It’s Halloween and everyone is enjoying a good scare. To celebrate, Joanne Laroche invite The Old Republic fans to post their Halloween Star Wars related costumes on the swtor.com forums. The best costumes will be featured in the upcoming Fan Friday and we took the liberty of singling out a few of these in the gallery bellow.
One very scary photo was submitted among the family friendly pictures. The costume is in fact so scary that we have to recommend caution to all those with weak hearts or even good taste. We are not sure whether this is an actual forum user or just a random image from one of the star wars conventions, but the scare factor is there nevertheless, which makes it a perfect Halloween image.
One of the more interesting classes of the Sith Empire got some Friday Update love yesterday. Imperial Agent is a mix of stealth, healing and high DPS, which is not something you see often in a class. The agent can specialize to be an Operative for close range combat/healing option or a Sniper for all you “assassination from stealth” type of players. Furthermore we found out that the starship you will be flying as the agent is X-70B Phantom-Class Prototype (very slick looking). Your “trusted” companion will be the petite, yet very tantalizing Kaliyo Djannis. Just to make this information-full Friday update even more rich we are treated with the Holonet page about the Chiss race that is apparently a natural pick for Imperial Agent players.
This Friday update also brings us back on track with information rich updates that the SWTOR community is longing for and we hope this trend continues. Enjoy the Imperial Agent Class Trailer:
If you ever wanted to find out who is behind these article and this site you have a chance to find out more by listening to the interview Vall from Tor Syndicate did with yours truly. I apologize up front for the nasty accent and all the language errors, but my speaking English is a bit rusty. I would like to thank the Tor Syndicate for this extraordinary experience and for all of their work in bringing the TOR community together. You can listen to the entire Tor Syndicate podcast that contains the interview by clicking here.
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The Old Republic fans are a bunch of people in love. They are in love with the concept behind the game Bioware is making. Star Wars universe populated by you and your friends in which everyone gets to be a hero. How can you blame them? That is why the moment someone mentions that there could be any kind of trouble with the game there are cries of terror showing up all over the official forums and fansites. There are several things that happened simultaneously these past few weeks that caused the current wave of doomsayers. We wanted to address these in this two part editorial describing the causes in part one, that you are reading now, and offering some explanations and suggestions in part two that will follow shortly.
Causes
During the convention season we were treated with loads of new game information. For the first time people were able to sit down and play the game. We also saw some higher level gameplay footage for the first time and were shown Revan’s dungeon. Space ships and advanced classes were also explained in detail. Following up on all that info we were also given a lot of info about the Smuggler and the Jedi Knight. Next three updates were about a planet, biographies and a timeline. If it was any other time of the year these would be enough, but after the eventful convention season all of it feels lackluster.
Advertised release date is getting very close. Here’s the math that is scaring fans. Everyone is expecting the game to come out in April, May the latest. Any date later than that is unexpected (even May is cutting it close) because summer is dead season. This gives us 6 months tops before the game’s release. Based on Bioware’s own policy that they don’t talk about it before its done people are thinking the following: “If they are not talking about so many core systems that means they are not done yet. Will they be done by release (in such a short period of time)?”. And MMORPG gamers are already tired of all those rushed out releases that ruined so many potentially great projects (who said Warhammer online, Age of Conan, Star Trek Online, APB – OMG are there that many?)
EA Louse. He is a “whistle blower” from inside Mythic (the makers of Warhammer online) that whines about how life ain’t fair and how management is to blame for WAR failing and him losing his job. Since Bioware and Mythic are both parts of EA and some parts of Mythic started helping out with SWTOR some time ago he made a statement about SWTOR. According to him the project already spent 300 million dollars and that it will be the biggest failure in the history of video games. This coming from a guy that works on a game that spent $50 million and has 100k subscribers right now.
There is a rumor floating around that at this year’s Game Developer’s Conference people were saying that there is trouble in TOR land and Bioware is flying people into Austin office to help out.
Enough to put anyone caring about the game into full on panic mode, right? Fear not fellow TOR fans, there are two sides to every story and we will be going in depth on The Cures in our Part 2 of this article tomorrow.
After a news-full convention season things have calmed down to the point where regular Friday updates, that the SWTOR community team releases regularly, are becoming a source of frustration rather than source of much needed revelation. In the past weeks we had a new playable planet, Ilum, revealed. We got to view a new entry in Timeline holorecord about the fall of Exar Kun. This Friday was October Fan Friday filled with great community creations, another developer corner and some new avatars and smileys (Ithorians are so cool I had to include the image of the smileys above) for the official forums. Some new character biographies were also revealed.
Guess what – no one seem to care! The community is in a bit of an uproar. With the advertised release date looming ever closer (6-8 months) people are starting to be anxious wanting to find out about core and important game mechanics. We are still missing info on most advanced classes specifics, detailed combat mechanics, end game options, playable species, PvP, crafting, companion mechanics and this is just to name a few of the more important things. Why does the community think that revelation of this information ASAP is so important?
I remember both World of Warcraft and Lord of the Rings Online had extensive closed beta tests for up to a year prior to game’s launch. In these tests rather large portions of the most dedicated members of the community and beta testers constantly provided in depth feedback, based on which developers modified their concepts. Whether this just meant tweaks or completely abandoning certain features it was all done before things were set in stone. With only 6-8 months remaining before the game is supposed to hit the shelves and none of this community-development process interaction happening people are becoming worried. By the way, LOTRO had one of the most successful MMO launches in the history (not in numbers, but in stability and richness of content and features) and we all know about WoW.
We just received a mysterious message through our contact us form and it seems we are not the only Swtor fans to get it. The official forum is full of people that got it as well. The message reads as follows:
Subject: ## Incoming Transmission from a faint signal…
Message Body:
## Incoming Transmission from an old Republic signal…
## Initiating trace
## Signal cannot be located!
## Receiving transmission burst…
“where it all began…in a Violent display, lIght meets dark…GrEat
power still remaiNs hERE”
YMESCJMFXZWTGYEUSGMUHLWTARYVIEMFKLSBGC
## End Transmission
## Signal lost!
## Attempting reconnect…
## Searching…
## Searching…
## Would you like to continue searching for the signal…?_
There is a cipher that decodes the upper cryptic sequence of characters. To help you out right away, the key you need to start deciphering is tython. This will lead you on a great adventure with a lot of puzzles and brain breakers. The most intriguing part for me was the use of a cipher seen in KOTOR, which shows great knowledge of the creators of this puzzle.
May you be warned that this is not something created by Bioware and there is no beta access as reward at the end of the path (and that is why everyone spent hours on this trying to solve it). Nevertheless it is a great experience and I suggest you test your intelligence by this great game. If you get stuck you can ask in the comments and we’ll give tips, or you can visit the thread started on the official forums and browse through 50+ pages for solutions :).
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