Hi Folks,

Wanted to give an update as to where we are with things.  Blix and his design team have been hammering away on the Heroics for Chapter 7.  It has been a little noisy at the office during this time, as they are all on speaker phone and shouting a lot.  The encounters are definitely better every day and I know that players are going to enjoy them a lot.  The art is all done and Aurelia looks in great shape.  QA has been verifying the collections (there are over 90 so it takes time to get them all checked) but right now that all looks really solid.  I still had hopes that we could get the chapter out to test before Friday, but it will probably work out that we wait until the beginning of next week just because I would hate to have things problems over the weekend and not have folks here to deal with it.  Most importantly the chapter is feature complete at this point and looking good.

Although not by way of an excuse here, but in order to be absolutely clear on this, Chapter 7 has been going on schedule for the most part.  We began this chapter at the beginning of August after the bug bash.  I regret now my decision not to characterize that effort as a Chapter, since it took about the same amount of time and certainly added a lot of new stuff to the game, as well as fix a number of outstanding issues.  My team is working hard on this effort and is extremely dedicated, talented, and experienced.  Forum gadflies who like to characterize them differently are wrong, plain and simple. I know that folks are as anxious to get there hands on the chapter as we are to give it to you, but I will not put it out on test until it is representative of what we feel the final live release will be. Period.

The new Digital Download SKU came out last week, initially exclusive to Direct2Drive.  I apologize to our overseas players who have not yet been able to purchase it.  We are working closely with LucasArts to get the download available on the UK D2D site as quickly as possible in order to broaden distribution.  After the exclusive period is up, we will have other mechanisms available for players to get it as well.

We have begun the specification work on Chapter 8 and we will be reviewing that with the LucasArts team next week.  As I stated elsewhere it is our intention to have Chapter 8 live by Christmas.  It will be a challenge, but I feel it will be a great present for everyone to have some new space content in their stockings.  We will be discussing C8 in more detail in the coming weeks.

Thats all for now...Keep eyes peeled for C7 on Test Center.

DeadMeat

Lorin W. Jameson, SOE Producer, Star Wars Galaxies

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