Star Wars: The Old Republic Interview
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It seems to have been difficult to convince people that The Old Republic is going to be more than an absolutely huge single-player game. Do you feel it's looking more like an MMOG now?
Absolutely it also looks more like an RPG. What we had before was the bare bones, getting levels down, the physical states, and we had to do a lot of experimenting with that. One of the differences with our world design is that our environments are not undulating repeated planes. We decided at one point because we're insane, apparently that we were going to do hand-crafted, real stuff with small placeables, the same way we would design an area for Dragon Age or Mass Effect. But that meant that we had to be sure it was right. Once we had the world, we knew what we were doing and all the other teams started to layer in. We've got the loot team, we've got the spawning team originally all of our spawns were placeholders, now they're actually going through the areas and thinking, what makes fun combat? Who should be here? This is going to be the bounty hunter and the agent, so what kind of encounters are going to challenge these two? What if they're working together?
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The game suffered a minor delay recently. Do you foresee further ones?
We're on track for spring next year. It's about getting those alpha dates, getting all the content in and getting everything tested. Again, BioWare has an advantage here, even though it's our first MMOG, because we make content games. Our games are huge. It's what we do. We know how to scale an 80-hour RPG already. Scaling it up so it's exponentially bigger was a huge challenge, but we knew what we were getting into. As we see the content pour into the game, the main challenge is tracing and testing the world's biggest BioWare game actually checking, "Hey, does this work right if I made this decision 140 hours ago?"
