By popular request, we bring you another video from Gamescom 2010 hands on experience. It shows some gameplay from the trooper and smuggler as well as a cutscene of the Sith Inquisitor. There is a brief glimpse of very cool feature where the map goes transparent when you move your character. Hope you enjoy it.

In a thread we started on the official forums before GamesCom, we collected some question from the SWTOR community. There was an overwhelming number of questions and although we would like to be able to ask all of them we were happy to get answers to at least a few. The focus of GamesCom is Space Combat and advanced classes and in accordance to that we got to ask the following questions:

Will there be guild capital ships
Talked a lot among the design team. At launch NO, but popular feature with designers including Daniel Erickson (James Ohlen pointed at Daniel at that moment and Daniel gave a little smirk :))

Will there be interactive features in our ships besides the galactic map
Here’s word for word answer. You will get the whole answer on this question later on from our James Ohlen interview but as the most important answer of this question:
Crafting and workbenches will be inside the ship.

Will friends be able to travel from planet to planet with you in your own ship, or will they have to use their own?
No details right now. They can’t talk about it because it is not done or implemented. It’s a dream and something they would like to see go into the game, but there are technical difficulties in this feature they have to surpass first.

The motivations behind some of the restrictions in space.
They think that this is the best way to deliver a genuine star wars experience this way (a well guided single player experience).

We’ll try and get additional answers to other community questions from other areas of the game but we can’t promise anything (goes off to stalk the swtor booth).

Above video shows what was happening at the Star Wars The Old republic booth at this year’s GamesCom. This is the first time the general public was able to get some hands on with the game. We were able to capture some of the atmosphere there during the press only day (that is why there are not that many people). You can also see some of the people still playing, and then there is a change of gamers (every 15 minutes a new group was showed in). We will be releasing more of these in the coming days.

Character customization in SWTOR is also made possible through a concept called advanced classes. It is a specialization of your primary class into one of two paths.

Today at GamesCom 2010 the working titles of all 16 advanced classes were revealed. They are:

• Scoundrel (Stealth/Medicine; Burst ranged damage or healing)
• Gunslinger (Dual pistols, Quick draw, Ranged DPS)

• Sorcerer (Single saber; ranged damage class; Healing; Think of someone that just loves using lightning; Think Palpatine; They even heal with lighning (joke, but they do heal))
• Assassin (Double bladed light sabers, a lot of melee damage, When you think about the Assassin think about Darth Maul and Zabrak and tattoos. That’s the general vibe they are going for)

• Sentinel (dual saber (not double), melee DPS; Think young Anakin)
• Guardian (tank, party buffs, Think Obi Wan leading the attack with the troops

• Commando (ranged tank)
• Vanguard

• Operative (blaster rifle, burst ranged damage, stealth)
• Sniper (dps)

• Powertech
• Mercenary

• Shadow (double-bladed lightsaber)
• Wizard (healing; single lightsaber)

During our talk with James Ohlen, he said that they wanted to have 4 healing capable classes so that out of 16 available advanced classes, 25% can heal and when you translate that to a group of 4 there will always be one class capable of doing some heals. (If they spec for healing option of course)

Update: The full list and details of all the advanced classes has been released by Bioware and can be found in our news article here.

You will be able to get some hands on gameplay with The Old Republic this year at the GamesCom convention in Cologne, Germany. The whole experience is divided into sections where you are taken through three introductory 15 minute videos, where you are given general information about the game and shown the Hope trailer. The last 15 minute section describes how to play the game and than you are taken into the open area with various characters already setup for you to play with.

Jedi Knight and Consular are still not available. There are the Republic table and the Sith table so there is some competition going on.

We’ll give you our impressions on the gameplay later on, for now here are the images we took at the booth.

GamesCom 2010 hands on Swtor booth being built

Although we are in the middle of packing for GamesCom and the excitement is almost palpable we wanted to bring you this week’s community news, at least the short version.

Star Wars Celebration V convention has ended and TOR was present with two panels. Darth Hater had the best coverage of the events and has exclusive interviews with writers Drew Karpyshyn (talked about the Jedi Knight) and Hall Hood (talked about the Smuggler) and concept artist Clint Young (talks about the artsy stuff).

Jedi Knight update was very exciting, especially with the cool trailer video that was released as well. Our friends at Jedi Archive Online did a very good dissection of the video, which you can find here.

Tor Syndicate, which we will be joining shortly, has their PodCast no.2 up and they yet again manage to provide loads of good information for anyone considering to make a SWTOR fansite or guild site. As if that wasn’t enough, they have an interview with ex SWTOR community manager Erick Adams. You can listen to “The Revenge of Darth Meow Meow” if you visit this page.

The sweetest thing as last. There is another SWTOR fan webcomic being created. Outer Rim stories just posted their first panel up and it is exactly the same idea I had for our comic when I heard about the details on space combat (including the Emo Darth Vader “Nooooooo”). Go, check them out here.

There is a live camera you can watch on Electronic Arts GamesCom dedicated website. It is broadcasting even now although it is well past midnight in Cologne. There are actually workers still building the Crysis 2 booth. The interesting thing is that you can see what SWTOR booth will look like. This, my friends, is where first people outside of the “inner circle” will get their hands on the game. People passing by will be able to witness the awesomeness of their game playing abilities.

Oh yeah, did I forget to mention? Gamescom will be the first event in the world where TOR will be available to the general public. The news was revealed by Sean Dahlberg a few days ago, but I was so excited that I forgot to post it on the site. Duh! In any case here’s the official announcement:

Touting 245,000 attendees last year, GamesCom is known as the world’s largest gaming convention. We’re excited to be presenting The Old Republic at this year’s GamesCom in Cologne, Germany for our first worldwide consumer hands-on event! It’s going to be incredible – Don’t miss it!

Visit the Star Wars: The Old Republic booth in Hall 6.1 at Booth B066 to get another look at “Hope” on the big screen, and to see all the exciting things we’re showing off. The trailer will also be shown multiple times per day at the EA booth, so be sure to stop by!

The Old Republic Booth Schedule – Hall6.1, Booth B066

* Wednesday, August 18th, 9AM – 7PM CET (Press Only)
* Thursday, August 19th, 10AM – 8PM CET
* Friday, August 20th, 10AM – 8PM CET
* Saturday, August 21st, 9AM – 8PM CET
* Sunday, August 22nd, 9AM – 6PM CET

EA released a press statement about its upcoming GamesCom appearance that includes heavy Star Wars The Old Republic presence. Here’s the interesting part for SWTOR fans:

Five EA and EA Partner titles at gamescom have already received early recognition for their outstanding quality. The gamescom 2010 award nominations were announced today and include:

• FIFA 11 — Best Console
• Star Wars™: The Old Republic™ — Best Online and Best of gamescom
• Crysis(R) 2 — Best PC, Best of gamescom
• The Sims(TM) 3 console — Best Mobile title
• Rock Band(R) 3 instruments — Best Hardware

Another important thing to know is that there will be a Press Briefing on Tuesday, August 17th, at 4:00pm CET (that is 7am PST) held by Electronic Arts. A live stream of the press conference will be available at http://live-event.ea.com/gamescom/live/ . We’ll try and record it so you can view it at a more convenient time :).

News spotted at MarketWatch.

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:

11:25-11:40
13:30-13:45
17:10-17:25

You can download the full schedule in PDF here.

We are very proud to announce that we’ll be attending this year’s GamesCom gaming convention in Cologne, Germany. It is the biggest gathering of game makers and gamers in Europe. Last year it was visited by 245,000 people, which made it one of the largest games trade fairs in the world.

We will be there to bring you the best coverage of all the Star Wars The Old Republic related events. You can expect all kinds of coverage, from news and show floor gossip to live blogging and videos from the SWTOR booth. Things will kick off on Wednesday, August 18^th, which is press only day, and we’ll try and get you as much info as possible starting noon.

Make sure you keep checking our site for all the latest updates as well as our Twitter account and YouTube page (for fresh videos from the show).

We would also like to share the excitement of attending Gamescom with the SWTOR community. For all of those that will not be able to be there in person we would like you to use our site as the vessel to take your message to the Bioware people at the show. We will pick a few of the best community questions and try and get an answer from Bioware. You can submit your questions in the comment section bellow or in this thread on the official forums!

Please refrain from questions that you know will be answered with a “No comment” and no, we will not ask if they will create a Twi’lek stripper class. If everything goes as planned we plan on rewarding the best questions with swag we pick up at the show so make sure you leave a valid email.

Also, we would love to meet other SWTOR fans so anyone attending just drop us a message and we can meet and talk about the game and have some German drinks while we’re at it (I hear Cologne is a beautiful town).