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 Empire™. 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!

Tags: audio, Blood of the Empire, dev blog, webcomic

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 Republic™. 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.

Tags: friday update, music, video

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:

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/starwarstheoldrepublic
Twitter: http://twitter.com/swtor

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:

http://twitter.com/SwtorLife

Tags: SDCC

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:

Image via babiesmakingfaces.com

Tags: beta, darth vader, leaked footage

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:

That’s it for now. May you have a great week.

Tags: beta, community, humor, leaked footage, podcast, world cup

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 we’re 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.

Tags: beta, leaked footage

Following the announcement about the game testing ongoing a lot of questions have been raised by the community and Sean Dahlberg was quick to respond. Here are a few of the more interesting facts he brought forward, while you can read the whole post in this thread on the official forums.

• If you participate in one of the testing stages you might not participate in a follow up
• Tests are focused on a certain area of the game
• Game Testing Program is all about us validating the features and design of the game
• Testing is only in North America (for) now
• We definitely plan on opening up phases of Game Testing to other countries before we launch (and not as a last minute “Open” test).
• We didn’t announce that Game Testing Began today, we announced that it is underway… subtle difference but there is one.
• Post count does not weigh any in the decision of who gets into testing

First thing, what we announced is “Game Testing”. This is currently underway and will end near the release of the game and happen in a variety of stages. We will be inviting people to different stages and just because you get invited to one stage doesn’t mean you’ll be invited back to another one. Unlike testing that many of you may have participated in with other games, we aren’t looking for people to test “everything”. Each of our tests are focused on a certain or a set of goals and areas. We want people to have clear direction on what we’d like help evaluating.

Tags: beta, faq, game testing

The first thing that crossed my mind when I read the announcement about beta testing was: “I’d give my car to be in this!”. I started reading through the testing announcement thread and noticed I wasn’t the only one willing to give up something to be a part of the beta.

Yes I know, it is hard work and not just fun, but anticipation among us fans is so high that we’re borderline mad atm. It’s like holding a juicy steak just out of reach of a pack of wolves.

I’ve started a poll on the official forums with the same question. Visit here and tell me, would you give up a body part to participate?

It has been officially announced – Star Wars: The Old Republic beta game testing has begun! You can join the discussion on the official announcement here and here’s the complete post:

Game Testing for Star Wars™: The Old Republic™ is underway! Those selected to test will gain access to the game and be able to provide valuable feedback to help us tune particular areas of gameplay and begin the process of balancing and tweaking our content.

Game Testing is an on-going process being rolled out in several phases. These phases began with smaller, more focused tests with community members from North America, and later will expand to other territories. Users selected for the test program will be notified via email with more information on accessing the Game Testing Portal. If you’ve not been chosen yet, you may be selected in the next wave!

If you haven’t signed up already, it’s definitely not too late! If you’re not already a member of the Star Wars: The Old Republic community, click here to become one today! Be sure to check the box to indicate you are interested in becoming a tester. If you’re already a member, go to the Game Testing Portal to begin the sign up process. Note that you must be at least 18 years of age to accept the Game Tester Agreement.

Please keep in mind that there are no guarantees that you will be selected once you have completed the sign-up process. For more information about testing Star Wars: The Old Republic, take time to read the Game Testing FAQ.

We’re looking forward to your help in making Star Wars: The Old Republic a success!

Sean also added:

One thing to remember…

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. 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 we’re sharing with community members remains confidential.

Tags: beta, official

Me neither … but people at Darth Hater certainly do. The whole staff attended E3 this year and have been able to summarize their impressions in one 5 pages long article. This is so far the most concise gathering of interesting, hands on, information available on the whole internet. They got to play for a few hours and through several levels and were able to each play a different class. This gives us the chance to read their impressions on UI, flow of combat for each of the classes (5 total), AI, graphics and art style and much more. I especially was interested in how they felt about the Dialogue System since that is the biggest venture out of the MMORPG standards we are used to. You can see them being kind of careful in their comments on the dialogue system, but overall with positive opinions. I guess it is going to be one of those love it or hate it things.
Make sure you don’t miss this article.

While I’m on the subject of community news, there is a new podcast in the swtor universe (like we don’t have enough of those 😛 ). I liked it though because we have two girl gamers discussing the game instead of your regular geeky male Star Wars fans (don’t look at me). Corellian Run podcast Episode 1 has hit the interwebz. Good luck with the podcast girls.

Tags: ai, gameplay, hands on, podcast, ui