Star Wars Galaxies received a lot of great press for last month, including the prestigious E3’s Best Online Game of Show. Although this made our team very happy, we didn’t let it slow us down from our next big milestone… BETA.

Yes, it is finally coming to that time. We’re going to open the gates and let non-employees in the game for the first time. The first phase of Beta officially gets started on July 15th and it will only be open to a select few people from our community. Don’t despair if you aren’t selected for Beta 1, I’ll let you in on a little secret: It won’t be much fun. The first two stages of Beta will revolve around focused testing specific systems instead of playing the game. As a new feature to the forums, I’ll be posting a weekly beta update on Wednesdays to attempt to keep you in the loop of what’s going on behind that big closed door.

Speaking of new forum features, in June we added three new forums for you to post on. We’ve split the General Forum into a Star Wars related forum and an any topic forum. We've also split the Dev Forum into a Questions forum and a Discussion Forum (I expect veteran members to answer new members questions on the Questions forum, by the way :) ). We also added a Player Association forum so you can make plans for what groups you want to start or join in the game. Finally, we added a page that lists all the recent developer posts so you don’t have to go searching to find the latest things we’ve commented on.

This month we plan on continuing the Guess the Alien Species Sweepstakes, updating the Features section with more information on our eight planets (including new screenshots of each), and putting up another behind the scenes article by SOE staff writer Clayton Kroh. We’ll also get a couple more screenshots up sometime during the month so stick around the fun is just getting started.

~Kevin “Q-3PO” O’Hara
Community Relations Manager