Ok… so it’s Day 2 now.. but.. I had to work! Â Geeze ;)
As part of the official SDCC Day 1 announcements..we got the “Official” Pre-Order information, and Pre-Orders went up about 12:01 AM Pacific yesterday morning (as mentioned here).  If you still have not Pre-Ordered.. better hop to it (TOR Preorder link here).  Origin (EA’s Steam competitor, and only place for digital downloads) is already sold out of the Collector’s Edition of TOR.  As of this writing, Amazon doesn’t indicate sold out yet (of CEs), Gamestop doesn’t say sold out either.  If  you pre-order (and why wouldn’t you?).. make sure you get your pre-order code entered on the TOR site, to get ‘registered’ for Early Access.  The amount of early access you get, is based on when that code gets entered.
The first TOR SDCC panel was at 3:30 PM Pacific. Â Comic Con doesn’t allow streaming of the panels (seriously? c’mon guys.. get with the times!), but G4TV did a live blog of it (poorly.. not a good live blogger). Â They also state they’ll get the Video of the panel up soon. Â Link to the live blog is here (too long for me to copy/paste and include in the post).
One of the best things to come out of the Panel was Stephen Reid wearing the vaunted Conductor’s hat to signify that the release train is rolling along. Â The fine folks over at TORWars.com got some really good pics of SR and his hat.
Also released yesterday, was a narrowing of the release date window via the video shown at the SDCC panel, and via press release from EA. Â The EA press release also contained some Beta goodness. Â In September, they will be running “beta weekends” for TOR, where they will be inviting larger quantities of players to beta for the weekend. Â This is, in essence, TOR’s stress testing. Â Which means the now narrowed “Holiday 2011” window.. could hit us as early as October!
There was a Q&A at BioWare base later in the day as well, but no earth shattering reveals there (though, there apparently was a 9 foot tall version of the statue included in the CE).
TORWars and DarthHater both have really good recaps of the days events/announcements as well.