It seems that Press has been beta testing The Old Republic recently. Guess what – they will talk about their experiences with the game starting tomorrow. It was first mentioned on IGN that tomorrow at 9AM PDT you can expect a pile of new content and then Monday (24th) to Friday new article each day (news spotted at Darth Hater). It has been confirmed now by Stephen Reid, Bioware Senior Community Manager, that this is in fact true and that tomorrow we can expect loads of articles all over the web. Here’s a quote:

• As others have noted, we have a press embargo on #SWTOR dropping tomorrow. We’ve had press in for a while. Testers are still under NDA.
• That means if you’re in testing, you’re still bound by NDA. Only press who have been admitted will be sharing their impressions.
• Watch the @SWTOR account for retweets of coverage btw.

We’ll also try and gather all the press coverage in one convenient post for you to browse through, but all of that tomorrow 9AM PDT. Gonna be a hard wait for hardcore fans. In the meantime – we give you the facebook image of the week just to spice this article up with some media and because this image is actually very cool. It represent a trooper in some kind of very large hall (apparently it is The Gormak King’s Hall) running towards what could be a King’s throne (perhaps the said king is present as well). This feels like an instance footage to me.
 

Compared to the excitement of the past 10 days it seems as if though today is a rather slow news day when it comes to SWTOR. Being Wednesday we got the above screenshot released on the official TOR Facebook page.
 
In other news … BioWare’s Alexander Freed will be signing his new Dark Horse Comic publication Star Wars: The Lost Suns. Yes, that is the cool one with Satele Shan kicking ass on the cover. The signing will take place in Austin Books & Comics at ‎4:00PM Saturday, June 18^th.
 
There’s a new episode of Mos Eisley Radio out – number 41. They have Larry Everett,SWTOR columnist from massively.com, as a guest. The show is a bit on the long side, two hours, but it is Zach and if you don’t love Zach by now you will after listening to his podcasts.
 
There was a glitch in the official swtor.com forums that redirected you to main page after you post. Trolls were not happy. Let me ask you; when trolling a troll is that a good thing or still a bad thing?
 
Told you … slow news day.

A few minutes ago Star Wars The Old Republic reached another milestone. The number of like the official page on Facebook has reached 300000 likes. As a reward, a new screenshot of a Sith Inquisitor readying his double bladed light saber for battle has been released. For a game not even yet released, not bad to have so many likes.
 

Click for full size (1600x900)

 
While we’re on a subject of facebook and SWTOR screenshots … Each wednesday there’s a screenshot released on the official SWTOR Facebook page and this week’s screenshot features a secret Imperial base.

Click for full size (1600x900)

Facebook image #11

Yesterday was Star Wars day (May the Fourth be with you…) and beside the Blue Ray version of all Star Wars films being announced we had a lot of TOR related news. European version of game testing has been announced. Conference call between EA financial management and the investors has been held and SWTOR was mentioned. This also produced an official release window for the game to be moved to the second half of 2011.
Click here to read about these news items in more detail

Official SWTOR page on Facebook got 250.000 “likes” several weeks ago. In celebration of this milestone Bioware decided to start releasing “Image of the week”, Facebook exclusive screenshots and concept art from the game. The first three images were of Ord Mantell’s volcanic mountain ranges, a Zabrak Inquisitor and a screenshot from a warfront clash. You can see these images in the gallery bellow or by visiting the official SWTOR Facebook page.

At the same time, in celebration of the upcoming PAX East, fansite The Galactic Struggle released first in their series of class wallpapers. This one is dedicated to the Republic Trooper and really looks awesome and you can view it in our gallery bellow or visit The Galactic Struggle (aka KOTORMMO.net) by clicking here.

For the pure awesome section of this post we would like to recommend reading an article by Torocast’s Eric Musco entitled “Pick Me, I’m Viable!”. It discusses the recent official forum discussion about a DPS spec for Jedi Knight that had several posts from Georg Zöller, Principal Lead Combat Designer. Eric wrote a great article about how a proper implementation of DPS spec could be handled and after trying to find holes in his logic I must say that his solution is the most awesome one. I just hope Bioware is thinking along the same lines. Go ahead and read the article by following this link here.