E3 Live Video Schedule
Ok, ok, I have a spare minute. This will just highlight the two things I mentioned. The full report might have to wait for a little bit. (hint, my next VT Gaming article in a few days).
When talking with David Bass, I asked him if he could clarify on what Daniel Erickson meant regarding open beta. To make a long conversation short, he basically said that they are not planning on doing what people consider a traditional open beta. He said that the hype and buzz surrounding the game is far greater than what most MMOs get pre-launch. For a game like Rift, the open beta helped it to generate a lot of hype, which was productive for it. For TOR, David said, that isn't necessary and isn't productive.
He also stated that with well over a million people signed up on this site, you cannot realistically have one test server and just suddenly open up the game to the general public before launch. That's not stressing a server, that's putting a bullet in it's head. So they will want to stress the test server and will definitely fill it to capacity. He didn't go into details how to get into this stress test prior to launch, but my guess is it will have to do with pre-orders possibly. I asked him what kind of player numbers we were talking about, but he couldn't give me a number. It will definitely be well into the thousands though.
As for what I talked about with Gabe Amatangelo, I basically asked if he could clarify on what we know about Open World PvP for PvE servers. It was mentioned in the past that there would be designated areas away from questing areas where you are auto-flagged and can fight in an open-world environment and that these areas would be clearly marked. However, some people interpreted this as either like WAR's Core server ruleset (the RvR lakes) or like WoW's Wintergrasp/Tol'Barad.
Gabe said it was definitely more like WAR's setup, ie, there will be "lakes", not every zone, but in a lot of them where it makes sense depending on the planet. He also asked me to specify that these are not "RvR" lakes, rather PvP lakes, as RvR hints at a completely different game mechanic. He also couldn't go into details about objectives within those lakes, but he did say that there will be reasons you would want to fight in these PvP areas. If you are unfamiliar with the "lake" concept, feel free to check out WAR (it's free up to lvl 10) and you'll see what I'm talking about.
Ok, so that's it for now. I have some things to take care of so I'll be back in a bit.