Star Wars: The Old Republic Interview

03 Dec 2009 at 11:37:05 by Tim McDonald

IncGamers recently caught up with Bioware's creative director James Ohlen to discuss the hugely-anticipated Star Wars: The Old Republic.

So, the Old Republic! Now, this is the first MMO game that BioWare's done. How has it been coming up to the challenge?

Well, the MMO genre is probably the most difficult genre to develop for. It's the largest kind of game you can build, so it has been very challenging. One of the first things we did is we made sure the team at the very beginning, the core team, was made up of veterans who had built MMOs before. So we had Rich Vogel and Gordon Walton, our art director Jeff Dobson and Bill Dalton our tech director, all have worked on MMOs for many years before they started on Star Wars: The Old Republic. So that was one of our first steps.

Other things that have helped us... you know, when we were bought out by EA, EA is a huge publisher, has a lot of resources, that's helped us a lot. Also the fact that Mythic is part of the studio family now, that's been very helpful. Mythic has a lot of experience building the games. In fact they've actually lent some of their talent over to us – we have some Mythic programmers and designers working in our studio, and some working at the Mythic studio helping out. So that's another thing that's helped out.

But even with all that, again, it's the biggest kind of game you can build, and so it's taken many years and a lot of deep pockets, but at the end of the day, I think it's going to be worth the wait. It's a really ambitious game but it's gonna be really cool, too.

So what do you think of the rest of the MMO market? It's a huge market, obviously, if you look at the World of Warcraft figures and everything else, but what do you think of the competition?

Well, I think that there's a lot of good competitors in the MMO space and there's a lot to learn from them. Obviously World of Warcraft is the biggest game out there, and they're developed by Blizzard, who's just amazing. That game is incredible and you can learn a lot by playing it and just seeing what they did and the smart decisions they made. There's other games – NCsoft is very good at building some games; Aion is a very, very pretty game that came out recently. Obviously Warhammer from Mythic, that's a very good game, you can learn a lot from that. We play all the games as they come out. Every time a new MMO comes out, we sit down, play it, and try to learn as much as we can from it.

So you're definitely paying attention to the rest of the market?

Oh yeah. It'd be foolish not to, right? You can't compete in a genre without knowing what's out there, otherwise you're going to be reinventing the wheel everywhere. You need to take a look at some of the hard lessons that other developers have learned and then focus on developing some new stuff that's going to differentiate you from those guys.

I've had the chance to play and get my hands on The Old Republic today, and I have to say it does feel quite different to other MMOs. How did you actually approach developing it and designing it and making it different?

Well, there's two major differentiators for our game, we feel. One is story, and the other is combat. Well, I guess there's a third if you count Star Wars, because Star Wars allows us to kinda be fantasy without being fantasy - you know, you have to differentiate yourself and so many people are just in the fantasy genre, so Star Wars is big.

But story. Bringing story to the MMO space, that's huge for us. We feel that by making the player fully voiced, all the characters in the game fully voiced, by having cinematic conversations, by allowing your choices to actually impact how the game unfolds, by giving you companion characters that you can have romances or friendships with, or by allowing you to make good and evil choices that actually impact your character and everyone around you – that is something that's never been seen in an MMO before, and is going to be huge for us.

And the combat – something you saw when you played the game – we wanted combat to be much more evocative of the movies, faster paced. MMO combat to today has been very slow – you run up, and you do the one animation, slam your weapon against the other guy, and he does the same thing, and thirty seconds later one guy dies. Eh, you know, that doesn't look very exciting. So what we tried to do was, we have a choreograph system for combat, so when you run up with your lightsaber, your lightsaber's going to be clashing with the opponent's weapon, you're going to be doing lots of interesting and very visually interesting abilities, it's going to be faster paced – like, you can kill a guy in five seconds instead of thirty. We also have systems like cover so that when people have blasters, they can take cover behind objects.

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