It is hard to pick out any particular coverage of the Fan Site Summit, because 15 fan sites were present and we think all of them did a great job. We are biased towards one of them because writer for SWTOR Life, MrWarlock, also represented his own site – SWTOR UK at the Summit. We had chance to hang out with Mick for those few days at the summit and I can tell you he is one proper human being. Now that I met him I truly regret not living closer so we can hang out more often in person. What you also need to know about him is that he is exclusively an MMO gamer and he’s been playing MMOs since Ultima Online. Story and some such tomfoolery is of no concern to him, or is it? To find out I recommend you read his articles from the Fan site summit – they are a jewel.

SWTOUR Part 1 – Story
Random Pic’s From SWTOUR
SWTOUR Part 2 Combat & Gameplay
SWTOUR Part 3 Points To Note
Screen Shot From SWTOUR & Friday Update

I would also like to point out that he is running a giveaway of swag he got at the summit. You can read all about it in his SWTOUR swag article and get a chance to win the book Deceived as well as a Sith t-shirt and hat.

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.

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”