San Diego Comic Con 2010 is about to begin. Companies have been up all night setting up the booths and most devoted fans have been gathering since last night. We will be covering all The Old Republic news as they happen. Tomorrow is The Old Republic day with Bioware talking about writing the multi-player story for the Old Republic. There will also be a chance to meet Bioware devs at Dick’s Last Resort later in the day. In the meantime people setting up the booth have managed to set off the fire alarm according to their tweet. You can see some preview images we found at the official starwars.com site. If you are wondering who the redhead is – its Shae Vizsla, the bad ass Bounty Hunter from the “Deceived” trailer.
UPDATE: Meet the devs will not be held at a previously announced location. It has been moved to Fred’s Mexican Cafe in the Gaslamp district just a few blocks from the San Diego Convention Center.
We are hard at work with the site. I have a goal of making this little site you are visiting officially launched by the end of this week or, at the latest, start of the next week. We still have some content we want to prepare and release. I am pretty satisfied with the ASCII lightsaber generator and we have a couple more videos and a surprise coming up. This makes releasing news a bit hard to accomplish and there are newsworthy items out there, but, for now, please bare with me while we crunch through this last mile. As a reward for sticking with us here is an absolutely amazing SWTOR wallpaper that I came across at The Galactic Struggle. Enjoy:
Click to see big image
To justify the title of this post here’s a video of Vader doing his thing because he didn’t get his Swtor beta invite (and neither did we đ ).
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 âfightâ other beings within game world.
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.
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Gamespot released an exclusive video entitled “Composing the Music of Star Wars: The Old Republic”. It was released short after this Friday’s update that covered game’s music creation through a developer diary. More observant forum members noticed something special in the Gamespot video. There is a music sheet with clearly visible title “Corellia intro (of) Corellia bkgrnd_03”. It is being speculated that this means Corellia will definitely be a playable planet. I am sure this will be a thrill for our friends at http://www.corellianrun.com/ :).
The video itself talks about having 5 composers working on the game’s music, each composing for an entire planet and you can watch it bellow (let us know if you notice any other revealing details đ
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Yesterday was all about music on the official The Old Republic site. We first got a brand new developer’s dispatch video covering the music we’ll be hearing in the game and right after that we got to read the very first blog by Orion Kellogg, Audio Producer at LucasArts (awesome name btw). He begins his deb blog entry by quoting George Lucas no less and than he continues to talk about the voice acting, alien tongues, following in the footsteps of John Williams in regards to music and of course the creation of all the Star Wars sounds (in his own words: “the pew-pew of a blaster rifle”). You can read the full dev blog here.
To make yesterday the most awesome Friday update ever, Sean Dahlberg also announced the release of the seventh issue of Blood of the Empireâ˘. Teneb Kel finds himself beaten and bloodied in the aftermath of the Lenico colony’s destruction. Trapped on a strange planet, he must draw upon the ancient Sith arts in order to ensure his survival–and to learn the secrets he needs to resume his vendetta against Exal Kressh. Check out the latest issue of Blood of the Empire now!
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Another Friday means another update from our friendly community manager. This week we get another Developer dispatch video (no.7) discussing the music of The Old Republic. Beside creating 5+ hours of original music for the game we will also be able to enjoy some classics from the Knights of the Old Republic game as well as some of the legendary themes from John Williams. You can visit the official page here or read an excerpt from the article bellow:
The emotional experience of Star Wars⢠comes to life in new music created exclusively for The Old Republicâ˘. From soft melodies that ring in the forest of Alderaan to the magnificent booming of a battle scene on Ord Mantell, a talented team of composers, musicians and developers came together to create a magical score for the game.
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There has been a steady stream of news coming from Bioware in the past few days with the latest being the most interesting. As most of the fans already know, The Old Republic team will be attending San Diego Comic Con with their Friday, July 23rd, panel “Beyond Solo: Crafting the Multiplayer Story”. Sean Dahlberg, TOR community manager, just announced that they have something special to reveal, but in order to do so they are asking their fans to spread the word and have people “Like” their Facebook page or follow them on Twitter. The target numbers are 200,000 “Likes” on their Facebook page and 30,000 Followers on their Twitter. You can find the pages at:
Go, spread the word, tell your friends and subscribers to follow SWTOR. Do it for us poor fans thirsty of new information and while you are at it, you can find us on twitter at:
Let me be honest with you. I looked for and found the beta leaks. I was burning with curiosity. The footage was not spectacular, as it mostly showed things we saw before, but it did reveal some of the things we haven’t seen so far. Let me tell you why we haven’t seen them so far, because THEY ARE NOT FINISHED YET. It was glaringly obvious that some of the things were in beta stages and if they showed an image there saying “PLACEHOLDER” it would have the same effect.
This is what bothers me the most about this leak. Some other MMO player or innocent bystander will not go deep into analyzing the leaked footage and will say how Bioware is doing a poor job and that this game will suck. It feels as if this leak was created for just this purpose, to hurt the image of this game. It doesn’t feel as if it was made available to show us what the game is really about. Let me explain why. The things that look good and finished are the things we already saw previously from official sources. Some of the things we didn’t see so far felt unfinished. You can see great potential in some of them but all in all they were not too impressive from a finished game’s standpoint.
In light of all this, we here at Swtor Life, have decided to join the rest of the fansites and declare our resentment with the unapproved leaking of material from the game. We will not be posting, endorsing or supporting sites that post unauthorized materials in any way. We here declare that we will honor the Fansite agreement we’ve signed by creating this site.
To lighten the mood a bit, here’s a girl in a pink Darth Vader costume:
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:
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 weâre 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.
