Blood of the Empire, Issue #6 and more E3

Last Friday's update was a bit later than usual, giving us the sixth issue of the Blood of the Empire comic. Besides that I've got a couple more E3 links from the past week to share.

But let's first do the official update:

In the sixth issue of Blood of the Empire™, Teneb Kel fights for his life as Lenico Colony Blue collapses around him. The Emperor's apprentice has proven vastly more powerful than anyone realized--it will take all Teneb's skills and resources to survive, let alone complete his mission. But can he rely on his closest ally in his moment of need, or will he face betrayal?

Check out the latest issue of Blood of the Empire now!

It also seems (thanks to Darth Hater) that issue seven is available (in German) on a German website as well. SWTOR-Station has translated it into English.

On then to more E3 articles. Last week the site MMORPG posted a hands on with the Sith Warrior. The writer seems to be fairly impatient, skipping past the dialog to "get my quest and get moving" (as most players tend to play in pretty much all current MMOs), seemingly missing the entire point of what differentiates TOR from other MMOs. Then again, having only a short time to play during E3 it's understandable that he wanted to skip the story and just taste the gameplay. He also seems to have missed the often-demonstrated Force jump ability to close into melee range. Anyway, here's an excerpt:

The dialogue is again one of the challenges of Old Republic. Many players like it and it has served Bioware well in the past, but again it seemed a bit tedious. My answers were all snarky and evil of course, but in the end I used the space bar to get my quest and get moving. I'm a Sith Warrior after all. I don't need to remind myself I am evil. I just want to hack Jedi apart. So I run into the caves and find the slugs are neutral to me. I attack them as I go and just keep rolling through to try out some new Sith skills. Again it was a limited demo so there were not a ton of skills available to players. But after hacking through giants slugs I came to an important question, what can I do against a ranged opponent?

Last week's G4TV show "The MMO Report" also included a bit on The Old Republic. In it they've got an interview with Daniel Erickson (lead writer). You can catch the entire MMO Report show (which also includes a segment on Vindictus and Lego Universe) by following this link, or you can just watch the TOR segment on YouTube here:


There have also been a couple of E3 awards for TOR from various sites. Though it's been fairly few so far (most sites seemed to be expecting a bit more from TOR), let me list the ones I've found so far anyway.

Eurogamer has a Best Video award for TOR's cinematic trailer. Here's what they had to say:

They did the same thing last year, but that didn't make it any less spectacular: BioWare and LucasArts' promotional CG shorts for their joint MMO are simply some of the best Star Wars entertainment of any sort in years. As Tom put it, "I hope they never release this game so we can just watch new, amazing Star Wars shorts once a year forever." Quite, and with the scale of this project and MMO launches being what they are, that wish might just be granted.

Next up is 1UP with a Best RPG award. Oddly enough SWTOR doesn't with the Best MMO category and to be honest I'm a tad surprised that it's included in the RPG category at all (which should probably be limited to single-player RPG). Then again the while genre categories thing is generally a mess anyway. Here's what they said with the award:

The Old Republic is the game of every Star Wars fan's dreams. With the ability to play as a variety of races and character classes (yes, you can be a Jedi or a Sith) and the newly announced player owned spacecraft (aka: the best thing ever), as well as PVP battlegrounds and robust character customization options, this game is primed to please MMO nuts and fans of the franchise alike.

And finally there's GameSpot who does give TOR it's Best MMO award. And though these awards are their Editors' Choice awards users can also vote on their favorites for the Readers' Choice awards (where TOR is over two-thousand ahead of the closest runner-up at the moment). Here's what they had to say:

Star Wars: The Old Republic pulls a repeat win in this category from last year as the most impressive massively multiplayer online game at the show. This year, apart from having another really impressive trailer, The Old Republic let us sample the starting content of six of the game's eight professions, and we found each of these experiences to be as in depth as anything we've seen from developer BioWare's other single-player games, such as Mass Effect, Dragon Age, and Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic.

The revelation that all players will have their own housing in the form of mobile starships (which will be both a social hub and a home base for your non-player character companions, similar to the Ebon Hawk in Knights of the Old Republic), the fact that specialized advanced professions will become available later on in your character's career, and the intriguing playable content for each class showed us that there's still plenty more of The Old Republic that we haven't seen, as well as more that we want to see (and play).

And finally Eurogamer had an interview with Greg Zeschuk during E3. They cover a number of topics (including his thoughts on the consoles' motion controllers) as well as The Old Republic (which was really the only game BioWare was showing at E3 this year). Here's an excerpt:

Eurogamer: Have you had any negative feedback?

Greg Zeschuk: Not really. The interesting thing is there's a surprise factor. One thing I heard was that up till now people never really got a taste for this whole story thing we've talked about. We've talked, talked, talked about it, and made it a big deal, but you couldn't actually experience it.

The feedback I'm getting is that now people have finally been able to play it, they get it completely. For us, that's very much a win condition because being able to experience and understand how the story is interwoven with the multiplayer experience is the whole point of the game. Just from playing for 30 minutes, it's evident that's really powerful.

And that's it for now.


[link] to Sith Warrior hands on article at MMORPG.
[link] to MMO Report video at G4TV.
[link] to MMO Report TOR segment at YouTube.
[link] to Best of E3 2010 article at Eurogamer.
[link] to Best Games of E3 2010 at 1UP.
[link] to Best MMO award at GameSpot.
[link] to interview with Greg Zeschuk at Eurogamer.