After the initial announcement of the start of beta weekends at PAX Prime there were still many unanswered questions that remained. Stephen Reid, Senior community manager, tweeted some of the final answers just now. Here’s a summary of the most important information pertaining to the first SWTOR beta weekend:
Most likely, all of the invites for the first beta testing weekend have already been sent out. If you haven’t received an email yet or it is not in your spam folder you will not get in this weekend. (source)
No EU testers have been invited for the first beta testing weekend (however a huge batch of beta testers from Europe will be invited in the next few days to regular Game Testing)
NDA is still in effect so people should not talk about the game impressions in public
The First Beta weekend starts on Friday, September 2nd
As it stands now, people that were invited for the first beta weekend will not partake in subsequent beta weekends
Invited players are being picked at random from those that applied for testing at swotr.com
Pre-Order status has no effect on your chance to be invited to the beta testing weekend
One of my absolute favorite reveals of Pax Prime came from the Sunday presentation in the main theater. Of course Darth Hater was there and they did a outstanding job of covering it for us that could not attend, they brought us the scoop on what the Developers are referring to as open world pvp. It looks fun, it looks exciting for sure!
One of the nice little tidbits that I just found that came out of PaxPrime this weekend thanks to Kristen Archer of Torwars.com was this tasty little morsel about the possibility for gambling in Star Wars The Old Republic MMO. Courtesy of an interview that Video Nvidia did with Cory Butler. At about 3 minutes in we get this question and very interesting answer from Cory,
We have have very little in the way of new info when it comes to TOR of late. Huttball is the only thing since the map update, which in itself was not well received by the TOR faithful.
Before that you would have to cast your mind back to the 10th of June when we got the Game play Features news article. This is the last new info we had.
GamesCom did bring Huttball and for me one of the better features that TOR has to date, this was followed by a lack-luster PAX where we just had info that some may find new but these things have been said before.
During the Star Wars: The Old Republic panel at PAX Prime convention held in Seattle it was revealed that previously announced beta weekends in September will already start on the first weekend – September 2nd. There will be a huge wave of new beta invites going out for this beta weekend to new beta testers. This beta test will be held on a new server, different from the one being used for game testers currently in the beta. Huge number of people will be invited in all subsequent September beta weekends. You need to be signed up for beta testing on the official swtor site, if you want to have a chance for an invite into this beta weekend. We’ll see if we can get more news and details posted soon.
For this Friday’s update we were treated to a video from GamesCom of the play through of the Eternity Vault, operations raid, narrated by Dallas Dickenson. This raid or as Bioware likes to call them “Operation” looks like a blast. Groups of 8 or 16 players Republic and Empire alike will discover this mysterious location on the planet Belsavis and attempt to confront ancient force-wielders and other serious contained prisoners that who’s release could threaten the entire galaxy.
Sitting here last night playing the beta of the Neverwinter heroes facebook game, I happened to do my nightly stroll across the swtor.com web page on crew skills before I went to bed, just to check on my pretties you understand, when I saw that the rest of the blanks had been filled in. I have been waiting for this day and still it took me by surprise.
We’ve heard that it was demoed the first day of GamesCom 2011. Now we get to see the demo video by ourselves in glorious HD. The pit is the latest PvP warzone we are hearing about and it is the place where Huttball matches are being held. Hutball is a vicious sport played where two sides try to pass the ball across the opponents goal line. All moves are allowed including force lightning, stabbing and cheating. See for yourselves in this fun little video showcase of the Pit. I wonder if this is the PvP arena Daniel Erickson told us about in an interview at E3. He mentioned that it is so much fun punting your opponents into fire.
There are also two pieces of news you should all check out. First is a Q&A with Bioware’s good doctors Ray and Greg. They talk about beta weekends and raids and you can check it all out at Ask A Jedi.
There was apparently an impromptu Q&A session held on Twitter with Stephen Reid and Gabe Amatangelo straght from Germany. You can check out the full transcript at Tor Wars
