Machinima released a video interview with The Old Republic’s Lead PvP Designer, Gabe Amatangelo. They discussed in detail some of the PvP mechanics and what they’ll bring. Here are some highlights:

• There will be experience awarded for PvP
• There will be token awards to get “identifiable” gear (so you get recognized as PvP player)
• There are different levels of PvP gear (level 15 and level 50)
• Alderaan warzone usually lasts between 5 and 15 minutes
• Next warzone (derelict starship one) will have Assault type game mechanics

At the point of talking about whether there will be “seasonal updates” of PvP gear (so that it gets upgraded once first set of PvP gear gets “outdated”), Gabe Amatangelo mentioned that: “Yes there will be multiple level 50 PvP sets“. This leads us to believe that Level 50 is the max level we will be seeing in The Old Republic.

You can watch the interview below and the “multiple level 50 PvP sets” bit is around 2:22:

(Thanks @Adaram on Twitter for catching this)

Bioware just sent out another QR barcode image similar to the ones we mentioned earlier this week. There is again a binary code hidden within.

This translates to:

http://www.sis.gov.uk/output/sis-home-welcome.html

Guess what? This is the website of the British Secret Intelligence Service, better known to most as MI6 (yes the one where Mr. Bond works). the curent rumor is that the next Bioware game will be a multiplayer shooter type of game set slightly ahead of current time and will be done in fashion of Call of Duty and Bad Company. Can’t do nothing but wait it out until the Video Game Awards on December 11th to find out for sure.

Following last Friday’s update that focused on Crew Skills crafting system, Darth Hater released an interview with Lead Writer for The Old Republic, Daniel Erickson. During this, otherwise informational, interview it just so happened that a question was asked that didn’t make much sense. Did that stop Daniel? Watch the video and see for yourself:

The video was very inspirational for me and I decided to create several demotivational and 4koma comics in style of verydemotivational.com and comixed.com . Hope you enjoy them and I appologize in advance because this is going to be the longest post you will ever see on SWTOR Life. I hope it is worth it :).

Crafting Armor

Crafting Armor 2

Long comic is long

Yoda style

with real Yoda

for those that understand the context

In Soviet Russia version

Carbonite for the end

All Bioware Twitter accounts just broad-casted links to images containing bar codes that you can scan with your mobile phone. You can find them at http://yfrog.com/b737bp and http://yfrog.com/7bj78p . Codes, when scanned provide a string of binary numbers

1. 001101010011010100101110001110000011010000110101
2. 0010110100110001001100100011100000101110001101011011000001000110

I made a small PHP script that converts binary to decimal and than decimal to ASCII characters and this is what I got:

1. 55.845 (Google says its the atomic mass of iron)
2. -128.5°F

Some sites speculate that his means the announcement of Mass Effect 3 that will be set on Earth. We’ll keep you updated as we find out more.

You can see the teaser trailer for the Bioware announcement bellow:

Patrick Buechner, Bioware’s VP of Marketing Tweeted the following yesterday:

Bioware fans pay attention RT @geoffkeighley VGA rumors…We’ll share two world premiere announcements on Wednesday with many more to come.

Some assumed that this might be related to some Dragon Age or Mass Effect announcements, but the following tweet hints that it will be about The Old Republic:

I’m at BioWare Austin in Austin, TX http://gowal.la/c/2UCma

Two world premier announcements … here’s my speculation – Release date and Beta related announcements (just writing that down gives me a fangasm). So, what do you think will be announced in the next couple of hours?

(Cheers to Ask A Jedi for first spotting the tweets).

We are still digesting all the official news on crafting and PvP we got last week. Personally, I am content for at least a few more weeks because the last week reveal was just so major. Still, there are a lot of great SWTOR related, community created content out there that I had to bring your attention to some of the more important ones.

One of the people I follow on Twitter is Patrick Lambert aka. Darth Dendory and he has his own blog as well. The reason I want to mention him is the very cool SWTOR comic he is making. He is actually creating his comic with 3D models of a super sexy Twil’ek Sith and I would recommend you go through his comics because they are a lot of fun and he puts out a new one quite often.

Ask a Jedi stumbled across some really great news posted on a French site http://www.jeuxvideo.com. Apparently those guys sat down for 6 hours and played Jedi Knight and Jedi Consular. The exciting part of this is that this is the first time (as far as I know) that anyone got a chance to play these Jedi classes. The amazing thing is that the article describing the experience got pulled because the embargo on information is not lifted yet. Luckily, Ask a Jedi saved the article and they even translated it from French. You can read the full article here.

For the first time in months, I am anxious and wondering about what will the official Friday update bring tomorrow? In the meantime make sure to check out the SWTOR community created content.

In what is looking like one of the most epic Friday updates ever the new PvP Warzone Trailer got officially released by swtor.com. You can watch it bellow along with the screenshot gallery.

Officially a neutral world, Alderaan has become the focus of Republic and Imperial political maneuvering. Even as conflict between Alderaan’s noble houses threatens to turn into civil war, Republic and Imperial forces engage in a secret battle that could decide the planet’s fate. High in the mountains, both sides fight for control of Alderaan’s massive planetary defense cannon—a weapon powerful enough to devastate an enemy’s fleet and ensure domination over the planet’s skies.

The battle on Alderaan is our first detailed look at organized team Player vs Player (PvP) in The Old Republic™. To secure the planetary defense cannon, players must deplete the enemy transport ship’s shields, driving their forces to retreat or be annihilated. Players must work together to control the defense system’s artillery units if they are to protect their fleet and emerge victorious.

There is an Electronics Arts event being held in London, and as we reported earlier a big announcement for The Old Republic was anticipated at the event. Bioware delivered in a big way on this promise and gave us details on both crafting and PvP warzones.

SWTOR Crafting

Crafting will have three major groups – Gathering, Crafting, and Missions. For now, we have been presented with two professions in each of the groups:

Crafting system is completely innovated in comparison to what we are used to seeing in other MMOs. You will be able to use your companions for crafting! The “Crew Skill crafting system” means that you will be able to send your companions on crafting tasks and specialize them in certain crafting branches. Sending out your companion on a Treasure Hunt can bring you a rare item based on random number generator. Certain companions will excel better at certain professions than others (the example provided was Vette, Sith warrior companion, who will excel at Treasure Hunting). You will be able to send companions on crafting missions from anywhere in the world and you will be able to queue your tasks for them. It is still unclear whether different companions will be able to have different crafting tasks at the same time or you can have one task at a time (with multiple companions working on it), but I believe we will soon find out.
A very interesting mechanic was mentioned concerning gathering. If you have your companion with you adventuring; once you see something that you can gather, instead of moving your character there to gather, your companion will do it for you while you continue fighting or doing whatever you were doing.

For all you crafting buffs out there here’s a very interesting quote from the event:

It is a very robust system, and there are still some details that we haven’t revealed yet which I know players are going to be excited about. I will just say there are some mechanics to it that will allow players who are more involved in crafting to really get deeply involved in crafting and be appropriately rewarded for it.

SWTOR PvP Warzones

We received details on Alderaan’s warzone that was previously announced at E3 but without going into too much depth. The most important points are:

• 8 vs. 8 combat
• objective-based PvP with a goal of controlling an area
• rewards tokens
• rewards XP

The way this warzone will work is that each team starts at their drop ship in the skies. They have means of transportation to get to the ground. Once there they fight to get control over planetary’s defenses. Whoever controls the defenses starts firing on the other team’s drop ship. The winner is the team that destroys the other team’s dropship.

The other thing we learned is that each warzone will have different objectives and mechanics involved. For example, the next warzone that will be revealed will take place on a derelict starship and will have completely different mechanics than Alderan’s. Here’s a quote from Darth Hater’s original article that I found most interesting:

BioWare’s PvP designer Gabe Amatangelo said they wanted Warzones to fit in with the story element of the game. When they looked at PvP, they decided that banners, flags and points were “too game-y.”

These two reveals have once again changed our way of looking at this game once again. The crafting system is much more intricate than we initially though it will be. The warzones mechanics looks legit and fun from a PvP buff point of view. Everything is starting to fall right into place and we are now more excited about the game than ever before.

Apparently, The Old Republic team is in Europe and they just announced through their Twitter accounts that they will be announcing new details about the game soon. Whether this will be this Friday as part of the regular Friday updates or today remains unclear. Ask a Jedi reports that:

.. one of our sources spoke of another “special unannounced event” that would provide TOR fans with some new information before the end of the year

The special event is supposedly EA Winter Showcase in London. We all know that European players are hoping for announcement of EU Game Testing start, but we better hold back see what happens in the neext few hours. We’ll keep you posted as soon as we get more information.

There is a feeling of slight unrest within The Old Republic community as of late. We discussed the causes for this in the previous part of this article (which I recommend reading if you haven’t already, otherwise this part will not be so clear) and we’ll try to address some of the concerns in as unbiased manner as possible.

Is there really not enough time to release all information before release?

Lets assume that we have 22 weeks left before the game hits open beta and information is then released by everyone. I have made a list of things we should be receiving info on in the time left, based on what Bioware released so far and new game mechanics we all expect to see in the game:

• Week 1-4: Jedi Consular, Trooper, Bounty Hunter, Sith Inquisitor class trailer/info
• Week 5: Companion mechanics detailed info (all companions should be revealed through class reveals)
• Week 6: Playable species
• Week 7-9: Detailed PvP/battlegrounds information
• Week 9-11: Crafting
• Week 12-14: unrevealed planets (?)
• Week 15-18: End game reveals
• Week: 18-22: Various additional information

Click here to read the full Editorial article