There are some alien species within the Star Wars universe that anyone can recognize. You could show a picture of a Twi’lek, Wookiee, or Rodian to just about any random person on the street and they will be able to tell you that have seen them before, even if they can’t tell you their name. Yet there exists, in The Old Republic, several species that even some of more dedicated fans may have little to no prior knowledge of. Today we are going to take a look that the history behind one of those species, the Sith Pureblood. You will never see a Pureblood in the movies, and they don’t show up in very many of the games or stories in the expanded universe. Despite this, they are, in my opinion anyway, one of the most interesting species in TOR as their history is tied to the very beginnings of the Sith faction.

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Today in the land of yellow posts came a very important statement from Stephen Reid about the potential for scams in gaining beta testing access to SWTOR, and the truth behind it. I want to highlight this bit of information because I want to make sure all the community is aware of the possible risk involved with such a scam.

Read on

Today via Stephen Reid on the official forums and twitter we got an announcement from Bioware that they decided to re-invite the testers of the first and only (so far) September beta testing weekend.  Here Stephen gives us a great explanation to the reasoning and the situation behind the change of not inviting weekend testers back for another go.

Read on

Today via a tweet on twitter from @Rockjaw (Stephen Reid) we were pointed to a official statement on the dev tracker regarding the inclusion of same gender romance arcs with your companions. The statement reads as follows,

Due to the design constraints of a fully voiced MMO of this scale and size, many choices had to be made as to the launch and post-launch feature set. Same gender romances with companion characters in Star Wars: The Old Republic will be a post-launch feature. Because The Old Republic is an MMO, the game will live on through content expansions which allow us to include content and features that could not be included at launch, including the addition of more companion characters who will have additional romance options.

 

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The guys at tgnSWTOR on YouTube have made this awesome guide to starships in SWTOR.  It is definitely worth a view as it is a great piece of work. Stop on by their channel and give them some love and tell them thanks for all their awesome work.

((The RP XP With MJ #3))

Yulel threw her back against a wall and winced when she pinched her lekku against the hard stone surface. Drawing her blaster, she risked a peek around the corner. There were no
signs of the Republic Troopers who were chasing her. “Next time,” she muttered to herself, “You boys should get lighter armor.”

Slowly, the Twi’lek smuggler backed down the alley, blaster at the ready, and tried to force a mental map to surface in her mind, to give her bearings and direction toward the spaceport and her meeting with the Jedi Kendriss.

At a cross junction in the alley, she stopped and turned to look in every direction. The side alleys were dark and didn’t look to open back up into streets. They led to the service entrances of the businesses here. There was no way she could–

“You! Hold it!”

Yulel gasped and turned toward the trooper’s voice augmented through his helmet P.A. She raised her blaster and fired off a couple warning shots.

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Let me go ahead and say this right up front, I am a lore nut. To me the idea of spending an evening surfing the pages of Wookieepedia to add even more knowledge to my arsenal is an evening well spent, so I am very interested in how lore is going to affect The Old Republic once it is released. And don’t kid yourself; it is going to affect how the MMO plays out, and not just through the story. Like it or not, lore is going to affect gameplay in this title. It’s impossible to get around it; the lore behind the Star Wars universe is too massive and too important to fans for Bioware to sweep it under the rug when making decisions about gameplay. At the end of the day lore will probably be trumped by gameplay, but if you think it is not going to be taken into account you are sadly mistaken. Continue Reading »

Do you, like me, have questions surrounding the “weekend beta testing” or just “testing” in general?  Well you are in luck today folks because hot off the transmitter waves  we got this information from Stephen Reid;

Plus we now have an additional update from @Rockjaw on this info as well!

Read On——->

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Well after the news of the EU followers will be at long last getting some testing invites, Stephen Reid dropped the bombshell that there will be no beta for this coming weekend Sept 9 – 11. Also it should be noted that BioWare did not intend to send out beta invites for every weekend which we kind of amused would be the case.

Which is a shame as the 9th will be my 40th birthday, darn I’m getting old. I was in my mid 30’s when I started following TOR :'(

StephenReid

Hello all,

There is no Beta Testing Weekend scheduled for this weekend. There may be further Beta Testing Weekends during September, but we’re not going to guarantee it. The weekend that just finished was really our first dry run of Beta Testing Weekends as a whole, and we have plenty of data to crunch, and decisions to make before we start things up again.

Further to that, as Chris Collins explained in another thread, we are about to roll out a major new build for The Old Republic. That build won’t be ready for this weekend. Just as we did not feel it was a good decision to ask potential EU testers to download our client only to have to download it again, the same applies for this weekend.

That does not mean, however, that as soon as our new build is available we’ll be rolling out a Beta Testing Weekend immediately. As with any new build of the game, we need to get feedback from internal testing and our ongoing Game Testing program before rolling it out to a massive audience. That process takes a while, and that time varies depending on how testing goes.

We rolled out this previous weekend as a relatively small scale event; from now we will do bigger and bigger events, but that doesn’t mean it happens every weekend. When we do resume, we’ll be inviting many more people in.

While many of you are excited and anxious to know what’s happening regarding Testing Weekends, I want to point out that a lot of posts on the subject with a lack of corresponding posts from us does not mean that we’re not listening, or not aware of your interest. It shows your interest in the topic, which is understandably high, but we will not always be able to react instantaneously.

In the past couple of days we’ve been preparing a comprehensive FAQ regarding Game Testing Weekends as a whole, along with some details about the weekend that just happened. We’ll post that tomorrow – in all languages, as we know the subject is of interest to everyone.

So depending on how the real time testing goes with the new build we may or may not have more invites the week after. Fingers crossed everything goes smoothly or it could be a very long wait till TOR finally hits the stores.

Today on the official forums we got this update from Chris Collins,

As promised, we have an update on the batch of Game Testing invites being sent to players in the EU.

After a lengthy discussion here at the BioWare offices, the decision has been made to postpone the proposed Game Testing invites for EU players for a number of reasons.

Firstly, there’s a new build of the game on the horizon. This is a major build, meaning there will be character wipes and a new client to download. As you may be aware, the current client download is around 27GB in size. If we were to invite players en masse today, those players would have to download the entirety of the client to access the game. There’s every chance that later this week, the service will go offline and this new version will be rolled out, meaning everyone currently in Testing will have to not only download the entire client again (another 27GB download), but will also have their characters erased and have to start afresh. This is a relatively large amount to download in such a short space of time and not an experience we want new testers to be exposed to.

Secondly, this new build will bring about the first localised versions of Star Wars: The Old Republic, which means those of you that speak French and German will have the chance to play the game in those languages, for the first time ever. We’re extremely excited to be able to offer this to our players and as such, we’re keen to get a lot of feedback from European testers in particular.

For those of you that may have missed the messages we put out on the subject already, last week saw a number of issues arise with key systems that prevented us from sending out invites to EU players. Had everything gone to plan, we would have been able to offer two weeks of testing time to new users. However, given the issues that arose, this was physically not possible.

So while we understand that this news may not be what a lot of you wanted to hear today, we hope that you’ll understand our position. Given the news of this new build, it’s now more important than ever that we invite European players into the Game Testing environments, so you have my word that this batch of invites will happen, it may just mean you just have to wait a little longer.

It’s also important to remember this is just the beginning. In the future, we’ll be inviting more and more testers to the EU Game Testing environments as well as future Game Testing weekends. So even if you’re not invited to this next round of testing, there will still be plenty of chances to get involved.

As ever, as soon as I get any firm news around the matter, I’ll make sure to update everyone.