Your donations keep RPGWatch running!
Box Art

SW: TOR - Interview @ Ten Ton Hammer

by Myrthos, 2009-09-14 21:50:55

Ten Ton Hammer sat down with producer Jake Neri from LucasArts and producer Blaine Christine from BioWare Austin to talk about Star Wars: The Old Republic.

Ten Ton Hammer: What was your biggest hurdle in making the move to an MMO? (Annache)

Blaine Christine: I think really it comes down to scope. Obviously it’s much, much bigger; we’ve talked a lot about how each class has their own story and each of those stories is essentially a full game. It’s literally 100s of hours of story, questing and all of the secondary activities. So when you factor that in with 8 different classes it’s a massive, massive undertaking. And that’s not just about the voice-over obviously. You’ve also got to think about all the different styles of play that people have as well.

One of the great things about our studio is that we have a lot of people with a lot of experience working on other MMO titles, so that’s invaluable. We have a lot of people that were from BioWare Edmonton that actually came to Austin and then we have a lot of people that were pulled from the Austin community as well. And as you know there’s a lot of MMOs that have been developed there, so that’s helped out a lot.

Jake Neri: I think the other thing too is that [BioWare] have a really sound process that just makes good games. So some of those hurdles that some companies might have, I don’t think that they share because they put a value on constantly playing the game – everybody in the studio has to be on it – and that flushes out a lot of things like balance issues.

So I think that when people think about the challenges of going from single to multiplayer its like, holy crap, what happens when you get all this new stuff mixing and matching? That makes those things even more important; the constant play testing, the constant feedback loops. That in itself has really cut down on a lot of the risk there. There are obviously challenges, but I think we’ve got good experience under our belt now since we’ve been doing this for a while and we’re starting to see those go away. We’re really at the point of “what’s the fun?”

From day one we really focused on why would this be fun? Why would it be fun for singleplayer, multiplayer, large groups or small groups? Once we nailed that fun it becomes a matter of just iterating on that.

Information about

SW:TOR

SP/MP: Single + MP
Setting: Sci-Fi
Genre: MMORPG
Platform: PC
Release: Released


Details