While talking with Jake Neri about the Trooper, we decided to use the opportunity to gather more information about Star Wars: The Old Republic. The LucasArts producer offered what limited insight he could into BioWare's James Ohlen and his recent comments on 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.

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. ;)

The history of the audio department at LucasArts is full of iconic video game moments. From Monkey Island to Knights of the Old Republic, the sounds coming from this studio tend to stand out. Thanks to Jake Neri, we were lucky enough to meet a few members of the LucasArts Audio Team while in California. In addition to a brief clip that will be featured on next week's podcast, they agreed to give us a written interview. We are pleased to bring you our interview with LucasArts on the audio of Star Wars: The Old Republic.

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?

The last few weeks have been noteworthy for everyone following Star Wars: The Old Republic. We've seen the Jedi Knight and Imperial Agent revealed back-to-back, and we got the first taste of the new marketing direction from BioWare and LucasArts with the combat demo for the Imperial Agent. Although November has been great to the fans, and especially us here at Darth Hater, December looks to be even more exciting.


We would like to invite everyone to join us here on December 3rd for a Star Wars: The Old Republic News Extravaganza. So eat some turkey, do some shopping, and get ready to see a little of what TOR has in store for us in the new year.

Last week Darth Hater was included on a short list of organizations invited to Lucas Arts' studio in San Francisco to check out Star Wars: The Old Republic. Due to a slight miscommunication, we only had short notice to grab plane tickets and get a hotel room booked, more on that later, but before we knew it Sado and I were on our way to California. The following is a photo journey covering a little of what we got to see in our short stay in the City by the Bay.

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.

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:

There seems to be quite the amount of misinformation making the rounds on the forum as of late and in an attempt to quell the flames I need to reiterate that Bioware has not made any statements regarding a use of a payment model whatsoever. This discussion started way back when EA Boss Riccitiello stated that The Old Republic's payment model would be microtransaction based. EA then sometime after retracted the statement attributing the comments to a misunderstanding. Flash forward to this last week when LucasArts President Darrell Rodriguez was interviewed by GamesIndustry on the payment model, speculation ensued from one quote:


Many people on the forum then took that comment out of context as a confirmation of a microtransaction model being used in the US and other territories even though the quote does not say or confirm anything near that. Furthermore in an interview with TenTonHammer, Blaine Christine was quick to dismiss the rumor:


You can stop claiming that they're using a microtransaction model from those comments as confirmation now ;) .

Gamesindustry.biz has an interesting interview with LucasArts President Darrell Rodriguez which discusses the possibility of multiple subscription methods in Star Wars: The Old Republic:


Nothing as far as confirming one subscription model or another just that they are considering different methods of going about it.