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Wild Space: This One’s For The Little Guy

It’s a big galaxy our there, and Wild Space can be a dangerous place. Worry not, explorer – each week we’ll navigate you safely through the lost hyperspace routes of the Deep Core and track down the great articles and entertainment from around the SW:TOR fan community, all in less than 12 parsecs, of course!

There are a lot of SW:TOR fansites out there, some big some small. This week I am going to be focusing on some of the lesser known fansites that are out in hyperspace producing great content! All of these deserve to be on your bookmark list!

BloggingTOR

First up is Tim from his personal blog, BloggingTor. We all know that the Beta Testing weekends are available for a very limited time and everyone wants to get the most out of their time in-game. Tim has come up with his top ten list of items that should prepare you for the beta weekends or help you get more out of your time if you are lucky enough to have gotten in. Probably the most important point?

Give Honest Feedback.  When filling out a survey about a quest, please give honest and objective feedback.  If you experience lag occasionally, don’t give it the worst rating available.  If you die during your quest because of a bug, don’t give super high negative feedback followed by nasty comments.  Bioware takes the feedback seriously […]

The goal of beta testing, after all, is to improve the game before it’s release. By submitting honest and constructive feedback you are directly helping BioWare create the best game experience possible and those of us who aren’t in the beta certainly appreciate that. Be sure to check out the full article here.

OldRepublic.net

Over on OldRepublic.net, editor vexx has created some really nice guides to the classes in SW:TOR. It includes a little bit of fluff about the class, description about the companions available to the class, some of the ships and armor available, as well as the currently known class abilities. While most of the information may be contained on the SW:TOR website, OldRepublic.net has a really good way or organizing the content for each class and making it really easy to access. Check out this week’s addition, the Imperial Agent, or vist this page for a list of all the available class guides.

SWTOR Crewskills

Are you interested in SW:TOR’s crew skills system? SWTOR Crewskills has you covered! They have great overviews of every crew skill available and will continue to add more content when the game begins. Currently there are descriptions of every Gathering, Crafting, and Mission skill and I wanted to point you all to the site because it has so much potential. The amount of information they have already added to the site is staggering when you consider that all they have to go on is the main SW:TOR website. Definitely keep an eye on this site once the NDA drops and the game is released. I have a feeling I’ll be spending a lot of my time on SWTOR Crewskills.

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Wild Space: Another Spin on the Release Date and Lore Updates

It’s a big galaxy our there, and Wild Space can be a dangerous place. Worry not, explorer – each week we’ll navigate you safely through the lost hyperspace routes of the Deep Core and track down the great articles and entertainment from around the SW:TOR fan community, all in less than 12 parsecs, of course!

Star Wars, in general, doesn’t have the the best history when it comes to the Christmas holiday. While I’m sure that the release date for of December 20 (NA) and 22 (EU) was chosen for a multitude of very well thought out and logical reasons, it is curious that BioWare and EA would choose to release the game so close to a major holiday when many of us will have a lot of other real life stuff going on. MrWarlock of the fansite SWTOR-Life posted an editorial exploring this very topic.

The article hypothesizes that maybe releasing the game so close to Christmas is going to be used as some sort of load balancing mecahnism. Bioware and EA must know that people will be busy during this time and some will be forced to play the game less than they normally would at any other time of the year. Having slightly fewer players on the server may help their launch day performance, but it may upset some people who hoped to devote a considerable amount of time to the game right at launch.

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Wild Space: Release Date(!) And Developer Interviews

It’s a big galaxy our there, and Wild Space can be a dangerous place. Worry not, explorer – each week we’ll navigate you safely through the lost hyperspace routes of the Deep Core and track down the great articles and entertainment from around the SW:TOR fan community, all in less than 12 parsecs, of course!

It’s been a long time coming but we finally have an official release date for Star Wars: The Old Republic. December 20, 2011 cannot get here fast enough! To start us off on Wild Space, here are a couple of release date articles and features from a few fansites that you may have heard of before.

– Darth Hater has an article with a bunch of information about the release date. It includes an interview with Stephen Reid, highlights of the actual announcement from the BioWare doctors, and an audio/media gallery of the whole thing. I highly recommend the interview with Stephen Reid about SW:TOR’s release, Early Game access, and the ongoing beta.

– TORWars has a short phone interview with Stephen Reid that they transcribed on their website, a breakdown of the SW:TOR pricing model, and a video of the BioWare doctors making the announcement.

It’s tough to contain my personal excitement since I have been looking forward to this game for a long time (as I’m sure a lot of you have). I have been wanting to play a sci-fi MMO for some time and it looks like my wish is finally going to come true on December 20th. Congrats to BioWare on this amazing milestone!

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Wild Space: Engines, Holidays And Videos!

It’s a big galaxy our there, and Wild Space can be a dangerous place. Worry not, explorer – each week we’ll navigate you safely through the lost hyperspace routes of the Deep Core and track down the great articles and entertainment from around the SW:TOR fan community, all in less than 12 parsecs, of course!

At their core, all video games are based on a game engine that renders the graphics and provides a framework for developers to work from when designing a game (among many other things). If you were not aware, SW:TOR is built on the Hero Engine which was built from the ground up to for MMO games. BioWare acquired one of the first licenses to utilize the engine which by all accounts has worked out very well.

This week, fansite Red Rancor has an awesome write up about the Hero Engine, what a game engine actually is and does, and what functionality the Hero Engine allows BioWare do when developing SW:TOR. The one feature of the Hero Engine that really caught my eye was how it could potentially handle game updates and patches. To quote the article:

Says [Neil Harris of Simutronic, creators of the Hero Engine] “The developer could be working on adding new content, and when they like it, they could push the new content out to the players and it will stream down to you.”  Um, did I read that right?  Wouldn’t that mean that having heaping loads of changes, in a “patch”, would no longer be necessary?  Does that mean that patches could become a thing of the past!?!  “Another advantage is that you don’t have to wait six months for another expansion pack. That content can be streamed down live to the players, and it’s very efficient,” stated Harris. 

If content can be streamed to a user’s local client, having to download a separate update or patch would become unnecessary. This should result in less downtime, traditionally need for patches and updates; perhaps less maintenance outages for the game; and an improved gameplay experience for the player since content is updated and bugs are fixed in close to real-time. I don’t think I see a downside here! The annoying “update day” could be heading for it’s demise. Check out Red Rancor for their very detailed article about the Hero Engine.

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Wild Space: Playable Species Lore, Class Balance, And Re-Specing

It’s a big galaxy our there, and Wild Space can be a dangerous place. Worry not, explorer – each week we’ll navigate you safely through the lost hyperspace routes of the Deep Core and track down the great articles and entertainment from around the SW:TOR fan community, all in less than 12 parsecs, of course!

One of the things that greatly interests me about the character creation process are the species that you can play as. In SW:TOR, BioWare made the conscious decision to not include “non-human-like” classes. This means that Mon Calamari, Trandoshan, Rodians, and Bothans (among many others) will not be available for play when the game goes live. Instead we have “near-human” species such as the Chiss, Zabrak, and Sith Pureblood. BioWare made this decision because they thought that players would have trouble identifying with a character of “strange” species.

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Wild Space: TORMag, Endgame, and “T for Teen”

It’s a big galaxy our there, and Wild Space can be a dangerous place. Worry not, explorer – each week we’ll navigate you safely through the lost hyperspace routes of the Deep Core and track down the great articles and entertainment from around the SW:TOR fan community, all in less than 12 parsecs, of course!

Convention season has come to a close with PAX. Everyone seems to still be recovering from the whirlwind that was SDCC, gamescom, and PAX but the SW:TOR’s fansite community did not rest on it’s laurels and has come out with some great stuff in the past week.

First up, TORMag released their September issue chock full of great articles, chief among them is a write-up of the planet Korriban. I’m a Star Wars lore nut and this is a great article if you want to get down the the nitty gritty about the planet and it’s almost symbiotic relationship with the ancient Sith Lords. Some of the other articles to check out are a detailed write-up of the companion system in SW:TOR, BioWare’s concept of “Heroic Combat”, voice actors in SW:TOR, as well as class write-ups and other goodies (comics!). Download the full issue on their website and support this great fansite effort.

Should the devs devote the majority of their time making the endgame great, or should they focus on improving the game as a whole? That is the question posed by Banath in an editorial over on Torocast. I think all of us have heard the screaming from the hardcore players that the endgame should be the devs top priority. It’s what will keep people playing the game long after they have completed leveling their primary character. However, SW:TOR is a different game than other MMOs out there. Every class has different content during the leveling process; the replayability of this game is going to be huge. 200 hours times eight classes is a whole lot of playtime without even touching the endgame.

I think that both Banath and I believe that the endgame is very important for SW:TOR to succeed, but is it the only factor that will determines the games success? Not a chance. All parts of SW:TOR, the beginning, middle, and end, need to be great in order for the game to succeed. I think this is something that SW:TOR has going for it over other MMOs, the beginning and middle seem to be more polished, accessible, and there is a lot more engaging and interesting content there. All of the parts working in tandem is what will keep players playing for many years to come, not just one or the other. Checkout Torocast for the full editorial.

By now, you have probably seen the Friday update video, which was a recap of gamescom. What you may not have seen was the four-second section at the beginning of the video giving the official ESRB rating for SW:TOR: T for Teen. Thankfully, our friends over at Yufmelt.com did notice this and produced a nice write-up of what a “T” rating means for SW:TOR. The first part of the write up struck me:

Blood and Gore. Interesting. I wonder if this relates to the piles of bones to be found in the Sarlacc pit? They’ve said no decapitations from lightsaber strikes, but there is a certain horror to be had from electrocuting defenseless animals and poor Jawas. Backstabbing is also a key element in the game. – Austen, Yufmelt.com

He’s quite right. I don’t think we’ve seen anything that directly shows “blood and gore” in the game yet other than lightening blasts (please correct me if I’m wrong). Perhaps some classes will have their own forced amputation moment a la Luke Skywalker at the end of “The Empire Strikes Back”? Tough to say at this point, all I know is that from the footage that we have seen no enemy mob gets eviscerated by lightsabers, they just sort of fall over (albeit gracefully) when killed. Check out the full write-up here.

Let us know what you guys think about a “T for Teen” rating, which is pretty standard for MMOs it seems, in the comments. Personally, I think that to reach as wide of an audience as possible, “T for Teen” is the appropriate rating. BioWare may have to sacrifice some of the more intense story moments and gameplay abilities, but it’s probably worth it for the longevity of the game. Besides, it’s doubtful that Lucasarts would allow a “M for Mature” Star Wars game to be made given their traditionally younger target audience. What do you guys think?

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