Being the greatest gathering of Electronic Entertainment professionals, E3 surely has a lot to offer. We tried to capture some of the atmosphere from the show floor so you can get a glimpse at just how massive this event is. Here are some images as well as a video of E3 atmosphere with Bioware doctors making a guest appearance.

Image Gallery

It is official. Jeff from TorWars.com is a pimp! How else would you describe a guy that went around the E3 show floor and took pictures of himself with the hottest booth babes around and called them all his “best new girlfriend.”? To view this gallery of awesome make sure you visit TorWars.com. They also have some great Day 1 coverage so make sure you stick around their site.
 
Beside the awesome Live Stream with Daniel Erickson and our very own interview with the man there was another feature that might have gone under the radar for many SWTOR fans. It was Gamepost.com and their live show with DE and for the first time we saw the full King Bouris Ulgo event (this is the Alderaan flashpoint/event/whatchamacallit). Thanks to the ladies of Corellian Run Radio that found this embed, here is a video of the whole thing:

Eternity Vault (the first raid that was ever talked about) trailer was first seen yesterday as well. This was shown during Gabe Amatangelo appearance on Spkie TV / Gametrailers.com. I am sure we will see this trailer in full HD quality very soon on swtor.com, but for now watch the bad TV grab bellow:
 

We had a pleasure of sitting down with Daniel Erickson, lead writer for Star Wars: The Old Republic, and he was nice enough to answer us some burning questions that the SWTOR community suggested us to ask. Here’s a recap of the most important information and you can view the video bellow.

• It is highly unlikely that there will be a pre-release character creator like the one that was present in Dragon Age and Mass Effect.
• There will be different size raids for different difficulties. It is not yet fully defined what those sizes will be for the bigger raid, but smaller raid will be 8 man
• No dynamic content in the same sense as in Rift
• Number of characters per server not defined yet. Guess is that you can have enough to play each class per server, but not yet sure.
• Kicking people off a cliff in PvP matches – YES
• Changing character look after you create it (barber shop) – probably not at ship
• You can have 5 companions on your main character and 5 companions on all your alts and they will all be able to craft at the same time (offline queue) (please watch the interview for better explanation)
• Crafted equipment is what you will need to go into a raid to get the best equipment ever on the server (please watch the interview for better explanation)
• Vanity pets (sly smile – no comment – watch the interview – you will know)

Here’s the Audio version of the interview. The video file is taking forever to upload and we will have full video version as soon as we can get that edited. Thank you for your patience.

Breaking News

• Raid info at Gametrailers.com; Belsavis has various enviroments (Snow, Jungle, Lava); Ancient prison from ancient race is on the planet; Belsavis trailer being shown.; Imperial vs Republic conflict compromised the prison; Guy that got released ruled 20.000 years ago over 10,000 planets; You have to defeat him.
• 4 minutes of gameplay footage from the show floor. This is the full length version of our previous video
  
  

Latest News

• Up next on Gametrailers Live Stream TV is SWTOR. Watch the stream here.
• Razer, maker of gaming peripherals, has created SWTOR themed gaming gear. They have a trailer and images of it on their site and there is also a contest going on. We will have more on this once we talk to Razer ourselves.
• There was a Live Show on Gamepost before Daniel Erickson did his Live Stream for the fans. Here’s a link to the Youtube recording of the Gamespot Live Show (Gameplay and comments included)
• Ask A Jedi has posted their gameplay video footage here
• Massively has an article up about their hands on experience.

Recap of live stream with Daniel Erickson

• Tatooine is absolutely huge. Even with a mount it took a while to get from one place to another
• Blizz is a Jawa companion that only Bounty Hunters receive. He is a DPS gadgeteer.
• Companions have their own equipment screen, but not all of them change their look (like the Jawa companion). Those that don’t change look with gear have special “different look kits” that we’ll here more about soon
• Player mounts (vehicles) have different designs, speeds and cost
• There are Sarlaac in the game and you can chuck people into them. Whether they were thinking PvP or PvE is unclear.
• Droid companions get their own unique type of armor plating, as in the KOTOR series
• There is one more warzone that has not be announced and that people will be excited about because it is “special”.
• Tatooine is visitable by all classes, Dune Sea will be a huge PvP server hotspot
• When you die, there is a Medical Probe option that revives you exactly where you died. Upon revival you have 12 secs of Ultra-Stealth that no one can see.
• You can not level purely through PvP

Due to the previous post getting humongous I have decided to create the Part 2 of our live blog. Hope you stay with us because we still gave about 4 hours of coverage left.

Breaking News

• First Gameplay video from E3
  
• JAWA COMPANION
  
• Live stream of Tatooine with Daniel Erickson and Stephen Reid has started at this page (2:05PM PDT)
• Patrick Buechner Marketing VP of Bioware and Dr Ray Muzyka will be hitting the SWTOR booth stage in 15 minutes (via twitter)(11:50AM PDT)
  
  Click for full size

•  First official image of the SWTOR booth (via Stephen Reid) (11:40AM PDT) (updated with image @2 at 12:00 PDT)
  
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Click here to read older and less important entries (the post got too long)

E3PO is the official twitter tag for SWTOR coverage of E3

Today marks the official beginning of the 2011 Electronic Entertainment Expo. If you think that it will be hard to top the epic SWTOR trailer “Return” you might be wrong. What we have in line from E3 is a full day of end game, vehicle, Tatooine and hands on experience news. Here’s a chronological list of things to expect:

• EAGamer tweeted the following (link):
  

  If you are at #E3 be at the @EA booth at 12:30 sharp on Tues for a special @SWTOR experience you won’t want to miss. @biofeed #E3PO

  None else talked about this early, 12:30, announcement so we are curious if this was a wrong time conversion or a real event.

• There will be a live stream from the show floor and EA booth at 2PM PDT. Being show is SWTOR gameplay and there will be a Q&A session with one of the developers. They are labeling this event as “Exclusive Tatooine reveal” so I am guessing we will see Tatooine gameplay (DUH).
• We are promised images and video from the show floor throughout today from official sources so keep an eye out on our own coverage as well as official swtor.com site.
• Interviews and hands on sessions for fan sites will start at around 5PM PDT and we can expect to hear first impressions at about 7PM PDT.

A lot of people think that the “Return” trailer should not be the only awe inspiring news coming from Bioware about SWTOR. A lot of fan hopes are riding on what will be revealed today. We will be with you every step of the day with our man at the convention and us Live Blogging all the latest news as it happens, so make sure you check back in really soon, because our coverage of 2011 E3 is officially about to start.

Omg is what I have to say at this point.  This town is not what I am accustomed to as a person who lives in the woods and normally has deer and squirrels for company.  This city is insanely busy and is definitely on the go.  I got here a few hours ago and got set up in the hotel then decided to walk to the con center and get my media pass and scope the scene out.

The show floor is buzzing with activity and forklifts!  Everywhere you look they are setting up booths and unpacking crates everywhere.  I was about to get run over everywhere I turned, almost like a game of frogger or something.  First order of business was getting to the media room and checking that out and getting my pass printed up.  That was very painless and took less than 5 minutes.  Media room looks nice and cozy I imagine I will be spending a lot of time in there.

Second order of business was locating the way to the South Hall and the EA booth.  Found it fairly easy as it is right there as you enter the hall.  I was walking around for about an hour looking for any familliar faces from the Bioware staff but no such luck.  I was able to sneak in a take this pic of a big screen they had set up, until I was kindly told to please exit the room and no more photos just yet 🙂

Exclusive Photos of the SWTOR booth

Click for full size image

Click for full size image

I pleaded with the lady and told her I had people that needed to see this info!  She smiled and said “not yet they don’t”  Well I guess the bulk of it will have to wait for tomorrow, for now I am going to snuggle up with my large meat lovers from Domino’s and see what it is that I missed today while flying.  Don’t even get me started about the flight in that was awful too, and the wifi at this hotel? OMG what else can go wrong!

Till tomorrow when all the action starts, this is Swtorcrafter signing out!

News is already starting to come in from E3 although it hasn’t even started yet! Unfortunately, a lot of sites are reporting wrong information so stuff like 4-man raids and experience with the Operation: Eternity Vault are all wrong. This puts a taint on what information is actually correct and what is a product of reporter confusion. My best guess is that some members of the press were invited to play Talar V flashpoint and got to play the Origin worlds (as is said in the machinima.com interview with Daniel Erickson). Everything else you might read is reporters getting confused in between what they played and what they heard will be talked about on the show floor.
 
The following interview Machinima did with Daniel Erickson is a nice intro into what is happening. Nothing new is revealed but it is always nice hearing DE talk (yes, I’m a fanboi).

The next piece of information I am not sure about. Kotaku released an article about the first impression of the game and mentions the Raid content. There have been some questions raised about the validity of information in this article, but some of it seems valid.
 
I hope we’ll sort all of this confusion out by this time tomorrow when people that know what they are doing will be reporting from the show floor.
 
On that note I leave you with an image of our very own SWTORCrafter’s E3 Media badge that he just got at the LA Convention Center.

Several screenshots have just been released as part of the E3 2011 SWTOR media kit. They include in-game screens of Tatooine, Alderan “scenario” (all of these are entitled Ulgo .. make your own guesses here) and Vehicles (player mounts). Here are the screens:

Tatooine Screenshots

Alderaan Screenshots

Vehicle Screenshots

 

 
June 6. 2011. is the date when last of the trilogy of cinematic trailers for Star Wars: The Old Republic got released. The name of the trailer is “Return” and it is arguably the best of the three and probably the best piece of Star Wars cinema since the movies. This will also be the intro cinematic that you will see once you start up the game.