It is that time of the month again, time for another Fan Friday. The honor of being featured as a spotlighted Fan Site goes to Ask A Jedi, a great site for all The Old Republic fans to visit regularly. If you don’t have them set in bookmarks and as part of your regular rotation you are at loss. They have some of the best columns out there and are very knowledgable and just nice guys overall. They get my full recommendation. You can read their interview for the official swtor.com site here.
 
As part of the fan friday we also get to enjoy some great fan art, new icons and some surveys. Due to all the recent E3 happening there was no time to do the regular Q&A session with the developers, but we do get a nice article about polishing the world of the Old Republic based on writer’s feedback. Ian Ryan, writer for SWTOR, gets a chance to tells us about the process of improving the overall feel of the worlds player will be able to visit in the game based on writer input. Turns out that writers are the first that finished their job. Based on their writing other teams started working. Once the first version is done, writers go back and give suggestions on how to improve the looks and feel of certain places to better reflect the storyline that they are trying to convey. There are some great before and after screenshots in this article so I wholeheartedly recommend you read it. Personally, I love the huge golden statue of a Hutt on the main promenade of Nar Shaddaa better than what they had before the writer’s input.
 
SWTOR managed to grab a few (well deserved) rewards from the press at this year’s E3. About this and overall impressions from the biggest gathering of gaming professionals you can read in the article on the official site.

This Friday update is Fan Friday and, for us, it is the most exciting update thus far. It is because SWTOR Life is featured in Fan Site Spotlight section and we got to answer a few questions in it. Feel free to check it out in the official news article.
 
For all of you great SWTOR fans visiting us for the first time I would like to recommend our:
– Fan Site Summit game hands-on and event impressions
– Crafting and Crew Skills articles by SWTORCrafter
– Forum Friday and other articles by BorukBH
– Editorials by Mr.Warlock of SWTOR UK fame
– Humorous articles by Flagg
– Our infamous webcomic and demotivational posters sections
– We also have a super-fast, searchable developer tracker you might want to check out
 
Make sure you also keep a look out for our upcoming SWTOR E3 coverage straight from the show floor.
 
You can find all of us on Twitter. @SwtorLife, @SWTORCrafter, @Grant__D, @BorukBH, @MrWarlock_, @Dalqak, @ForceMeridian
Click here to read about all the other great stuff this Friday update has

Fan Art by Redding

I don’t think anyone was expecting for this Friday update to outshine what we got in the past two updates that were leading up to, and covering PAX East info flood. It comes as no surprise then that we get a Fan Friday Update this week with TorWars.com having the spotlight on them through a Fan Site Q&A session. As Fan Fridays tend to provide, we also get some really cool fan art including the image above from forum user Redding. You can check out new Concept Art and official forum avatars if you read the official article here.

In addition to Fan Friday we get a Studio Insider article describing how cinematic in-game cut-scenes are made. To walk us through the inside work of the process we have Animator Andrew Lauretta. He describes how rough motion captured data is refined and tweaked and then how computer generated actors are added into the scene to give us what Bioware games are best known for – memorable cinematics.

Best for last is the community Q&A on flashpoints. World Designer Jesse Sky answers some of the questions posted in the official forums in the flashpoints Q&A thread. There are several interesting bits about companions and general flashpoint mechanic (and -wow- how Story comes into play). You can post questions about Classes in the new Q&A thread for this month.

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.

I would suggest reading Jedi Archive Online’s article on the subject or visiting Part 2 of a thread on the official forums aptly titled “Bioware, I’m rooting for you, but you’re shooting yourself in the foot” to read more about these concerns.

Despite what was expected, this Friday update was not the Smuggler trailer video released earlier yesterday by Machinima.com. Instead we got a huge update containing a great “Designing the Light Side” Developer Dispatch video and a huge Fan Friday article containing a huge amount of fan created content.

The video is full of information on what decisions were made during the design process of the Jedi classes. We find out that you can choose to be a heroic type of Jedi like Luke or darker, more avenging Jedi like Anakin. There is a bunch of video footage of Tython (still one of the most serene environments I’ve seen in any game so far) along with discussion on why choosing earth tones for Jedi and “robed monk” look. Jedi Knight is all about action and adventure. Consular’s story will be more about diplomacy and you will be able to play a sneaky (stealth) role, or a more supportive (healing) role or even do some force damage (magic dps). The problem I have with each of these videos is that every time they release a new one I have to rethink what class I’m going to play as my main. I just have a need to live through all these stories and not miss out and that is going to be hard with 8 classes available. Anyone with a cloning machine wanna help me out? You can find the official video page here or just watch it below.

Along with the Developer Dispatch article we were also presented with this month’s Fan Friday. I recommend everyone visits the official news post, because it has loads of great Fan made art along with some great looking capital ship concept art presented in another Developer Corner. New wallpapers and official forum avatars are presented as well.

In the midst of all the GamesCom madness people of Bioware managed to release a new Fan Friday as part of their continuous Friday SWTOR updates. First up is the update to Holonet with a new starships page. Although we saw all the other ships in the recently released space combat trailer, only two previously announced ships are in the starships holonet page, the Fury and the Defender. There are some new screenshots if you go onto the individual ship pages so make sure you check it out.

Fan Friday wouldn’t be complete without some awesome fan created art. Two of the most impressive fan created sketches I’ve seen have been made by Kromnz adn have been posted on the official SWTOR forums. “Jedi reading” sketch and “Three Deadly Siths” are surely worth seeing. You can find the rest of the mentioned art at the Fan Friday page on the official site.

The best is, as always, left for last. In the developer corner we get a full list of the advanced classes and some details on them. The list is very close to the one we provided from our GamesCom exclusive coverage, but with more details on some of the advanced classes we didn’t manage to write down.

Read the full list of advanced classes by visiting the rest of this article, here.

Welcome to our regular Monday community watch. It’s here so you can fight them Monday blues with some Swtor reading.

Previous week was one of those extremely exciting weeks. Comic Con is behind us and with it the announcement of space combat and player ship customization. This brought mostly positive reactions by the community and speculations are also running rampant, until we get more information scheduled to appear in the PC Gamer magazine.

Preceding the space combat announcement Friday update was Fan Friday displaying some impressive fan made art and renders of Cathar race (not sure if playable or NPC only). There is also a Darth Rasp 3D animationabsolutely worth watching. For the rest of the goodies visit the Fan Friday page.

Also, last week, we saw the release of Fatal Alliance, a novel placed in the Swtor timeline. It is speculated that the game will have a lot of things mentioned in the book. Therefore, you might be interested in reading Darth Hater’s dissection of the book as well as the interview with the author, guys at SwtorStrategies did. You can also read a part of Chapter 1 on the official site.

Podcasts seem to be a big deal in the Star Wars The Old Republic community. There are numerous quality shows and its hard to single out just a few to showcase in our community news. I must mention the always entertaining ToroCast and their episode 62 in which they are joined by a female co-host. Episode two of the Correlian Run Podcast is also available and the girls are super excited with the possibility of Corellia being a playable planet.

How Will You Play? That is the discussion in the official forum started by the developers. Are you a “soloer” or a “raider”. Go here to join in on the constructive discussion here.