BioWare had a nice full day of surprises in store for players yesterday, and this one may have been the most unexpected of them all. The Developers have decided to start their very own podcast, with developer interviews and news straight from BioWare.

The first episode launched yesterday and is focused around the combat changes players will be experiencing in 1.2. Combat designers Austin Peckenpaugh and Cameron Winston sat down with show hosts Eric Musco and Brooks Guthrie to talk class balance, the new Warzone Novare Coast, and even gave a little hint to a new Heroic World Boss we can expect to see on Voss, the Nightmare Pilgrim. One of the most interesting little tidbits of info out of the show was concerning forum posts, specifically what kind of posts get the most attention from the developers (here’s a hint: Whining about your individual assumptions and experience is less likely to get noticed. Instead offer expanations about the overall game experience that are affecting the community as a whole without making unproven assumptions.).

Head on over to the official site and check out the new podcast. This first episode clocks in at just under 20 minutes long, hopefully the shows length will be extended a bit in the future. in the mean time be sure to let us know what you think of the new show in our comments section below!

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.

Community surrounding The Old Republic keeps growing and we have reached a huge number of sites and different projects that devote themselves to following SWTOR. I think I’ve seen Tor Syndicate, a gathering of most TOR sites/guilds out there, reach 80 members the other day and it still keeps rising. It is nigh impossible to follow them all. It is even hard to keep track of the good ones in the crowd. That is why I wanted to try and present the ones that caught my eye this week to our visitors. With hopes of this becoming a regular article I present you the Community Tip for the first week of June.
 

Red Rancor V-Casts

Red Rancor has been around for a while and they are best known for their epic videos, like the 30 minute compilation of SWTOR screenshots released in the past 2+ years. They are now doing a regular V-Cast that is getting better with each episode. The latest episode is entitled “Full Auto” and you can listen about their thoughts on the upcoming E3, their video dissection of the trooper progression video and additional news and bits that caught their eye. The show is 20 minutes long with some great video effects and well thought out segments so check it out on their site or view it bellow:
 

 
Click here to read about a fantastic SWTOR webcomic, great new podcast and Facebook image of the week

I have a lot of convention news withdrawal. I was spoiled by the convention season and the constant stream of news coming our way. It fed the hole created by not being in the SWTOR beta. Luckily, SWTOR fansites are plentiful and have great articles and content for you to browse through on a dreaded Monday and we are here to list it all for you.

Fansite Mentions

Lets get all the PAX info out of the way first.

TOROCast has released several quality articles created based on info they gathered at PAX. They took notes on Stats and what they do and shared it in a very informative article.

Darth Hater has its own PAX article that sums up all the General info they learned from the hands on experience. Two page article covers all the General Notes, Stat Modifiers, Character Sheets, Equipment and Loot they were able to record.

To round up the convention related news we have a bit of late news from SWTOR Station and their Gamescom coverage. They just released a new video from Gamescom that shows Daniela & Hergen (French/German Community Manager) and some speeders in action as well as Hutta’s spaceport video footage. Visit SWTOR Station for the full article and you can watch the video bellow:

Blog Mentions

Our Friends at Scary Booster have a great blog post “Let’s talk planets”, discussing how multiple planets and travel and story between them will work in a MMO environment. Check out their article and join the discussion in the comments here.

Podcast Mentions

Galactic Holofeed has entered its 1 year of SWTOR podcasts. Suzina and Kalvod guide us through their impressions of the Designing the Light Side Developer Dispatch and speculate in their knowledgeable and informed way about the Smuggler abilities. Clicking here will take you to their site and the Transmission 52 article.

Corellian Run Radio discusses PAX and all the info we got from there.

TOROCast just released their Episode 69 “Jedi do it with the Lights on”

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.

My attention span is that of a chipmunk. If you hit me with a podcast that lasts for 2 hours I will probably be distracted by the time the opening music is done with. When you start the podcast with a small clip from Robot Chicken Star Wars episode II (that I just watched a few days ago) and your guest host is Scott from Extra Life (one of my bookmarked webcomics that I visit regularly for the past 5 years or something) you might just be able to beat my ADD. This is what Mos Eisley Radio did with their podcast #22 named “Extra Lives”.

It’s a pretty bold move to start a new podcast among so many quality ones already existing in the TOR fansite universe, but when you do it right like TOR Syndicate did we have to tell you about it. The first full fledged podcast episode is available on their site and they talk a lot about what it is like to be doing a fansite for The Old Republic. They also interview the owner of Toruniverse.com and its a great insightful show that lets you inside the fansite creating life.

In other news, we have a merger of two fansites, Dathomir Project and Jedi Archive Online that they announced in their podcast that you can find here. Also, if you are interested in joining the fansite community TOROcast.com is looking for people. You can read more about it in this thread on the official forums.

As a final treat I give you Epicness! It’s a 3D rendered Star Wars space battle made by one man as a school project and it is absolutely amazing. Found this in the forums in this thread.

Welcome to another Monday community watch. I will be trying to make this our regular thing so you have something to read at work to beat the Monday blues :).

Following this Friday update about the sounds and music of SWTOR, community got very excited and a lot of fansites discussed this topic. I would like to especially single out Galactic Holofeed podcast with their vast knowledge of all things Star wars and awesome voice impressions the podcast hosts do. You can enjoy Suzina’s and Kalvod’s podcast if you click here.

Mos Eisley Radio opens their podcast with the Binary Sunset (some know it as the Force) theme (even it is the Family guy version). I always get goose bumps from listening to this theme, don’t you? In any case, you can listen to the guys celebrate their one year of covering TOR by discussing game design, their worries about this being Bioware’s first MMO and the sounds and music of SWTOR along with their guest host, Jeff Cannata of “Totally Rad Show” and “Weekend Confirmed” fame. Listen to the show here.

In the meantime Ithoirans.com has Exclusive leaks from deep inside game testing. They are saying that:

Several players deep undercover in Star Wars: The Old Republic testing have confirmed several revolutionary new MMO features to Ithorians.com.

Specifically:

Another player, who would only identify himself as DarthTerriosity, said that when in game, he had the option to “fight” other beings within game world.

You can read the whole hilarious article here.

If you want to win something this week visit Darth Hater. They are celebrating their 1 year anniversary with a “Choose Your Side Giveaway”. All you have to do is post “HATE ON! GALACTIC REPUBLIC” or “HATE ON! SITH EMPIRE” in a comment in this article before 9:00 AM EST Monday, July 26, 2010. Even Bioware sent them an awesome background image as a gift for their anniversary.

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.

Me neither … but people at Darth Hater certainly do. The whole staff attended E3 this year and have been able to summarize their impressions in one 5 pages long article. This is so far the most concise gathering of interesting, hands on, information available on the whole internet. They got to play for a few hours and through several levels and were able to each play a different class. This gives us the chance to read their impressions on UI, flow of combat for each of the classes (5 total), AI, graphics and art style and much more. I especially was interested in how they felt about the Dialogue System since that is the biggest venture out of the MMORPG standards we are used to. You can see them being kind of careful in their comments on the dialogue system, but overall with positive opinions. I guess it is going to be one of those love it or hate it things.
Make sure you don’t miss this article.

While I’m on the subject of community news, there is a new podcast in the swtor universe (like we don’t have enough of those 😛 ). I liked it though because we have two girl gamers discussing the game instead of your regular geeky male Star Wars fans (don’t look at me). Corellian Run podcast Episode 1 has hit the interwebz. Good luck with the podcast girls.