Star Wars: The Old Republic Previews and Audio Q&A
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While the cash-minting potential of The Old Republic has executives salivating, many BioWare fans were disappointed the series didn't return to its single-player RPG roots. "There are a lot of reasons why we decided not to do KOTOR 3, and why we decided to do this as an MMO instead," said Nichols. "The unique aspect of storytelling, which is really differentiated for this game, is something the KOTOR franchise did very well, and we felt that just doing a single-player experience with a new KOTOR really misses the opportunity to take this out to a much wider audience."
"One of the things we like to joke about is just the sheer amount of content we're doing," Ohlen mused. "Our fans ask, 'Why aren't you doing Knights of the Old Republic 3?' What we're really doing is Knights of the Old Republic 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, and 12-plus. We have that much content and that many stories...We really get to do a lot of things we really wouldn't get to do in [a] KOTOR 3."
Ohlen is in a unique position to make such an assessment. Described as "the most important guy at BioWare no one has ever heard of" by insiders, Ohlen has been a lead designer on virtually every game the studio has produced, including Baldur's Gate, Neverwinter Nights, Jade Empire, and the original Knights of the Old Republic. Now, as lead designer of The Old Republic, he is overseeing what he isn't afraid to say is BioWare's most ambitious project ever.
The second preview is at Gamasutra:
A "big challenge" in development is finding a way to make other classes as powerful as the Jedi and Sith, who obviously wield nearly god-like powers in the films and other fiction in the Star Wars universe.
In particular relation to this, Ohlen noted in-fiction examples of Jedi being killed by non-Jedi; he said, "If you're a non-Jedi class, you'll be a very powerful version of that class."
Ohlen also hinted that the game will be able to be nearly completely soloed -- "If you want to play through your epic story on your own, you can do that" -- but that the developers are going to "encourage" multiplayer.
And the audio Q&A is at Videogaming247.
