Let me be honest with you. I looked for and found the beta leaks. I was burning with curiosity. The footage was not spectacular, as it mostly showed things we saw before, but it did reveal some of the things we haven’t seen so far. Let me tell you why we haven’t seen them so far, because THEY ARE NOT FINISHED YET. It was glaringly obvious that some of the things were in beta stages and if they showed an image there saying “PLACEHOLDER” it would have the same effect.
This is what bothers me the most about this leak. Some other MMO player or innocent bystander will not go deep into analyzing the leaked footage and will say how Bioware is doing a poor job and that this game will suck. It feels as if this leak was created for just this purpose, to hurt the image of this game. It doesn’t feel as if it was made available to show us what the game is really about. Let me explain why. The things that look good and finished are the things we already saw previously from official sources. Some of the things we didn’t see so far felt unfinished. You can see great potential in some of them but all in all they were not too impressive from a finished game’s standpoint.
In light of all this, we here at Swtor Life, have decided to join the rest of the fansites and declare our resentment with the unapproved leaking of material from the game. We will not be posting, endorsing or supporting sites that post unauthorized materials in any way. We here declare that we will honor the Fansite agreement we’ve signed by creating this site.
To lighten the mood a bit, here’s a girl in a pink Darth Vader costume:
Image via babiesmakingfaces.com
Yesterday was highlighted by two things for me, the World Cup finale (gratz Spain!) and release of more leaked beta footage from SWTOR. None of which I’ll talk about here! World cup is for some other news site and leakz will get you perma-banned.
Instead, I want to tell you about a couple of articles I came across on another fan site – swtorstrategies.com. They wrote an excellent and fun article to commemorate the World Cup finale by humoring the idea of playing football (its called football not soccer) in SWTOR. As a result of the mix they created some images of Star Wars characters playing soccer. Make sure you check out the full article here.
While we’re on a topic of mixing – there is a fan made audio-visual mix posted on Youtube that combines a lot of previously released videos into one cohesive entity. You can watch the video here. News spotted @ SwtorStrategies.
TOROcast has released its 60th episode (!) named “This is NOT a Demo”, which you can listen to just below:
That’s it for now. May you have a great week.
Not a day went by since the announcement of the beta testing being underway and already leaked footage from the game hit the net. VG247 reported about this and provided a link to the video. They labeled it as rumor but seeing the video already being pulled from Youtube under a copyright claim by EA we can only imagine it was some real footage.
FOTOR reports that it was “16 minutes of nothing we haven’t already seen”.
It is a rather worrying development because Bioware is sure going to make further beta invitation even more scarce. On the other hand with a game as anticipated as SWTOR is things like this are bound to happen.
Sean Dahlberg updated his thread about Game Testing with the following:
Being able to have the community help us test The Old Republic is very important and valuable to the development process. The Game Testing Program allows community members to give us quality feedback so we can make adjustments and have a highly effective service and entertaining experience when we do launch. Since we have some time until the game is complete, some of the information testers have access to has not been released and may actually drastically change based on tester feedback before we go public with it.
This is why we take violations of any of our user agreements very seriously. Our expectation is that players of The Old Republic will follow the terms of the Game Testing Agreement and ensure that the confidential pre-release information we’re sharing with community members remains confidential. We will take action if that is not the case.
Anyone caught promoting confidential information (such as linking to, reposting, quoting, etc) will be contacted and such information removed from our community. Actions that can occur due to this can be simply removing the post to being suspended to being completely and indefinitely suspended from the entire service (including after we launch).
He also mentioned that you can report leaks to the Bioware community team:
If you find one on these forums, definitely Flag (report) the post so the Community Team can quickly react to it. If you find them off-site, you can always send them to bwacommunitysupport at bioware DOT com
UPDATE: I saw one of the videos and it shows some 7 minutes of smuggler gameplay. It is the starting area and very low level quests. The video shows some combat that really isn’t anything we haven’t seen before. Makes me more psyched for the game than anything, but I can imagine it could be hurtful to game promotion because it is obvious this is a not finished product and may leave an impression to the casual crowd as something that is broken instead of awesome. That is why such leaks are just wrong.
