at Daniel at that moment and Daniel gave a little smirk :))

Will there be interactive features in our ships besides the galactic map
Here’s word for word answer. You will get the whole answer on this question later on from our James Ohlen interview but as the most important answer of this question:
Crafting and workbenches will be inside the ship.

Will friends be able to travel from planet to planet with you in your own ship, or will they have to use their own?
No details right now. They can’t talk about it because it is not done or implemented. It’s a dream and something they would like to see go into the game, but there are technical difficulties in this feature they have to surpass first.

The motivations behind some of the restrictions in space.
They think that this is the best way to deliver a genuine star wars experience this way (a well guided single player experience).

We’ll try and get additional answers to other community questions from other areas of the game but we can’t promise anything (goes off to stalk the swtor booth).

GamesCom 2010 hands on Swtor booth being built

Although we are in the middle of packing for GamesCom and the excitement is almost palpable we wanted to bring you this week’s community news, at least the short version.

Star Wars Celebration V convention has ended and TOR was present with two panels. Darth Hater had the best coverage of the events and has exclusive interviews with writers Drew Karpyshyn (talked about the Jedi Knight) and Hall Hood (talked about the Smuggler) and concept artist Clint Young (talks about the artsy stuff).

Jedi Knight update was very exciting, especially with the cool trailer video that was released as well. Our friends at Jedi Archive Online did a very good dissection of the video, which you can find here.

Tor Syndicate, which we will be joining shortly, has their PodCast no.2 up and they yet again manage to provide loads of good information for anyone considering to make a SWTOR fansite or guild site. As if that wasn’t enough, they have an interview with ex SWTOR community manager Erick Adams. You can listen to “The Revenge of Darth Meow Meow” if you visit this page.

The sweetest thing as last. There is another SWTOR fan webcomic being created. Outer Rim stories just posted their first panel up and it is exactly the same idea I had for our comic when I heard about the details on space combat (including the Emo Darth Vader “Nooooooo”). Go, check them out here.

My attention span is that of a chipmunk. If you hit me with a podcast that lasts for 2 hours I will probably be distracted by the time the opening music is done with. When you start the podcast with a small clip from Robot Chicken Star Wars episode II (that I just watched a few days ago) and your guest host is Scott from Extra Life (one of my bookmarked webcomics that I visit regularly for the past 5 years or something) you might just be able to beat my ADD. This is what Mos Eisley Radio did with their podcast #22 named “Extra Lives”.

It’s a pretty bold move to start a new podcast among so many quality ones already existing in the TOR fansite universe, but when you do it right like TOR Syndicate did we have to tell you about it. The first full fledged podcast episode is available on their site and they talk a lot about what it is like to be doing a fansite for The Old Republic. They also interview the owner of Toruniverse.com and its a great insightful show that lets you inside the fansite creating life.

In other news, we have a merger of two fansites, Dathomir Project and Jedi Archive Online that they announced in their podcast that you can find here. Also, if you are interested in joining the fansite community TOROcast.com is looking for people. You can read more about it in this thread on the official forums.

As a final treat I give you Epicness! It’s a 3D rendered Star Wars space battle made by one man as a school project and it is absolutely amazing. Found this in the forums in this thread.

Welcome to our regular Monday community watch. It’s here so you can fight them Monday blues with some Swtor reading.

Previous week was one of those extremely exciting weeks. Comic Con is behind us and with it the announcement of space combat and player ship customization. This brought mostly positive reactions by the community and speculations are also running rampant, until we get more information scheduled to appear in the PC Gamer magazine.

Preceding the space combat announcement Friday update was Fan Friday displaying some impressive fan made art and renders of Cathar race (not sure if playable or NPC only). There is also a Darth Rasp 3D animationabsolutely worth watching. For the rest of the goodies visit the Fan Friday page.

Also, last week, we saw the release of Fatal Alliance, a novel placed in the Swtor timeline. It is speculated that the game will have a lot of things mentioned in the book. Therefore, you might be interested in reading Darth Hater’s dissection of the book as well as the interview with the author, guys at SwtorStrategies did. You can also read a part of Chapter 1 on the official site.

Podcasts seem to be a big deal in the Star Wars The Old Republic community. There are numerous quality shows and its hard to single out just a few to showcase in our community news. I must mention the always entertaining ToroCast and their episode 62 in which they are joined by a female co-host. Episode two of the Correlian Run Podcast is also available and the girls are super excited with the possibility of Corellia being a playable planet.

How Will You Play? That is the discussion in the official forum started by the developers. Are you a “soloer” or a “raider”. Go here to join in on the constructive discussion here.

Welcome to another Monday community watch. I will be trying to make this our regular thing so you have something to read at work to beat the Monday blues :).

Following this Friday update about the sounds and music of SWTOR, community got very excited and a lot of fansites discussed this topic. I would like to especially single out Galactic Holofeed podcast with their vast knowledge of all things Star wars and awesome voice impressions the podcast hosts do. You can enjoy Suzina’s and Kalvod’s podcast if you click here.

Mos Eisley Radio opens their podcast with the Binary Sunset (some know it as the Force) theme (even it is the Family guy version). I always get goose bumps from listening to this theme, don’t you? In any case, you can listen to the guys celebrate their one year of covering TOR by discussing game design, their worries about this being Bioware’s first MMO and the sounds and music of SWTOR along with their guest host, Jeff Cannata of “Totally Rad Show” and “Weekend Confirmed” fame. Listen to the show here.

In the meantime Ithoirans.com has Exclusive leaks from deep inside game testing. They are saying that:

Several players deep undercover in Star Wars: The Old Republic testing have confirmed several revolutionary new MMO features to Ithorians.com.

Specifically:

Another player, who would only identify himself as DarthTerriosity, said that when in game, he had the option to “fight” other beings within game world.

You can read the whole hilarious article here.

If you want to win something this week visit Darth Hater. They are celebrating their 1 year anniversary with a “Choose Your Side Giveaway”. All you have to do is post “HATE ON! GALACTIC REPUBLIC” or “HATE ON! SITH EMPIRE” in a comment in this article before 9:00 AM EST Monday, July 26, 2010. Even Bioware sent them an awesome background image as a gift for their anniversary.

Yesterday was highlighted by two things for me, the World Cup finale (gratz Spain!) and release of more leaked beta footage from SWTOR. None of which I’ll talk about here! World cup is for some other news site and leakz will get you perma-banned.

Instead, I want to tell you about a couple of articles I came across on another fan site – swtorstrategies.com. They wrote an excellent and fun article to commemorate the World Cup finale by humoring the idea of playing football (its called football not soccer) in SWTOR. As a result of the mix they created some images of Star Wars characters playing soccer. Make sure you check out the full article here.

While we’re on a topic of mixing – there is a fan made audio-visual mix posted on Youtube that combines a lot of previously released videos into one cohesive entity. You can watch the video here. News spotted @ SwtorStrategies.

TOROcast has released its 60th episode (!) named “This is NOT a Demo”, which you can listen to just below:

That’s it for now. May you have a great week.

Me neither … but people at Darth Hater certainly do. The whole staff attended E3 this year and have been able to summarize their impressions in one 5 pages long article. This is so far the most concise gathering of interesting, hands on, information available on the whole internet. They got to play for a few hours and through several levels and were able to each play a different class. This gives us the chance to read their impressions on UI, flow of combat for each of the classes (5 total), AI, graphics and art style and much more. I especially was interested in how they felt about the Dialogue System since that is the biggest venture out of the MMORPG standards we are used to. You can see them being kind of careful in their comments on the dialogue system, but overall with positive opinions. I guess it is going to be one of those love it or hate it things.
Make sure you don’t miss this article.

While I’m on the subject of community news, there is a new podcast in the swtor universe (like we don’t have enough of those 😛 ). I liked it though because we have two girl gamers discussing the game instead of your regular geeky male Star Wars fans (don’t look at me). Corellian Run podcast Episode 1 has hit the interwebz. Good luck with the podcast girls.