I loved the galaxy map in Mass Effect. It was just Sci-Fi enough to make my nerdy senses tingle. We heard before that there will be a similar map in The Old Republic as well. This Friday update brings us an unexpected new feature on the official Holonet portion of swtor.com site – an interactive Galaxy Map. This is probably a preview of the map we will find in the game, only you view it in your browser. The interactive map features each of the planets we will be able to visit in-game together with all the information and videos that we could find on “plain old regular” web pages about those planets. There is also a special section dedicated to personal spaceships each of the classes will be getting. You can view details about each of the spaceships as well as look at their 3d models (and rotate them to see every detail from every angle). Although this is just a fluff update, I enjoyed it nevertheless. The feature is just that cool.
 

Tonight via the @SWTOR account on twitter I was made aware that Bioware is advertising a sneak peek at the Friday update, a Developer Dispatch having to do with companions.

It is a great one in my opinion, over seven minutes of some of the developers talking about companions and the mechanics revolving around them.  Such people as James Ohlen, Daniel Erickson, Georg Zhoeller, and more make this one of my favorite dev dispatches to date.

It is an interview done by Gamespot, very well done and full of information indeed.  It talks about customization options, companions with levels and the ability to level them, and many more goodies.  If you haven’t seen it yet I highly recommend going to see it or you could just wait till tomorrow……..

I thought not, well, here it is.  😉

Today on the official forums we got this update from Chris Collins,

As promised, we have an update on the batch of Game Testing invites being sent to players in the EU.

After a lengthy discussion here at the BioWare offices, the decision has been made to postpone the proposed Game Testing invites for EU players for a number of reasons.

Firstly, there’s a new build of the game on the horizon. This is a major build, meaning there will be character wipes and a new client to download. As you may be aware, the current client download is around 27GB in size. If we were to invite players en masse today, those players would have to download the entirety of the client to access the game. There’s every chance that later this week, the service will go offline and this new version will be rolled out, meaning everyone currently in Testing will have to not only download the entire client again (another 27GB download), but will also have their characters erased and have to start afresh. This is a relatively large amount to download in such a short space of time and not an experience we want new testers to be exposed to.

Secondly, this new build will bring about the first localised versions of Star Wars: The Old Republic, which means those of you that speak French and German will have the chance to play the game in those languages, for the first time ever. We’re extremely excited to be able to offer this to our players and as such, we’re keen to get a lot of feedback from European testers in particular.

For those of you that may have missed the messages we put out on the subject already, last week saw a number of issues arise with key systems that prevented us from sending out invites to EU players. Had everything gone to plan, we would have been able to offer two weeks of testing time to new users. However, given the issues that arose, this was physically not possible.

So while we understand that this news may not be what a lot of you wanted to hear today, we hope that you’ll understand our position. Given the news of this new build, it’s now more important than ever that we invite European players into the Game Testing environments, so you have my word that this batch of invites will happen, it may just mean you just have to wait a little longer.

It’s also important to remember this is just the beginning. In the future, we’ll be inviting more and more testers to the EU Game Testing environments as well as future Game Testing weekends. So even if you’re not invited to this next round of testing, there will still be plenty of chances to get involved.

As ever, as soon as I get any firm news around the matter, I’ll make sure to update everyone.

For this Friday’s update we were treated to a video from GamesCom of the play through of the Eternity Vault, operations raid, narrated by Dallas Dickenson. This raid or as Bioware likes to call them “Operation” looks like a blast. Groups of 8 or 16 players Republic and Empire alike will discover this mysterious location on the planet Belsavis and attempt to confront ancient force-wielders and other serious contained prisoners that who’s release could threaten the entire galaxy.

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These class progression trailers are immense fun. They are one of the few things forum trolls do not hate or fuss much about, which just goes to prove my previous sentence. There was a big squeee in SWTOR Life virtual office because 80% of staff are planning to play Bounty Hunters at launch. SWTORCrafter even managed to play the first levels of it during the Fan Site Summit, so you can check his hands on impressions to complete your overall impression of the class.
The progression trailer shows some great footage of new armor and skills. I particularly liked the last armor they show in the video. It is very “savage” looking. There’s flamethrower AOE-ing, carbonite freezing, rocket launching, jetpack flying, knife in face action all over the place in the video and I am sure you will enjoy it. I have one objection though. I know they’ve done this only to show the skills and that action is a bit staged, but I still can’t get it out of my head. There is no way in hell that anyone or anything, including Bounty Hunters, can one shot Jedi (padawan or not).
 

As part of this Friday’s update, Bioware treated us with the Sith Warrior Progression video. The star of the video is a Sith pureblood and we can see how his skills, armor and looks change as he gets more powerful. In all honesty this is the best looking progression video we have seen so far, especially the high level armor the Sith Warrior gets to wear. If I may be honest I think that is probably the best looking armor I have ever seen in any MMO so far.

 
A funny anecdote about this video is that we got to preview it at last week’s Fan Site Summit. They wanted to release this video as part of last Friday update, but they missed the deadline by 30 minutes and had to delay it for this week. I really don’t mind, because a trailer this awesome is rewarding just as long as everyone gets to see it, no matter when.

click here to read more about the User Interface article that was also released

Going through all the blog posts and tweets and everything else has left me exhausted. The amount of information given in this last Friday Update is staggering if you think about it, as it is something actual about our classes we are playing at launch. In the bigger picture, if you look at it like I do, it really breaks down class roles, and that leads to the reality of how close we actually are to finally playing this game. With all of this, I am going to try to dissect some of this information in relation to the Bounty Hunter.

Diving straight in, I am going to start with this quote below:

Choosing an Advanced Class is very important in The Old Republic, as within your Advanced Class, your character will reach their full potential. Your Advanced Class choice dramatically alters the gameplay experience of your base class by providing access to two exclusive skill trees per Advanced Class, with a third being shared between both Advanced Classes.

So how I take this is that this plays out like any other MMO so far, even the venerable Warcraft and how their Talent trees used to be when it wasn’t so restricted. This basically say “Hey, pick the AC you want, you still get the base class abilities of the class itself, thus this being the Bounty Hunter. You can even place some points in the other AC. So, just like WOW, we get 3 talent tress to mess with to fine tune the type of player we want to be and how we play.

Now, as much as I hate “cookie-cutter” builds on classes, I don’t see a way Bioware can stop this. Some abilities are going to be better than others and there will be those that will probably force those upon you depending on the role you pick. With this in mind, I hope that Bioware gives us the “Dual Spec” option so that we can have 2 builds based on what we are doing (Soloing/Group).

Something else I picked up on is this:

As you level up, your character will gain abilities from three sources:

• Through trainers, from their base class (e.g. Sith Warrior)
• Through trainers, from their advanced class (e.g. Marauder)
• Through skill points spent in the skill trees of their Advanced Class

So no longer is it the run to one trainer and you’re done. We now have to hit up the Base Class (Bounty Hunter) but we also have to fine the AC trainer that we are playing, in my case which will be the Mercenary. This is interesting as unless these are always grouped up, you have to make sure to remember where each are to make sure all of your abilities are up to par.

Now the fine folks over at Bioware even gave us the break-down on the roles for the Bounty Hunters:

Bounty Hunter Advanced Classes

Mercenary (Roles: Mid – Long Range Damage Dealing, Healing)

PowerTech (Roles: Close – Mid Range Damage Dealing, Tanking)

• As previously announced, the Bounty Hunter’s Mercenary Advanced Class now features the ‘Bodyguard’ skill tree, allowing this iconic class to fill the role of a medic if desired.
• The ‘Advanced Prototype’ skill tree, shared between both Bounty Hunter ACs, now features an upgrade to the base class flamethrower, which allows the player to rotate while using the ability.

We now see how the Bounty Hunter breaks down. Mercenary breaks down into a DPS/Healer role and the Powertech breaks down into a DPS/Tank role. Now for all you WOW’ers out there, Bounty Hunters look to have the possibility of being Paladins of Swtor.

Those that are going the Tank Bounty Hunter will also have that DPS chance of speeding up their leveling without sacrificing the Tank aspect of it. It also plays

I, like many, think this last update was a great one. it really moves use one step closer to that fateful date where we all get to jump in game and put all this information we have been hoarding for so long to the test. In regards to the Bounty Hunter, playing a main healer and knowing I have DPS choices to help in the leveling process make me very happy as well.

I am waiting for one more week before I pronounce it as official, but it seems that Bioware is starting their pre-release information flood. Friday updates are becoming more informational and we’re starting to see mid-week updates as well. Coupled with the events season it promises to be an information filled summer for SWTOR fans. What this Friday update talks about specifically is how the design of advanced classes changed since they were first talked about and what Bioware based those changes on. There is a detailed rundown of all the advanced classes in their current state, given by Georg Zoeller, Principal Lead Combat Designer. We now fully see 3 healing and 3 tanking builds present. Very interesting thing to see is the choice they made with the Jedi Consular and Sith Inquisitor. These classes can spec so they can be healers or tanks (tanking abilities have been added in the meantime; since the last AC info was released). Since both these classes were basically cloth users I wonder how they made them tanks. High evasion plus heals to get aggro? I don’t see them as paladins either. I must admit I am curious to see how this works out.

What I have a feeling Bioware did is incorporate your classic trinity roles into the most commonly used classes; Jedi Knight and Consular and Sith Warrior and Inquisitor (or as you’d call them – force users). The other classes are getting non standard trinity options or what some would call soft trinity classes. So we get a ranged tank, healing rogue and a healing “hunter” (ranged rogue). Just the prospect of discovering how these “new” roles function is exciting for me.

Friday update also goes over the decision making process through showing two images created through metrics Bioware gets from test servers and game testers. The images show a three-dimensional map with all the spots gamers died at and a smaller two-dimensional map showing where people thread the most and what places are fatal for their adventure. That image alone helped Bioware determine that Smugglers were having problems in the areas of their primary class story and were able to tweak the difficulty. I must add that the 3D image looks like what is known among game programmers as representation of geodata. Geodata is map data of X, Y and Z coordinates of the game level that determines what players and other level stuff (foliage, buildings, NPCs, etc.) stand on and can’t “fall through”.

Kathy from Corellian Run Radio compiled a nice list of things we’ve learned from this developer blog so go ahead and check it out.

As part of this Friday Update we get a surprising new feature. It is a video showing progression of a class from the very beginning with some early combat, through advanced class branching and finally we realize that the character is capable of awe inspiring feats as it reaches its full potential. The honor to be featured this way goes to the Jedi Knight (according to some sources the most popular class among game testers). It was very fun to see how the Jedi Knight goes from practice sword to light saber and how armor looks better and better as the character gains more experience. Also, I must say I am amazed by how epic both advanced classes feel and look with their final armors. You can check out the official Friday update page here or watch the video bellow:

Image from Mos Eisley Radio

Penny Arcade Expo in Boston is only several hours away and excitement among The Old Republic fans is mounting. Things are not being made any less difficult by officials at Bioware and they keep adding fuel to fire. We first had an awesome update last Friday with plethora of information on the Bounty Hunter and the Deceived novel. We got surprised on Wednesday by the Guild HQ application on the official swtor.com site (10.000 guilds have registered in these two days). The latest news is that Firday update, that Bioware has been doing for SWTOR every Friday for almost 2 years now, will be done live from the show floor. Official SWTOR Twitter account invited fans to:

… join us at 10:15am EST at Booth 912 and help us kick off #SWTORPAX

The wording of this announcement is very suggestive and the fact they chose #SWTORPAX to be their hash tag feels as if their news is going to be so big that PAX East this year will be remembered by SWTOR news. It might just be the starving fan in me seeing things though.

The other fact is that fans and members of fansites have already started arriving in Boston and there are some images already being available. You can see what the press badge looks like bellow (image from Vall of Tor Syndicate) and the image at the top of this article is actually a look at SWTOR booth that will host the big announcement tomorrow.

Keep your eyes pealed to SWTOR Life all throughout tomorrow and while the event lasts because we will be scouring for news and footage non-stop to bring you as much coverage as we can. Temporarily we added Twitter feeds in our sidebar to keep you updated with the latest news from fansite attendees as well as discussions tagged by the official SWTOR PAX East hashtag #SWTORPAX.

Image courtesy of Tor Syndicate