July has been an extremely busy month at the offices of Star Wars Galaxies. We have mastered our Beta 1 CDs and have set up our live servers. Any day now we'll open them up and allow external testers to have the first look at the game.

On every Wednesday I now write a short beta report to let the rest of the community in on what's going on behind the big closed doors to beta 1. The past few editions have covered the selection process for beta testers, the manufacturing and delivery of the disks and how beta 1 will differ from other beta programs. In our beta 1 we will be focus-testing certain systems. This means the testers will only be able to enter the servers at certain times and will be limited to what they can interact with. For example, one of the first things we will focus-test is character customization. That tool should be a lot of fun to play with, but we're going to ask the testers to make as many different looking characters as they can. Hopefully they won't be overwhelmed by the options. :)

On the website, we started the month with releasing some new screenshots. Throughout the month we added our regular features such as Comments from the Team and weekly Frequently Asked Questions and Polls. The month ended with the revelation of the planet Lok and a large feature page describing each of our nine planets with wilderness, panoramic screenshots of each. Finally, you still have another week to enter the last round of the Guess the Alien Species Sweepstakes.

Next month we'll show some more screenshots and give you some insider reports from Beta 1.

~Kevin "Q-3PO" O'Hara
Community Relations Manager