Swtorcrafter Bounty Hunter!

About the author,

Swtorcrafter is a crafter at heart, dating back to the start of the Ultima Online beta.  It was there that he developed his love of massively multiplayer online crafting systems, in game economies and fan site creation.  It was there in that realm that he was first introduced to what it was like to play online with other people instead of just a single player PC game.

It was a grand six years, the longest he has been in any one MMO since.

He has searched countless realms searching for that feeling again, sometimes finding satisfaction, sometimes not.

Now as he grows older he decides it is time to “go all in” one last time to try to find that perfect anvil, the crafting system of his dreams, and the community to share his thoughts and insights with.

*Enter stage right*

The Game:  Star Wars The Old Republic MMO by Bioware.

The Community:  www.swtor-life.com

*fingers crossed*

Tags: armormech, armstech, Artifice, beta, biochemist, bioware, community, companions, crafting, crew skills, Diplomacy, game, gameplay, Gathering, massively multiplayer online, mission skills, MMO, Slicing, star wars, star wars the old republic, swtor, trade skills, treasure hunting

It is Holiday season and if anything we expect to see less news. Instead, we get a Thursday update (and the power in charge are promising a Friday update as well!). I guess Santa is making his rounds and visiting SWTOR fans as well :). Check out the video that was released on Gamespot a few hours earlier showcasing the Republic Trooper class.

Tags: republic trooper, trailer, video

Several major gaming magazines and web sites have participated in a special event held by Bioware, where they were able to sit down and play Star Wars The Old Republic for 5+ hours and experience the game the way MMO is supposed to be experienced (not 15-60 minute gameplay sessions we heard about so far). Reviews are generally favorable and most of the reviewers finally confirm what Bioware has been emphasizing for so long – story does bring a new dimension into the gaming experience and it does make this game stick out.

Things to note from all the articles I’ve read so far is that you get to forge your own lightsaber at level 10 and are faced with a mini boss encounter at that point (like we saw in that PAX video). Some of the reviewers even managed to leave Tython and get to Coruscant. There is a flashpoint while traveling to Coruscant where you are faced with a moral dilemma to save some engineers and take a harder route in order to save the attacked ship, or flush the engineers into space but repair the ship faster. All of the flashpoints can be played with a group and the content scales with the group’s size.

Here are some quotes and links to articles I found more interesting out of the bunch:

Curse:

I often find myself concerned with being “hooked” by early starting experiences after the Age of Conan debacle in which 1-20 was amazing and then the rest of the game lackluster, but Tython felt like a small sampling of an even greater experience. It easily rivals the Goblin and Worgen starting experiences found in World of Warcraft: Cataclysm, and in some ways tops them thanks to the questing system.

IGN:

I’m told by one Jedi trainer to keep an eye on a young couple. It seems they might be in love, an emotional bond considered dangerous amongst Light Side saber-wielders. I track them down, learn their love to be true and am faced with a decision. If I turn them in, I get the standard quest reward and Light Side points. But if I decide to keep their relationship a secret, I get the bonus of a lightsaber crystal. Since there’s no reloading the game in an MMO, these decisions are permanent, and I find I’m actually spending time thinking about how I want to treat these characters instead of blindly focusing on amassing money and experience.

TOROCast:

It was not an easy fight, and it really proved to me that they can make the one on one battles feel heroic too. At one point I charged towards him and used my “Force Wave” ability in the hopes of pushing him back and down to the ground, but at the same time he stomped on the ground! The result was my companion, him, and I, all hurling back in opposite directions just like Obi-Wan and Anakin in their duel on Mustafar. I eventually took him out, but not before getting down to around five percent health even after using a stim pack during the fight.

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)

Tags: level cap, PvP, warzone

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

Tags: 4koma, comic, Daniel Erickson, demotivational, yonkoma

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).

Tags: announcement

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.

Tags: comic, leak, speculation

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.

Tags: Alderaan, PvP, trailer, video, warzone