Published by Mikro under Beta,news on Jun. 16. 2011.
It seems that the Beta expansion is starting effective immediately. Not long after stating that they “recently transitioned into longer-term and larger-scale testing” it was announced yesterday that a batch of survey emails were sent out to people “across the US, UK and EU”. This survey comes from their external testing partner Magid so don’t get confused. These surveys are part of their marketing research and upon completing them you should get a “real” beta invite email if you are eligible for testing.
Just to make things perfectly clear, the order of steps for this latest beta invite is the following.
You get an email from Magid inviting you to fill out their SWTOR testing related survey.
Once you complete this (and if you are eligible) you should await for a subsequent email from Bioware telling you you’ve been admited
Being that these situations are what phishers love the most please check if your email is really from Magid and don’t go giving out your passwords, credit card numbers of firstborn children if asked to.
Also, here’s a list of steps you should take if your inbox is as empty as mine (or if you are Canadian):
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 18th.
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?
It is official. Jeff from TorWars.com is a pimp! How else would you describe a guy that went around the E3 show floor and took pictures of himself with the hottest booth babes around and called them all his “best new girlfriend.”? To view this gallery of awesome make sure you visit TorWars.com. They also have some great Day 1 coverage so make sure you stick around their site.
Beside the awesome Live Stream with Daniel Erickson and our very own interview with the man there was another feature that might have gone under the radar for many SWTOR fans. It was Gamepost.com and their live show with DE and for the first time we saw the full King Bouris Ulgo event (this is the Alderaan flashpoint/event/whatchamacallit). Thanks to the ladies of Corellian Run Radio that found this embed, here is a video of the whole thing:
Eternity Vault (the first raid that was ever talked about) trailer was first seen yesterday as well. This was shown during Gabe Amatangelo appearance on Spkie TV / Gametrailers.com. I am sure we will see this trailer in full HD quality very soon on swtor.com, but for now watch the bad TV grab bellow:
Published by Mikro under E3,news on Jun. 07. 2011.
E3PO is the official twitter tag for SWTOR coverage of E3
Today marks the official beginning of the 2011 Electronic Entertainment Expo. If you think that it will be hard to top the epic SWTOR trailer “Return” you might be wrong. What we have in line from E3 is a full day of end game, vehicle, Tatooine and hands on experience news. Here’s a chronological list of things to expect:
If you are at #E3 be at the @EA booth at 12:30 sharp on Tues for a special @SWTOR experience you won’t want to miss. @biofeed #E3PO
None else talked about this early, 12:30, announcement so we are curious if this was a wrong time conversion or a real event.
There will be a live stream from the show floor and EA booth at 2PM PDT. Being show is SWTOR gameplay and there will be a Q&A session with one of the developers. They are labeling this event as “Exclusive Tatooine reveal” so I am guessing we will see Tatooine gameplay (DUH).
We are promised images and video from the show floor throughout today from official sources so keep an eye out on our own coverage as well as official swtor.com site.
Interviews and hands on sessions for fan sites will start at around 5PM PDT and we can expect to hear first impressions at about 7PM PDT.
A lot of people think that the “Return” trailer should not be the only awe inspiring news coming from Bioware about SWTOR. A lot of fan hopes are riding on what will be revealed today. We will be with you every step of the day with our man at the convention and us Live Blogging all the latest news as it happens, so make sure you check back in really soon, because our coverage of 2011 E3 is officially about to start.
Published by Mikro under E3,news on Jun. 07. 2011.
News is already starting to come in from E3 although it hasn’t even started yet! Unfortunately, a lot of sites are reporting wrong information so stuff like 4-man raids and experience with the Operation: Eternity Vault are all wrong. This puts a taint on what information is actually correct and what is a product of reporter confusion. My best guess is that some members of the press were invited to play Talar V flashpoint and got to play the Origin worlds (as is said in the machinima.com interview with Daniel Erickson). Everything else you might read is reporters getting confused in between what they played and what they heard will be talked about on the show floor.
The following interview Machinima did with Daniel Erickson is a nice intro into what is happening. Nothing new is revealed but it is always nice hearing DE talk (yes, I’m a fanboi).
The next piece of information I am not sure about. Kotaku released an article about the first impression of the game and mentions the Raid content. There have been some questions raised about the validity of information in this article, but some of it seems valid.
I hope we’ll sort all of this confusion out by this time tomorrow when people that know what they are doing will be reporting from the show floor.
On that note I leave you with an image of our very own SWTORCrafter’s E3 Media badge that he just got at the LA Convention Center.
The biggest Electronic Entertainement Expo in the world is only 24 hours away, yet things seem to have started already. Companies have already started their big pre-show press conferences and first major announcements will be made there. The most interesting conference for The Old Republic fans is the Electronic Arts conference that starts in roughly 3 hours. SWTOR Life will try and bring you all the news form various sources. We will be looking for any SWTOR related news from both the SWTOR team as well as EA team, major press and fansite representatives at the event. All of that coverage will be presented in an comprehensible form in a live blog right here on the site so make sure you check back often. Here is the latest news about what we can expect to happen.
Breaking News
@masseffect, official Mass Effect Bioware game Twitter account, just mentioned that “new BioWare online feature (will be) making its debut” at the press conference.
All of the head Bioware people have been calling this “Mass Effect Monday”. This is in line with the fact that the first major trailer for Mass Effect 3 will be shown at the press conference and more news will be revealed. We will also be reporting on this in a separate news item, because we love Mass Effect just as much :).
Stephen Reid, our beloved Community Manager, had a few things to say about the whole press conference thing and SWTOR.
Press conference should start about 12:30pm PDT, 3:30pm EDT, 8:30pm/9:30pm UK/EU time and lasts an hour.
During said press conference, you will see… something. I want to warn you that said ‘thing’ may spoil you for another ‘thing’.
Basically, I think you may enjoy the ‘thing’ more if you don’t watch the press conference. With the thing. That spoils the thing.
Sigh. Look – here’s the best advice. Make sure you’re following @SWTOR … that’s about the best advice I can give you. 🙂
I will say with some certainty that apart from #SWTOR, there’s other cool stuff to see during the EA presser, so tune in if you can. 🙂
Origin (Editor note: new digital distribution service by Electronic Arts) will be hosting many CONTENT exclusives from today. Think videos. Including a #SWTOR one. (Editor note: once the press conference ends it is expected that you will be able to find all the shown trailers at the origin.com website)
As part of their pre-E3 marketing activities Electornic Arts redesigned their EA.com site and announced the beginning of a new digital distribution service that they call Origin. The redesigned EA.com website sports two important sections for all The Old Republic fans; the E3 live coverage section and Star Wars: The Old Republic dedicated page. A bit of interesting information I found on the SWTOR page is that is listed as a “PLATFORM: PC Download”, which hints that they will sell it as a digital distribution on the EA.com site. Click here to read why I am not a fan of this new service
My first hands on experience with The Old Republic was playing the trooper for 15 minutes at GamesCom 2010. Ever since then I have been leaning towards choosing to play this class once the game comes out. This is why today’s update, that shows us the Trooper class progressions video trailer, is very exciting (beside being totally cool and managing to hype me about the game yet again). One thing I’ve noticed is that they seem to have used the same Sith Inquisitor we’ve seen in the “Unlimited Power” Sith Inquisitor class trailer. Has Bioware decided to create a mini story through their promotional trailers? In the Inquisitor trailer we see her using stealth to overcome her enemies. We now see how this can be countered by a Trooper class. Can we expect in some future Empire class trailer to have them counter Trooper’s moves? I sure hope so, because these small “easter eggs” sure are exciting to report on.
One of our favorite forum do-gooders, Georg Zoeller, dropped by the main forums today to wish us a Happy Rapt… no, my apologies! He wanted to clear up a few things about auto-attacking, and whether or not there would be macro functionality in SWTOR at launch:
Macros are a pretty broad term for certain convenience and advanced user functions at this time. Some of those features are present as possible key binds in the game, others are not.
We’re not opposed to macros, we don’t hate them, in fact we will probably add them, but probably not for launch.
A few minutes ago Star Wars The Old Republic reached another milestone. The number of like the official page on Facebook has reached 300000 likes. As a reward, a new screenshot of a Sith Inquisitor readying his double bladed light saber for battle has been released. For a game not even yet released, not bad to have so many likes.
Click for full size (1600x900)
While we’re on a subject of facebook and SWTOR screenshots … Each wednesday there’s a screenshot released on the official SWTOR Facebook page and this week’s screenshot features a secret Imperial base.
