This concludes our live coverage of the EA Press Conference. We hope you enjoyed it. Keep a look out for more because we will have our very own SWTORCrafter reporting from the show floor starting tomorrow early morning.
Here is the trailer that was shown at the EA press conference and that you can currently view at Origin.com.
Breaking News
Stephen Reid just made a post on the official forums about the “Return” Trailer, about Origin service and its “Choose” trailer and the release date. Click here to read.
On the “Return” trailer that you can download from swtor.com there are words Intro Cinematic written on it. I guess this is what we will see when we first start the game
The name of the new SWTOR cinematic trailer is “Return” and you can view it HERE
There is an exclusive video featuring excerpts of footage from the new SWTOR cinematic trailer on www.origin.com! (12:06 PDT)
Here are some screenshots from the “Return” trailer while it uploads to Youtube so I can embed it properly onto the page.
For the rest please watch the trailer on the official site ;).
Latest News
While talking about SWTOR Greg zeschuk gave us a honest, heartfelt and personal view on the game. Ended his speech saying how they live The Old Republic. Coincidently, our site’s motto is living the Old Republic
What is being show now at the conference is NOT the new trialer, but a mashup of all three trailers. The new trailer “Return can be found on the official site.
Mass Effect 3 trailer starting the conference (12:30 PDT)
TorWars.com reports: 15 mins to EA showtime. CEO John Rittichello chatting with execs in front of stage. (12:27 PM PDT)
The name of the new SWTOR cinematic trailer is Choose(12:06 PDT) This turns out not to be true. Stephen Reid corrected us promptly.
Concerning that E3PO tag. It was first recommended to Stephen Reid by Adaram, avid SWTOR fan. Here’s a shout out to him!
TorWars.com is inside the Theatre where the Press conference will take place. Here’s a link to the image they posted on Twitter http://yfrog.com/h0tbpsusj
Stephen Reid and his friend E3PO (this is the official tag for all The Old Republic news on Twitter). http://twitpic.com/57xe2s (11:49AM PDT)
TorWars.com just tweeted an image of people waiting in line for the EA conference. I think I see the guys from AskAJedi.com and that one guy in the front is Zirak from Darth Hater (11:41AM PDT)
If you are at #E3 be at the @EA booth at 12:30 sharp on Tues for a special @SWTOR experience you won’t want to miss. @biofeed #E3PO (9:30PM PDT) Source
This is the page you will want to follow in the next couple of hours. We will be posting all the news we found before, during and after the EA press conference. News will be sorted latest on top of the post to older at the bottom of the page. We will be automatically refreshing the page every 5 minutes, but if you want to do it manually you can do that by using CTRL+F5 or CTRL+SHIFT+R in your internet browser.
February 1. was a big date for EA shareholders because that was the day when Electronic Arts Q3 2011 Earnings Conference Call was held and EA CEO John Riccitiello and CFO Eric Brown gave reports on how the past quarter went and what can be expected in the upcoming period. Among other things The Old Republic was discussed. TOR fans were expecting to maybe hear a more precise estimate of the release date in the form of we are expecting a rise in profits in this quearter because TOR gets released that day but none of that happened. The best we got was that TOR will ship in Fiscal 2012, but calendar 2011. Translated this means April 2011. – December 2011. Tell us something we didn’t know, eh? Here is a summary of other TOR related statements:
EA is incurring significant development costs for the Star Wars MMO
I will say the following things though, one is we previously described to folks that half a million subscribers or so the game is substantially profitable but its not the kind of thing that we would write home about it, anything north of a million subscribers, it’s a very profitable business.
The second thing that I would tell you is that the game is looking very good, a number of you will have seen it in a variety of our consumer shows, it’s only gotten stronger, we feel very good about the title. We’re currently testing it with a wide-scale consumer type thing but not sort of at the beta scale level-wise over the coming months.
Western markets, you know we estimate that the leading competitor has six-ish million subscribers, paying subscribers, and that they’ve got approximately half of the market that seems to be growing in the five percent per annum based on the number of subscribers. So call it 12 million people paying for subscription based gaming in the way that we review as competition. We’ve previously indicated that sort of a million subscribers or more rings our bell, that’s very well for us economically. So it’s our view that we can be very successful without fundamentally challenging the market leader, cause we think we’ll probably hit the smaller competitors harder when we get out there. Of course we have no particular ambition to be a distant number two, our ambitions are higher than that, but we’ve throttled back a little bit relative to our financial projections
I think what you’re pointing to is it might be getting tired after so many years. I don’t know that to be the case. I have not seen them announce that their western market numbers are coming down. But I do think that the market would be absolutely receptive to something fresh and new and differentiated. If you will, lightsabers vs. swords. I think there’s a marketplace for us here and we’re going at it aggressively
I would also like to reflect on a few things here. First is the best quote of the year “lightsabers vs. swords“. The second thing is something that I did not include in the important list above as it generally is not important, but I find it interesting in “the way industry works” sense. Here’s the quote:
… a fair amount of what you’re asking about is either subject to NDA with our partnership with Lucas …
Lucas Arts obviously has a great deal of control over what information gets released when. Keep that in mind the next time you whine about lack of information and blame it on George! I can’t remember where I read it but someone said that the best thing George Lucas could do to the Star Wars franchise is leave it to the fans and get his greedy paws off of it (opens his flame retardant umbrella and prepares for impending DOOM from fanboys).
Electronic Arts will be occupying a huge area at hall 6 with multiple games on display. There is a whole subsection reserved for Star Wars: The Old Republic. EA’s German site has a map of booth configurations as well as the schedule of events in the EA area. What I found interesting is that when you zoom in the SWTOR area you can clearly see 3 round tables with seats for 12 and computers all around. This looks like you will be able to get some hands-on experience with the game. Whether this will be the same demo people at E3 were able to play or we will be seeing new areas of the game (space combat perhaps?) remains to be seen.
Star Wars: The Old Republic show will be held each day at these times on the central EA stage:
TorWars.com just tweeted an image of people waiting in line for the EA conference. I think I see the guys from AskAJedi.com and that one guy in the front is Zirak from Darth Hater (11:41AM PDT)
