Posted by Lethality | 27 Comments

Blue Milk & Cereal: Is The Release Date What You Expected?

No day would be complete without the breakfast of Jedi: Blue Milk & Cereal.  Every morning, the team at Ask A Jedi will get Force-induced thoughts coursing through your head with delicious issues from around the galaxy! Join in the discussion below to make your voice heard!

Yesterday was aruguably the biggest day for fans of Star Wars: The Old Republic since the game was announced on October 21, 2008. Or at least since Pre-Orders began. Thirty-five months and change later, BioWare Co-founders Dr. Ray Muzyka and Dr. Greg Zeschuk made the big announcement during the Eurogamer Expo. TOR will be released on December 20th in the US, and December 22nd in Europe.

I think I speak for most fans when I say that the announcement came as quite a surprise. Most probably felt that the announcement would come on a bigger stage, or we’d at least hear the train coming. No, this train went all stealthy on us and popped out when we least expected it! That’s hard for a train to do.

Anyway, that’s not the surprise I’m talking about. I’m talking about the date itself. We know that BioWare has been touting “Holiday 2011” pretty staunchly for some time now. But did anyone think it would literally be Christmas week? It’s an interesting choice, and we may never know why it was chosen. But I do know the server hamsters at BioWare Austin will be working overtime and enjoying their egg nog over the serene sound of fan noise in a server room.

So, does the release date meet your expectations? Did you expect it sooner? Later? I know we’re still all a little shell-shocked, but try to pull yourself together enough to cast a vote and perhaps leave a comment below!

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Posted by Lethality | 24 Comments

Blue Milk & Cereal: What Month Will TOR Release?

No day would be complete without the breakfast of Jedi: Blue Milk & Cereal.  Every morning, the team at Ask A Jedi will get Force-induced thoughts coursing through your head with delicious issues from around the galaxy! Join in the discussion below to make your voice heard!

Heading into PAX this week, we thought it would be a great time to take the pulse of the communuty and do a release date check! The Penny Arcade Expo is the last major gaming convention in the US remaining in the release window for Star Wars: The Old Republic, which as of right now is still “Holiday 2011”. There are still other events on the schedule, but arguably none of them have the hutzbah of PAX!

Obviously, as of this writing we don’t know what announcements will come out of PAX, but assuming one of them isn’t a release date, that will leave 4 full months left in 2011 in which BioWare can meet its stated launch goal. September is unlikely, as that’s been stated when Beta Weekends will be taking place. Realistically, that leaves 3 months.

So today’s question is simple… what month do you think TOR will finally launch? I’m not sure there’s an 0ffical Vegas line on the odds, but we knew the TOR community will have lots to say on the topic! Let’s hear it!

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Posted by ReDDoT | 8 Comments

Blue Milk & Cereal: What Would You Like In A Collectors Edition Of TOR??

No day would be complete without the breakfast of Jedi: Blue Milk & Cereal.  Every morning, the team at Ask A Jedi will get Force-induced thoughts coursing through your head with delicious issues from around the galaxy! Join in the discussion below to make your voice heard!

As we found out earlier this week in BM&C, many of you are expecting the collector’s edition details and a release date as part of the announcements coming from BioWare at SDCC this week. The community has been buzzing over the last couple of days, as there is a huge amount of speculation currently present on the SW:TOR official forums. Even Stephen Reid, on his Twitter feed, had to make a remark about all the ongoing speculation on the forums with the following:

For those demanding answers: this the ‘wait’ part of ‘wait and see’. (And btw, no, I don’t need Polish/Spanish help, thx. :) )

This makes the wait even more intriguing and interesting! Collector’s editions of various games are always considered the ultimate versions of the game,  and are made with the hard-core fan in mind. Most of the time, these editions include a bunch of physical goodies likes art books, soundtracks, maps and other collectibles. In addition to that, especially in MMO games, a collectors edition usually gives players some unique in-game items that will set him apart from the crowd. Of course, most of the time these items are purely cosmetic – but they are really awesome to have nonetheless!

Personally – I am extremely excited for SSDC, regardless of what it will bring to us. If we do get some information on the collector’s edition and perhaps (gasp!) something about the mythical release date – this will take me to new levels of happiness and hopefully set me straight on which version of the game I will purchase. I also have complete faith in BioWare that they will make the CE worth it by including something that is awesome as both physical item(s), as well as an in-game item(s). So as Stephen Reid said himself – “wait and see!“.

What about you? What do you want to see in the collectors edition? Is there a particular item you’d like to see? Do you think you will be getting a collector’s edition? Let us know!

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Posted by Rashiva | 22 Comments

Officially Speaking: The Science Of Release Date Speculation

Welcome to Officially Speaking, a weekly column focused on the most hotly debated  topics ever to grace the official Star Wars: The Old Republic forums. Do you have something to add? Feel like it gets lost in the shuffle over there? Join in the extended discussion right here on Ask A Jedi.

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In the realm of consistently debated, reposted, and ever-expanding threads on the official Star Wars™: The Old Republic™ forums, few come close to achieving the notoriety and sometimes surprising ingenuity of the “Release Window Speculation” topic, which in its current iteration boasts close to 300,000 views. Much of the current zeitgeist seems to center on the frustration of the legions of hopeful beta testers and future players, who had been waiting on the former “Spring 2011” release window until its adjustment earlier this year to a more general “when it’s ready/2011” response from developers.

While much of the conversation tends to devolve into pettiness and bickering, some of the more ingenious posters follow specific criteria and clues to inform their projected release dates; one poster even went so far as to chart out the release date of every major MMO, cross-referencing that data with Bioware’s release dates of former titles to conclude the most likely outcome, all done in an Excel spreadsheet. Unfortunately that particular thread has been buried beyond my powers to retrieve it, but to give a sense of what these more hardcore speculators focus on, let’s take a look at a post by zewi [edited for general readability]:

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