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SWTOR Hands On @ GDC

The Game Developers Conference was held last week and several sites had an opportunity to get a “hands on” with Star Wars: The Old Republic. Both 1UP and Eurogamer were afforded the opportunity to check out the game. Here a couple excerpts from their reactions: Story Driven Experience When playing a story mission in Star Trek Online, it’s all text delivered through a little dialog box. More times than not, it’s usually an alien race harassing a Federation colony, and you need to step in and blast them out of the stars. From the little that we’ve seen of The Old Republic so far, this much is certain: you will have many different story arcs available to your character available out of the box on day one. Recently we saw some of this in action as we got a taste of the Trooper’s story arc, and what it was like…

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The Old Republic reveals Imperial Agent its newest class

We’ve got Trooper, Smuggler, Jedi Knight, Bounty Hunter, Sith Warrior, and now Imperial Agent. BioWare revealed the sixth class for Star Wars: The Old Republic today on their forums. This news comes as absolutely no surprise to those who attended the EA Press Tour earlier this week — they enjoyed advance information from producer Blaine Christine. Imperial Agents are a rogue class of sorts, doing their work for the Empire with high-tech tools to help them infiltrate the republic and assassinate enemies of the Sith Empire. The announcement from Sean Dahlberg says that Imperial Agents are “heavily inspired by several classic Star Wars characters such as Zam Wessel and Grand Moff Tarkin. […] Players who choose to be Imperial Agents in The Old Republic (TOR) will see the underbelly of the Empire in a whole new light.“ The Holonet will be updated next week with the Imperial Agent, but the…

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Star Wars: Sneaky, Sneaky

Since a great deal of TOR’s Holonet — the game’s official repository for info and features — is still hidden, fans have been hacking away at entering in random words into the URL to see if any might match and unconver potential secrets that BioWare is holding close to their chest. So far, the community has found a number of pages that do not give a “Requested Page Not Found” error, but merely a blank page — a placeholder, if you will. So what are the pages? http://www.swtor.com/info/holonet/combat http://www.swtor.com/info/holonet/pvp http://www.swtor.com/info/holonet/professions http://www.swtor.com/info/holonet/space http://www.swtor.com/info/holonet/story http://www.swtor.com/info/holonet/characters http://www.swtor.com/info/holonet/guild http://www.swtor.com/info/holonet/equipment http://www.swtor.com/info/holonet/enemies Okay, so nothing eye-opening in the extreme, but it does make one curious for what they might be revealing in the future — especially under the “space” and “professions” pages.

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Interview with Bioware’s Richard Vogel

Check out this Star Wars: The Old Republic interview from Bioware’s Co-GM Richard Vogel. Please excuse the bad audio. Transcript: I am Richard Vogel and I am the co-GM at Bioware-Austin. Basically this story, umm, takes place 300 years after the original KotOR, which is what it’s based on. Uh, Knights of the Old Republic. And, uh, 2700 years before the movies. So gives us a lot of leeway to a lot of stuff we couldn’t do if we were near the movies. So, there are a lot of Jedi, for instance, in our game. But as far as classes go, we announced the Bounty Hunter, and we announced the Trooper, and we announced the Smuggler. We have been developing for about three years. We’re, uh, not ready, still not ready to release yet. We have a ways to go. Well, basically what we did is, we did, uh, we…

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SWTOR Trooper & Bounter Hunter Alpha Gameplay Footage

The story takes place in the Star Wars fictional universe shortly after the establishment of a tenuous peace between the re-emergent Sith Empire and the Galactic Republic, 300 years after the events of the Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic games and 3,500 years before the events in the Star Wars films. The Jedi, held responsible for the Sith‘s success, are forced to relocate from Coruscant to Tython, where the Jedi order was founded. The Sith control Korriban, where they re-established a Sith Academy. The game begins as new conflicts arise. A collaborative effort between Bioware, Lucasarts, and Dark Horse Comics has resulted in a webcomic entitled “Star Wars: The Old Republic: Threat of Peace” whose purpose is to set up the story as the game opens.

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