A PC Gamer interview came out today that highlights what BioWare's thoughts are when it comes to endgame:

Official Star Wars: The Old Republic Twitter feed included some interesting news about this year's E3 Expo:


E3 Expo is June 15 through June 17 at the Los Angeles Convention Center.

In the shameless plug department, if you want to support Darth Hater's coverage of E3 Expo and other conventions this year, then please help us out with a donation.

Official forum poster armenak reported that while taking a casual glance at this year's E3 Expo Exhibitor List, he noticed both LucasArts and BioWare's parent company Electronic Arts booked their meeting rooms.

Although there isn't a booth confirmation yet listed, both meeting rooms are in close proximity to one another: LucasArts will be in Meeting Room 404AB, while Electronic Arts booked Room 406AB, and no one is listed for Room 405 yet.

E3 Expo is June 15-17 at the LA Convention Center.

After reviewing many of our recent speculation articles, we felt it was time to take a step back and reveal the core foundation of the logic that drives our conclusions. We strongly believe BioWare is approaching game design in a significantly different manner than what we see in other MMOs: instead of simply copying primary game elements and introducing a few new ideas, we believe the core principle at BioWare is to completely avoid significant MMO flaws through design innovation that wont negatively affect other areas of Star Wars: The Old Republic. Therefore, we believe these design innovations will compliment each other and integrate seamlessly throughout the game.

When attempting to solve common MMO problems such as stale character progression, faction or class imbalances, BioWare must use the Star Wars universe itself to creatively consolidate their design innovations. We think BioWares fourth pillar of Story actually has to permeate even further into the other pillars of Combat, Progression, and Exploration and these pillars are intertwined in such a way that they seem to solve these issues from the outset.

The podcast team is on holiday break this week but we wanted to bring you something special to fill the void until next week's podcast. We have an audio interview with Darragh O'Farrell and Jake Neri of LucasArts. The questions/poll for this week's podcast will be held over for next week's episode. Next week's episode already looks to be a packed one. Until then, Happy Holidays.



Transcription of the audio interview is after the jump.

Note: Just because the podcast team is on break doesn't mean the editorial staff is. ;)

We racked our brains here at Darth Hater to come up with a perfect gift to BioWare on behalf of us, the Star Wars: The Old Republic community -- a community where we debate, argue, troll, praise, post lolcats, root for Aqua 31 to be a lightsaber color, watch Caleb Hiett roflstomp our threads, etc.

And of course, all of us in the community dig through BioWare and LucasArts' marketing messages to find clues about the game that we hope will be the game we play for years.

One of the mantras of the marketing team behind Star Wars: The Old Republic has been "the four pillars" that make up an MMO: exploration, advancement, combat and story. TOR has made a splash in the MMO community with a marketing emphasis on story, however the recent change in direction, hinted at by Jake Neri, is what we should be paying attention to. With many months of narrative buzz words behind us, we may be entering a new phase in the news coming out of Austin. Could it be that we are finally approaching the second pillar?

incgamers has a new interview with BioWare's James Ohlen on story and endgame raiding:


Hat tip to chillinvillain.

We had the chance to sit down with Jake Neri, Producer at LucasArts for Star Wars: The Old Republic. With the immanent Holonet announcement of the Imperial Agent, Jake Neri was able to give us some insight on the workings of this truly unique class.

Interview after the jump.

We learned from a recent Gamasutra article that BioWare has licensed Umbra occlusion culling technology for use in multiple titles, including Dragon Age: Origins and Mass Effect. This adds to the growing list of relatively high profile third party technology being utilized in BioWare products, and could be another interesting point of conversation in the constant debate about graphics in Star Wars: The Old Republic.

Last Friday, Dragon Age: Origins had quite an update. Bioware is going to be giving out a character creator, for free, prior to release of the game on the 13th. The tool will let people tinker around and make their ideal character, that will then carry over to the release of the game three weeks later. After thinking about how I will download this and play around with the character options, Captain Obvious came to the rescue. Bioware is making Star Wars: The Old Republic too.

Everyone has done it. You've signed up to be a tester, and, in the midst of your application, there was a standard agreement you SHOULD have read before agreeing to it. My bet is many of you just took it like an EULA and said "Too long, didn't read." Those of you that did read it may have gone, "What do they mean by that?" Well, I'm going to take my skills of a non-lawyer type person and translate what the agreement says, line by line, into normal English. You may notice I am also using the term "testing" instead of "beta." That is because Sean Dahlberg says this: