I wanted to give you an overview of news that have come out of this year’s San Diego Comic Con and SWTOR’s presence at the event. As all of you probably know Bioware held a panel dedicated to The Old Republic on the first day of ComicCon and there is also a Bioware Base setup in a hotel near by the convention center where many fans are able to get their hands on the game and experience other games Bioware has to offer. I would like to suggest that you closely monitor www.torwars.com and www.darthhater.com because they are the only fansites reporting live from the event and they have the most up-to-date news available. Here’s a summary of things we’ve learned so far.
 

July 21st – midnight PDT – Pre-Order launch

Official SWTOR site had a pre-order page made available with all the details on how to obtain a copy of digital standard or collector’s editions of the game or standard and CE boxed version. A number of well known MMORPG sites have had an advertising campaign for the pre-orders launched at the same time.
 

July 21st – San Diego Comic Con Bioware and LucasArts panel

• For the first time the opening crawl for one of the classes (Sith Warrior) was shown to the general public. (absolutely epic – watch in Part 1 video from TorWars here)
• No duplicate missions in class stories
• Jedi consular companion Nadia revealed for the first time (she is romancable)
• Higher level vehicles shown looking much better than segways
• There will be 19 major worlds (that means we should expect two more planets revealed?)
• You can customize companion characters, from clothing, weapons, and even their skin color, hair color and facial features
• They are testing adding tactics options to companions (like the AI system seen in Dragon Age)
• 900 voice actors have been working on the game across all languages
• There will be bonuses for people that reroll that they will talk about later (it is assumed that this is the rumored Legacy system and that you will get additional customization and race options if you have a level 50 character and roll a new character)
• Hyperspace travel between planets will take seconds (there was an idea it should take minutes, but dismissed after testing)
• It would take ~30 minutes to run across Tatooine
• Beta testing weekends start September and “huge” numbers of people will be able to join
• Stephen Reid put his Conductor’s hat on and said the following
• Release date window is now moved from second half of 2011 to Holiday 2011
• All participants of the panel got pre-order codes that will give them early access. They will still have to purchase the game tho.

 

General things learned from Q&A sessions and interviews

• By all accounts you will be able to respec your advanced class at some point in the game. First respec will be “easy”, but after that it will be very difficult to respec advanced class
• The boxed collector edition owners will have access to a VIP area that will hold the special CE vendor that will sell items for in-game credits. These items will have different looks than similarly powered items you can get in the game as drops or rewards.
• pre-order Color Stone should be yellow colored (yellow core with a blck glow?)
• shards (instanced versions of a certain area where two people would be standing in the same place yet be on a different “shard”) is available as a technology and they will reluctantly use it if they need to help initial launch.
• Swtor works very well on MACs with bootcamp
• Companioncan not die anymore, unlike what we heard before. “…don’t want players to lose companions and have them gone forever.

 
This compilation of information was done thanks to articles and live blogs by Newsarama and TorWars.
 

Tags: ComicCon, companions, vehicles