The Old Republic: Getting Ready for Launch
BioWare talks about lessons learned and future changes in its Star Wars MMO.
No more beta tests and no more character wipes. Starting on December 13, 2011 those who preordered BioWare's Star Wars: The Old Republic will be rolled into in the live game before the official launch date of December 20. We'll be playing as soon as we get in, and posting plenty of impressions and video leading up to the official review, which will likely appear several weeks after launch after we've had a chance to adequately explore.
In the meantime, check out what BioWare's game director James Ohlen had to say about the beta, the launch, and how The Old Republic will develop in the near future. For more on the game plays, you'll find plenty of info in our recent beta coverage.
IGN:
During beta, which are some of the elements that changed the most and in ways you didn't expect? I mean I saw a post recently about how much the item modding has changed.
James Ohlen: Item modding is a really good one. What happened there was we had this really cool item modding system that had a lot of fans but was incomprehensible to the majority of our players. We wanted to make it more understandable so that more players could get into it because it's a major part of our itemization. It needed to be something that everyone in the game could wrap their heads around but we didn't want to take away all the depth and the coolness that you know the fans of the system saw in it, so we went back to the drawing board, made some changes but it was a little bit controversial because our changes didn't all come in right away. Now that the whole system's in there we've been getting really good, like the last round of feedback on it was really positive so that's good.
IGN:
Were there any unexpected things in there in terms of systems that went really well that you didn't think would make much of an impact? Or systems that people reacted to negatively that you thought were okay otherwise?
James Ohlen: Recently there haven't been too many big surprises. It's because we've been testing the game for many, many months now, for more than a year and we've been making adjustments as we've been going along. In this last stage of the game development we've been trying to make sure not to rock the boat too much because if we make too many widespread changes that could result in a whole bunch of bad bugs which we don't want to ship with.
One recent change we did was with Flashpoints. We made it easier for people to get to Flashpoints [The Old Republic's dungeons]. In order to group up to do a Flashpoint were waiting around in the fleet, but that wasn't really a behavior that was conducive to people finding groups because you only want to wait around for so long before you get bored and want to do other stuff. So we introduced breadcrumb quests on the actual worlds and a shuttle on the world could take you to the fleets, so that while you were adventuring say on Alderaan and you came across one of the Flashpoint quests you could start looking for groups right on Alderaan where there's tons of people adventuring. Then when you finally got that group together you could go to the shuttle and go straight to the fleet and get into that Flashpoint. We're doing things that are going to improve the playability of our existing systems and make it easier for players to group, make it easier for players to understand a certain system.
IGN:
Moving forward might there be something like a group finder or something like that? An auto-finder implemented into the game?
James Ohlen: Some people ask for a dungeon finder system but the thing about those systems is they're really for more of a mature online game. If you put a system in early on it really takes away from the exploration of the level up game. If you have people all just basically waiting around their dungeon finder and all being grouped up together, they're going to actually take the time to explore all the worlds that are available in the Old Republic galaxy. So it's definitely a feature that we want to put in, we just want to put it in at the right time. However, the looking for group feature is something that we continue to work on, we want to make that more robust and more powerful.
IGN:
What's the plan for maybe three, six months outside of launch?
James Ohlen: We're careful not to promise a date for any of the features, but I can tell you what we're working on. Guild functionality is something that we're working on right now. The first piece of guild functionality that we want in the game is guild banks. We have a team that's essentially just going to be pumping out new guild functionality on a regular basis. The other thing we're working on, obviously we have multiple teams on Flashpoints and Operations so that's the high level content, some of our best content, the hardest content in the game where you have an epic story. We're continuing to work on those so we have multiple teams working on flashpoints and operations, we have new [player versus player] War Zones planned, we have new open world PvP planned, and we have a team on that as well.
IGN:
I was also curious about space combat and how that might evolve. How are the later game missions different from the early game ones and will they ever become sort of a multiplayer experience?
James Ohlen: We're going to continue to add missions. That's another thing that actually surprised us. While we knew that because we weren't doing a freeform X-wing versus Tie Fighter-style space game that we were going to get backlash, that didn't surprise us and obviously we got that feedback a long time ago. We've been working really hard to continue to improve the space game that we have and it's definitely become more popular with our fans with each [beta] iteration. The very last test we had it scored higher than it's ever scored before. I don't think it's going to win over people who want X-wing versus Tie Fighter but I do think people are going to find that it's very evocative of Star Wars and it's a fun activity when you want to take a break from questing. You can go to your own starship and involve yourself in some very awesome Rogue Squadron-y space combat. I can say that we do have a special project going on right now in regards to the space game that will expand the space game in a significant way, but that's not something that's coming right away.
IGN:
Can you explain what the Legacy system is meant to be?
James Ohlen: What we're giving at ship is basically just a taste of the Legacy System. It's allowing you to essentially choose your legacy name, essentially your family name. You're creating a family, and you can populate that family with children or siblings, but you can also populate it with friends and henchmen. Even though it's part of a family you can still have aliens or people that aren't actually related to your other characters. This is one of the features that we have a lot of people focused on right now. All the characters in that family tree are going to share the benefits that come from being part of that family and those benefits are going to include new powers, new items, there's going to be a whole bunch of different things that you're able to unlock through the Legacy system.
The inspiration for it is that Star Wars is very much about family, you have the relationship between Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader or Anakin Skywalker so that was what started it off. We also wanted another reason to reward players for playing more than one character. If you decide to be the player who plays the Bounty Hunter and an Imperial Agent and a Jedi Knight, you're actually rewarded for doing that because you know they can all be part of the same family tree.
IGN:
In terms of how much content is actually going to be in the game at launch, I assume the majority of what's been mentioned is actually going to make it into the final product. You'll have full story content for every class all the way to the cap as well as the sort of endgame Operations and all the Flashpoints in between that have been talked about?
James Ohlen: We've been working on the project for a long time, but the benefit to that is we've actually been able to polish all of the content from level one to fifty. Every single online game that's come out so far has always had a drop off in quality in terms of the content at a certain level. That drop off doesn't happen in Star Wars the Old Republic. Each of the planets has the same cinematic quality, the amount of effort we put on making the encounters interesting and fun.
IGN:
What opportunities are there for each class' storylines to go in different directions? So if I'm playing an Inquisitor, could another Inquisitor storyline not be exactly the same thing as mine? I noticed a few decision points but I didn't really get a sense of what that was actually doing to my overall questing arc.
James Ohlen: One of the things, something we do in every single Bioware game, from originally in Baldur's Gate and then in Dragon Age and Mass Effect in recent times, we always show the player the impact of his actions along the way. The biggest impacts are usually reserved for when a story coming to its close, so you're going to see the big impacts at the end of chapter one for your character and then at the end of chapter two and three. We've also added a system that was very late so players only got to see it in the last testing weekend. The quest givers that you come across and you make decisions with will actually communicate with you afterwards. They can send messages to your starship and if you helped them out they might give you a reward or they might have a funny story about what happened afterwards or they might be cursing you for destroying their lives.
IGN:
For graphics options, will there be any additional tweak options you can make just in the menu aside from what we've seen in beta when the game goes live?
James Ohlen: We have some. Some of the textures we had were messed up a little, we've fixed that up. Anti-aliasing is something that we're going to have in either right after launch or for launch. It's just something that we had on very late so that's another graphical option that you're going to be able to have access to.
IGN:
How confident are you that you can handle the rush of players on launch day and in the early access leading up to the official launch day?
James Ohlen: We had more people coming in faster [during the latest beta phase] than what our limits are for launch so launch should be easier than that weekend. I like to knock on wood when I say that because I don't want to curse it but that weekend went very well so we're pretty confident.
IGN:
In terms of the actual strategy for bringing content out, I mean I know you can't discuss specific schedules but will fairly major content will be patched into the game for paying subscribers or might that be locked behind some sort of pricing wall? Are you holding most major content for some larger content release further down the line?
James Ohlen: No, we're going to be releasing major content to subscribers. They're not going to have to pay anything extra for the major content. We're going to be doing that regularly. It's going to be significant, you're going to be able to travel to entirely new worlds in the galaxy and you're not going to have to pay to have to do that. Now obviously we also have an expansion pack planned but that's, you know, much farther into the future.
I know there's been some talk about [user interface customization] amongst our fans and is something that they're very passionate about. That's another thing that we have a team working on, to players a lot more power to essentially adjust their UI so they can move UI elements around, they can change the size or the alignment of it, and essentially customize how they get to play the game.
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