Star Wars: The Old Republic Update 1.1: Rise of the Rakghouls Interviews
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GameSpy: You say you've been working on this one for over a year. Have you had any time to go back and make tweaks based on what you've learned from watching people play the game?
James Ohlen: As new features have come online, as new combat features have become available to the combat team or the team making the boss monsters, we've definitely been able to tweak the Flashpoints, and basically make it flashier. More cinematic tools came online, we were able to make the boss fights more interesting. It's really grown a lot as we've gotten more tools and more features available to us. That's the main way that it's been growing over the course of development.
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GameSpy: So we've got one update coming next week and one coming in March. Is that roughly the amount of time we should expect between updates going forward?
James Ohlen: Yeah. Obviously, the first one came really fast. We wanted to set the precedent. The next one's coming a couple months after. We really want to have a cadence to this, where we're releasing content really quickly. We'll have multiple teams working on different content so we've got them staggered. We're going to be able to keep up. I'm reviewing content that is meant for releases in 2013, so that's how far we're working ahead. We know that the only way we're going to be a successful service is if our fans believe we're going to continue to grow the game and continue to support it in a big way. We're going to continue to release weekly updates, and those weekly updates will take care of the biggest issues that come to a head that week.
And from the latter:
GS: What are the plans for story-based updates that continue in the vein of the storytelling that helps The Old Republic stand out?
JO: Oh yeah, obviously we know that's a selling feature. When you look at Rise of the Rakghouls, the flashpoint, it's very much in the vein of our story-heavy flashpoints. You'll notice when you start with The Old Republic we have two types of flashpoints. We have our story-heavy flashpoints, which are represented by the first flashpoint you went on, the flashpoints that dealt with Revan, and the flashpoint at the very end of the game that dealt with Darth Malgus. Those flashpoints were very story-heavy.
We have a team that is focused essentially on providing content and events throughout the galaxy. Then we have the lighter story flashpoints. Rise of the Rakghouls is in the vein of the story-heavy flashpoints, so if you enjoyed those kind of flashpoints, you're very much going to enjoy Rise of the Rakghouls.
GS: So there will be a chance for the party to make an important choice along the line.
JO: Oh yeah. There's gonna be choices. It's much more like one of those story-heavy flashpoints. We wanted to--with each of our content releases, we're probably going to mix in, sometimes we'll do a story-heavy flashpoint, sometimes we'll do more story-light. But we'll lead off with story-heavy flashpoints.
