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Wild Space: PAX Prime

It’s a big galaxy out 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!

This has been a crazy good week for SW:TOR fans! We started off at the amazing Eurpoean show gamescom and will end at PAX Prime, which takes place in my former hometown of Seattle. Tons of information has come out about Warzones and Operations from gamescom and it appears that the trend will continue with PAX. Since this week, most fansites have been busy either recuperating from gamescom or preparing for PAX (or both), I thought that it would be appropriate to continue my theme from last week and focus on the PAX information that is already starting to trickle out from the fansite community.

Darth Hater has continued with their popular theme of live blogging the official BioWare presentations and Q&A’s. The two live blog transcripts from today’s two developer presentations can be found on the Darth Hater website. Some noteworthy pieces of information to come out of those presentations:

You will not be able to enter Warzones with premade groups of eight people. Eventually, they might add “multiple group queues” to the game. Do I detect “rated battlegrounds” (or rated Warzones) in our future?

“[BioWare] is working on a system that prompts you to friend people after grouping with them.”

Further clarification of Huttball team mechanics (Republic can fight Republic and Empire can fight Empire; the two factions cannot combine onto the same team).

In addition to keeping us up to date on their twitter feed, the ladies from Corellian Run Radio coaxed some raid lockout information from the lead Operations man himself, Gabe Amatangelo. For instance:

“Easy mode and hard mode raids will NOT share a lockout.”

A potential third difficulty mode was teased: “medium”. Definitely won’t be in the game for launch (and might not be in the game at all).

TORWars always does a great job of getting exclusive video of the conventions and getting them up quickly and PAX Prime is no exception. As of this writing, there are three PvP gameplay videos available:

Exclusive PAX Video: Alderaan Warzone – Jedi Sentinel vs Marauder, Juggernaut
Exclusive PAX Video: Alderaan Warzone – Trooper vs. Sith Assassin
Exclusive PAX Video: Huttball Play-by-Play With Stephen Reid

Be sure to check out all of this great content courtesy of the awesome SW:TOR fansite community!

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Wild Space: gamescom 2011

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!

You may have heard that there has been a huge gaming convention going on in Germany (which ended today) and SW:TOR has been a big part of it. This week, I thought we should take a look at some of the coverage coming out of the show thanks to some great community members.

TotalBiscuit

You will be familiar with our first feature due to his dedication to and involvement in World of Warcraft. Yes, the Cynical Brit himself, TotalBiscuit, has released a few game play videos of SW:TOR from gamescom. You may have seen the first video, which includes an interview/play through with Stephen Reid. As of Saturday morning, two more videos have been released (with hints that more might be on the way). The first video (or is that second?) was a great interview with he-of-many-titles, Gabe Amatangelo, the Lead PvP, Flashpoints, and Operations Designer. Operations and PvP were the topics of the interview (surprise!) so check that out! The second video that TotalBiscuit released was a 16-minute play through of the Smuggler class on the origin world of Ord Mantell. Providing some of the highest quality gameplay video of the game we have yet seen, TotalBiscuit also brings his trademark commentary to bear in the video. Be sure to check out his YouTube channel for videos not just of SW:TOR, but all kinds of games.

TORWars

TORWars has been featured in this column before, but I had to give them another shout out for their great gamescom coverage. One article that particularly caught my eye was “Exclusive Gamescom Report: Eternity Vault Hands-On“. This article was particularly interesting to me since it was written by a regular gamer and not a fansite contributor or game journalist. The writer, Ben, was chosen randomly out of the crowd to come up and play the Eternity Vault operation on the main BioWare stage. They were able to get through the first wave of baddies (assault droids and two defense turrets) before wiping to the huge Annihilation droid. BioWare gave them another shot and they ended up defeating the encounter! Congrats to Ben on his “World First” achievement! Check out the article on TORWars for the full write-up.

The Forums!

Last up are the community contributions of some truly awesome SW:TOR official forum posters. I know what you’re thinking, that wretched hive of scum and villainy can’t even use proper capitalization let alone post some worthwhile information. Most of the time you would be correct…but in this case you are dead wrong! For the last several conventions (including SDCC and E3), GamewizX has been writing the official unofficial convention threads, but due to some real life commitments, he passed the reigns to Celwinn for gamescom 2011 and boy did he step up in a big way. The thread is basically a list of every article, video, blog, picture, review, preview, and opinion that has to do with SW:TOR at gamescom 2011. Organizing all of the information from all of the SW:TOR fansites and gaming media in one place makes it incredibly easy to find that one article you missed or video that you have been dying to watch and since it’s been stickied on the official forums, it makes it easily accessible to SW:TOR fans. A huge thanks to Celwinn for keeping this thread up to date! Be sure to checkout the post on the official forums.

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Wild Space: Podcast Roundup

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!

This week we are going to take a look three great SW:TOR podcasts that are dedicated to provide you with some of the best news and entertainment. First up is Two TOR Gamers (and Some Microphones).  blur and Blueneko bring their unique personalities and humor to this great podcast. I feel like their show has two unique things that it brings to the community. First, the podcast brings together the views of both men and women gamers which is extremely interesting to listen to. As a man, it’s always intriguing to think about aspects of SW:TOR (or life in general) from a woman’s perspective, which I find myself doing when I listen to this podcast. The other thing that I really like is that TwoTORGamers is (usually) about 30 minutes in length, which creates a very succinct program chock full of information. Since I am a terrible multi-tasker (don’t tell my boss) and have a lot of RL obligations, I like that I am able to dedicate less time to this podcast but still get the same quality information and entertainment out of it. These two factors serve to keep this podcast on my weekly rotation. Episode 16 comes out soon so check it out on beskar.net!

Next up is Mos Eisley Radio. MER’s biggest strengths has to be their ability to analyze any and all information that comes out from BioWare. Taking time off from his successful music career (which I’m sure is a joke he has never heard before), Zach Brown is at the helm of this podcast along with his good friend Evan Lewis. They really get down to the nitty gritty and provide some in-depth analysis whenever some new information comes out. I really like the speculation ideas that come out of their discussions. They don’t go off on crazy tangents or tinfoil hattery; what they do is come up with clear, concise, and logical ideas that make you think about the game and what the possibilities are. MER is currently on the front page of the iTunes Games and Hobbies (#34 overall last time I checked), so check them out on iTunes or on their website, moseisleyradio.com.

Finally, we have the video cast “The Republic” from Gamebreaker.tv. I like this cast for the combination of entertainment, analysis, and the hosts. The three primary hosts (Gary Gannon from Gamebreaker.tv, Larry Everett from Massively, and Justin Lowe from Darth Hater) work really well together and all bring very different views to the show. Gary is the “everyman” and represents the opinions of the average gamer, Justin is the hard core raider, and Larry is the roleplayer and resident Star Wars expert. The three of them truly make this cast one of the best video casts around. Head on over to “The Republic” on Gamebreaker.tv to check it out.

This is by no means an exhaustive list of the podcasts available for Star Wars: The Old Republic – stay tuned as we highlight more of them in the future! And who knows… maybe, just maybe… someday Ask A Jedi may even have our own ;)

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Wild Space: Preparing For SW:TOR

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!

First up is the active community of Tormag.net. After taking a look around the SW:TOR community and not finding information presented in exactly the way the he wanted, Tormag founder John F. decided to create his own site. The end result of his efforts was the first issue of Tormag: The (unofficial) Old Republic Magazine. Released to the world in .PDF format on Friday, August 5, the magazine combines editorials, interviews with prominent community members, fan art, forum highlights, and more. The magazine’s goal is to pull in some of the most interesting SW:TOR information from the month (as well as create some of its own) and wrap it in a very appealing and highly accessible format for distribution to as many SW:TOR fans as possible. The 21-page magazine is more than worth the time it takes to read. I can’t wait for next month’s issue!

Next, is a site that a lot of you have probably already heard of if you regularly read Ask A Jedi: Our friends over at r2-db.com. The goal of this site is to be the best SW:TOR database website out there (similar to what Wowhead is for World of Warcraft). R2-Db’s strength lies in their ability to organize information in a very clear and concise way. You can view headlines from other fan sites on their front page, you can search or browse for anything SW:TOR related and if you register on the site, you can also choose to follow any article in the database and be notified whenever that article is updated. In preperations for the eventual release, R2-Db just released a concept test for how tooltips will look when you search for armor, weapons, or an item in the database. The site is updated all the time so be sure to register to keep up to date on all the goings on. In addition, you could also win a copy of the SW:TOR Collector’s Edition just for registering on the site and liking them on Facebook.

Finally, BioWare recently released the official minimum hardware requirements for SW:TOR. With this news came an explosion of forum posts all asking the same question: will my computer run TOR? Given that BioWare has been focusing on console games as of late (Mass Effect and Dragon Age both have wider followings of the console versions), this question makes total sense. A wall of text with phrases like “Intel Core 2 Duo Processor 2.0GHz or better” and “ATI X1800 or better · nVidia 7800 or better” can seem quite daunting.

To guide you through the asteroid field of all things SW:TOR hardware related, Yufmelt.com has release a great video blog chock-full of info designed to help you make the decision to upgrade, purchase, or build your own computer. In addition to their relatively new video blog, the site also features a wealth of very well organized information about the game, so check out their site when you have a few hours to spare (trust me, once you get started reading, it’s tough to stop).

That’s all for this week!  Let us know in the comments if you guys plan to upgrade a few hardware components, purchase a new computer, build your own computer, or if your computer is just fine the way it is (thank you very much)!

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Wild Space: TORWars, Darth Hater And Corellian Run Radio

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!

For our inaugural week, we start with TORWars, the self-described Star Wars: The Old Republic Online Magazine. This site’s features are quite extensive including in-depth articles, exclusive video interviews, and a thoroughly entertaining podcast. However, what I specifically wanted to mention from this week are the photo galleries that the site posted from SDCC. Some of the photos are fun, some are nerdy, some are downright creepy (thanks for that, Jeff,) but all are worth a look. Head on over to the TORWars site to check them out.

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