The latest developer dispatch has been released. It’s the fifth in the series and showcases the Sith Inquisitor and Sith Warrior, the last two classes of the dark side. The video is of great quality and in HD and we can see a few people actually playing the game, among other things. You can see the interface and “spellcasting” (is the proper term forcecasting?) and how all that works at around 3:50. There seems to be a possibility of adding extra action bars. The bottom of the screen seems to be reserved for all your game info, from character and target HP and MP bars to basic action bar and buffs. Even the radar is placed in the bottom right. I bet there will be many changes to this setup by the time game actually makes an appearance (or we can customize our little hearths out of it … hopefully). Anyways, enjoy the video:
End of the year brings a lot of “best of” lists and you can’t read a web page without stumbling across “the most anticipated” or “best game of the year” poll. When “big MMO” sites start such polls a lot of game makers take notice. Community managers and advertising people in the game making companies take it as a good tool for promoting their product.
There is one such poll at IGN and what makes it special is that faced against each other are Trekkies and Star Wars fans (Swarians? Starians? Starwarians?), because MMOs based on both IPs are being released within the next 12-18 months. Both community managers asked their forum members to vote for their favorite, so you can imagine how intensely the results change.
Here’s the post Sean Dahlberg (TOR community manager) made:
IGN is hosting a poll asking “Which upcoming MMO are you most excited about?” Let your voice be heard on which of the MMOs they list is the one you are most excited about.
http://pc.ign.com/ – The poll can be found in the right column near the bottom of the page under the WE WANT TO KNOW section.
Fansite Star Wars MMO net reported earlier that they have scans from a German gaming magazine revealing the last two classes that we’ll be able to play in SW:tOR. The classes are the Sith Inquisitor and the Jedi Consular. First being the damage dealer, while the latter being a healer with long range damage dealing abilities. You can read the whole article and some of the translation from the magazine on Star Wars MMO fansite.
The classes have been officially confirmed by Sean Dahlberg:
Fans of Star Wars: The Old Republic will be in for a treat this week! Several magazines in North America and Europe will have articles that not only talk about The Old Republic but also reveal our final two classes: the Jedi Consular and the Sith Inquisitor!
This being our first news about SW:tOR in the past months also marks our return to this project. In the coming months we will try and become your ultimate source of news and information for SW:tOR like we did with Aion and LOTRO.
It has been reported earlier today that beta testing sign ups have started on the official TOR site. The moment this became public knowledge the internet went ablaze. Everyone and their mother tried signing up (yours truly included). There is a scanning application at the end of the sign up process that tests your computer and this was the most common point of failure. Everything went down after that. As more people started hearing the news, the official site was hit by a gazillion excited fans wishing to try their luck. Be patient. The sign up will last for many more months to come and I don’t think your chances to participate will be higher if you are among the first million to sign up. Once the initial rush passes be sure to
The Old Republic community members using either Hotmail or Yahoo email providers may not be receiving transactional emails at this time. This includes validation and password recovery emails. We are looking into the situation and will update you when we can.
The team is still working on various solutions for the looping issue that some users are experiencing. Your patience is appreciated while we are working on this. And remember, the order in which an individual signs up has no bearing on who gets chosen for testing.
Update 2:
Things have been working as intended for weeks now.
After the breathtaking video, BioWare has for the first time shown gameplay demo with the Bounty Hunter, Sith, and Smuggler classes. More information about Star Wars: The Old Republic from E3 expo 2009 coming soon. In the meantime take a look at several new screenshots.
News from E3 keep pouring in. People from Kotaku.com had a chance to actually sit down and play the game (lucky bast****). Here are some initial impressions:
I played through a section instance called The Taking of the Black Talon. I controlled a level 10 Sith. …. During interactions with non-player characters your choices not only drive the voice-acted cut scenes, they also drive the story and your experience. In the section I played I first decided to kill a disobedient spaceship captain and the second time decided to let him live. In the resulting first scenario, a new captain takes over and her inexperience leads her to ignore pods ejecting from a ship we’re attacking. Those pods later attach to our ship and I was forced to go repel the invading soldiers. In the second scenario, the captain, happy to be alive, blasts the pods as they approach the ship, allowing me to concentrate on my main task: Taking out a Jedi. …. This is the sort of massively multiplayer experience that I think could bring back a lot of people long lost to the genre. Of course I only saw a small snippet and we have no way of knowing just how far out this game is, so keep an eye out for further developments.
In other news, the voiceovers for the game seem to be so massive in scale that everything else fails in comparison. Here’s what Bioware people had to say to the reporters at the E3 expo:
When I asked Erickson how many hours of audio they had already recorded he said he didn’t know. But, he added, when the audio team was about a third of the way through the voice work they told him that they had just passed all of the audio found in the full six seasons, 86 episodes of The Sorpranos.
The E3 expo is being held in sunny LA and Bioware is there in full force (no pun intended) promoting 3 of their titles. Apparently a bunch of Jedis came on the stage to announce the Cinematic trailer for Star Wars: The Old Republic and among the Jedi clad gentlemen were Ray Muzyka, Bioware’s CEO and one of the Lucasarts designers. Ray Announced that: “SW:TOR is the first ever, fully-voiced massively multiplayer game” and that the game will feature hundreds of thousands of lines of dialogue and thousands of speaking characters. You can see the timeline of the event on Joystiq
I am at loss of words. I have images of explosions and light sabers and bullet time effects permanently burned into my brain. The cinematic trailer Bioware released at the E3 expo is probably the most epic piece of media ever to be unleashed on the world. I haven’t been this excited about something since I first saw the WoW trailer 5 years ago. Could it be that Blizzard, the master of cinematic trailers, has finally found its match. Judge for yourself from the video below. If I were you I would go to the official SW:tOR site and download the trailer in HD resolution – it is worth every megabyte. The trailer can be found here (to download use that little arrow pointing down).
The Edge Magazine had an interview with James Ohlem, The Old Republic’s game director.
The game will be shown for the first time at E3 for 20-30 minutes including multiple worlds: Tython, Korriban, Ord Mantell. The big part of the demo is going to be showing a flashpoint: a one to two hour long story moment which is fully instanced and basically designed for group play, though you can also play solo.
Star wars is basically all about fighting it’s about Jedi vs Sith and huge war machine in the background. it has to be visceral and stylish, you have to be fighting multiple enemies, there has to be cinematic music in the background and all those things are important in making our game feel like a Star Wars game.
The latest character class is the Smuggler. Ord Mantell is a war-torn world and it’s where the Smuggler starts off, when his ship gets stolen. He’s pretty angry; imagine what Han Solo would’ve been like if the Millennium Falcon got taken.
