Star Wars: The Old Republic Interview
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Ten Ton Hammer: You often talk about how story really bolsters the gameplay experience; do you think its ever limiting in anyway? Do you think the game could be more popular if you took a more WoW type of story route?
Jake: I think there's a misconception out there that believes that all you do is sit around and watch story the entire game long. I think if you carved out the percentage of passive story versus activities that you engage in while you play, there would be a vast majority going towards the activity side of the ratio.
We understand that the guys at BioWare have been making MMOs for a long time. One of the things that I think everyone is trying to sell in MMOs is the idea of story. We believe in story, and we believe in the fans that like story. But if you don't like story, you're going to be able to play the game at your own pace the way you'd like to play.
The game is a story-driven game, but people should give it a shot. The cynics should come in and try it, and the people that love story will definitely have a ball with our game.
Dallas: It's our job to make sure that you don't want to skip the story. That's what we're trying to achieve, y'know?
Alexander: I also want to take a shot at the content versus story suggestion. You look at a game - to pick a random example - like Bioshock. How much of that game is story and how much of it is context? If you remove all of the audio logs and all of the overhead stuff, you don't get a smaller game if you remove that. You would just have a game with much less context to work with.
People look at Bioshock and they react to it emotionally. The context is there so that everything you see and do in the game is meaningful on a different level than just "Can I shoot this bad guy?"
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Ten Ton Hammer: Can you discuss any of the scenes we saw in the movie regarding the kind of "choreographed combat" that you've talked about in earlier interviews? Maybe talk about how that might be influenced by the abilities / skills / powers that a player uses in the game?
Dallas: I don't think we're talking details about that yet, just because so much of that is also involved in the specifics of combat.
We really just wanted to emulate the cinematic, action-packed Star Wars combat. The decisions that Jeff [Dobson]'s combat team makes are based on those tenants - that it needs to be full of action and visceral. It needs to feel like it has an influence on the game, and it needs to be reactive in that the enemies are reacting to what you're doing.
Jeff Dobson: The combat animation team is really, really involved in what they're doing with the characters, and they're trying to raise the bar with what players are used to in MMOs.
We didn't want it to be the "combat dance" of standing in front of someone and simply swinging your sword back-and-forth. It's not believable, it's not fun, and it's been merely accepted as this sort of standard MMO convention. We want to change that.
