Posted by Cormeister | 9 Comments

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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Posted by Cormeister | 0 Comments

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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Posted by Lethality | 4 Comments

SWTOR Community Cantina @ PAX Prime 2011!

If you’re headed to PAX Prim in Seattle later this week, we’ve got one last must-do item to add to your list: The SWTOR Community Cantina!

Come put a face to a name that you might be familiar with from the official Star Wars™: The Old Republic™ forums, or mix and mingle with your favorite hosts and writers from sites such Curse, Darth Hater, Mos Eisley Radio, TOROCast, Corellian Run Radio and TORWars. Oh, and of course Ask A Jedi will be there too!

When and where you ask? The event will be held at The Blarney Stone Pub & Restaurant on Friday, August 26th at 7:00pm PDT. The Blarney Stone is located at 1909 Third Avenue in downtown Seattle, just a short cab ride from the convention center.

This is a community-wide meetup, so if you have friends that might just be hearing about TOR, being them along too, the more the merrier! Although, be on the lookout for Rodians in dark corners.

We hope to see everyone there!

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Posted by Cormeister | 1 Comment

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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Posted by Cormeister | 1 Comment

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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