Welcome to Sith Sunday, our semi-regular roundup of SWTOR’s appearance in the mainstream news!

It’s been quite a while since the last news roundup, and with the local launch there’s no shortage of new stuff being written about SWTOR, so let’s jump in:

1. Like from Australian Gamer has an interview with Gabe Amatangelo from his visit 10 days ago. (You can check out or own interview with Gabe here)

2. Julien at Capsule Computers covers off on the ‘refer-a-friend’ trial BioWare is now offering.

3. Paul at The Vine has a nice overview piece on SWTOR now it’s available locally, and gives it the big thumbs up.

4. This one dates to late February, but John at Atomic PC has a review of SWTOR and gives it 88% overall.

5. PC Gamer has a nice story on the logistics in the lead up to SWTOR’s (US/Europe) launch.

6. On the pre-launch stresses, Escapist Magazine also has a good piece that looks at it a little differently.

There we go for this week – post any cool articles you’ve come across in comments!

Welcome to Sith Sunday, a roundup of SWTOR in the news. On a Sunday, we’ll be regularly bringing you the best from the web covering our favourite MMO. As always, if there’s an article you’ve found that you’d like to share, post it in comments. Here we go:

1. Massively: SWTOR is in the Guinness Book of Records for it’s more than 200,000 lines of recorded dialogue.

2. Leo over at Mos Eisley Radio is very disappointed with the Collector’s Edition.

3. Anthony at TORWars has an early review of SWTOR’s end-game content, which he currently gives a 6/10 rating for.

4. IGN have a very detailed review of SWTOR after playing for 160+ hours and have given it the big thumbs up with a 9/10 rating.

5. Sex in SWTOR: some people are obsessed with it based on the number of people who find TOROZ Googling ‘SWTOR Sex’, so for you we have this Youtube video, Romance and Love Making as a Male Jedi Consular:

See you next week!

1. From the official SWTOR site: the Mandalorian Wars get a lore update, and new playable species are announced. Sith Pureblood (Sith Warrior), Zabrak (Sith Inquistors), Miraluka (Jedi Knight) and Mirialans (Jedi Consular) are the four newies.

2. From the SWTOR forums: some nice debate on holiday events being included in SWTOR, a thread on silencing negative SWTOR reviews, and the Aussie / NZ guild thread continues to grow.

3. From our own forums: A bit of a Starcraft 2 discussion, the start of a chat on the new playable species, and more talk on the now settled Real ID fiasco over at World of Warcraft.

4. We’re still really keen to list Oceanic guilds and have improved the look of our guild listing. Drop us a line if you have one!

It’s hard to do a roundup of SWTOR news at the end of a huge week like the last one has been, but here goes:

1. The Wall Street Journal has a great article contrasting financial reform in the United States to some Star Wars lore of a similar vein.

2. For the comic-obsessive (like me), there’s quite a swathe of Star Wars comics on the way.

3. We’d love you to download our iPhone / iPad app. For a buck you help employ writers passionate about SWTOR – that HAS to be a good deal 😉

4. The big part of the week’s E3 announcement was the Hope trailer. Aside from our own opinion, there’s this one and this one to name two. Even the Christian Science Monitor has an opinion.

To top it off, here’s an interview with Lead Writer, Daniel Erickson:

1. The President of LucasArts, Darrell Rodriguez, has resigned. There’s apparently no impact on SWTOR with this announcement.

2. The Guardian in the UK asks: what Star Wars tie-in games would you like to see?

3. From the SWTOR Forums 1: for those who can’t get enough of rhyming couplets and the like, there’s now a poetry and limerick thread.

4. From the SWTOR Forums 2: the official Australia / NZ thread continues to grow

5. This could become required reading for potential SWTOR guild leaders: The Guild Leader’s Handbook. It appears fairly WoW-centric but I’ve ordered a copy so expect a review in the future.

6. In official news – the second issue of Blood of the Empire is now out.

7. Don’t forget our own forums: there’s a steady population growing but there’s certainly room for a few more!

1. The SWTOR info snippet released by Bioware this week is on the potential infiltration of the Sith into the Jedi order. There’s a nice wrap up from Darth Hater on the info, including some snippets from SWTOR developers.

2. GamesRadar got their hands on part of SWTOR, and have a very detailed look here. They make some interesting point on the fact that no matter how interesting SWTOR ends up, at the end of the day it will be bound by a bunch of bog standard MMO mechanics. For me, that’s not necessarily a bad thing!

3. From our forums: discussions on choosing factions, the appeal of the Republic side and the link between KOTOR II and SWTOR.

4. From the official forums: The SWTOR wish list thread, whether people just want World of Warcraft in SWTOR clothing and an index of useful guild threads.

1. Bioware have announced a new planet that’ll be featuring in SWTOR: Voss.

Voss is an independent planet populated by Mystics who are major wielders of The Force, but know nothing of its existence. Sounds rather intriguing.

2. From the official SWTOR forums, there’s some interesting discussions on prestige classes, whether role-playing fansites serve any purpose, and a great introductions thread for Australian and New Zealand SWTOR players.

3. Whilst talking forums, we’ve set up our own. They’re very simple, which concerned us initially but the feedback has been great to date, and there’s already a good community building.

4. We’re also running a new poll on our front page, asking you whether a guild is going to be front and centre for you in your SWTOR experience. The results from the first poll were:

No big surprises there although one has to wonder about the people who voted that they hate either game.

1. SWTOR’s Principal Lead Systems Designer writes a piece on MMO design and (surprise) how happy he is with the playability factor of the game. He also has some interesting thoughts about the multiplayer conversations for solo content and the community aspects of crafting. And if you think it’s easy writing as a developer, check the post’s comments to see the level of analysis every discussion generates. That’s a good thing of course.

2. PC World looks at the rumours of SWTOR coming to the XBox – personally I’d like to see them support Macs natively before developing for consoles, but I’m certainly not holding my breath in that regard.

3. Darth Hater had one of the more amusing April Fools jokes for the week.

4. Mos Eisley Radio keep churning out their special brand of podcast, with Episode 16 hitting the streets.

5. We’re still looking for writers wanting to be (modestly) paid to write for us. We have a writer debut coming up this week but could still use a further person. All the details here.

One of our regular features will be a roundup of SWTOR news from around the world that doesn’t make it to separate stories during the week. The first few are likely to be sparse as I’ll avoid linking to the same story subject, but as more information comes to light, this weekly segment could get pretty extensive. If you believe you’ve got something newsworthy to share, drop us a line.

Onto the inaugural instalment:

1. Over on the official SWTOR forums, they’ve made some changes to the Guild forums. Also. don’t forget we’re looking to create a list of Aussie SWTOR guilds.

2. Also on the forums, here’s a great list of suggested character creation traits. What, no option to select nose hairs or not? (Thanks to Darth Hater for the heads-up).

3. Mos Eisley Radio has Episode 3 of its podcast available.

4. Friday’s official developer blog covers the Smuggler class in quite a bit of detail. There’s a sentence in the blog that for me opens up a whole new area of Star Wars Fan Fiction:

Nobody successfully flirts with Jedi Knight

If that’s not the perfect premise for a whole range of Jedi romance books, nothing is.

5. The latest instalment of the SWTOR webcomic is now available.