About the Developer

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My dream job had always been to work for BioWare. When I was doing basketball games, my team used to always joke that I would try to put dwarves and elves into them at some point. Everyone knew where my passions were.

And BioWare specifically. BioWare is what got me into making games. In fact, KOTOR specifically. Originally, I was a critic before I got into games (and to making games). I had degrees in Ancient History and Play Writing. Writing had always been a big passion of mine.

It was actually playing the Mission/Zaalbar series from the original Knights of the Old Republic and going down the dark side path where you can actually have Zaalbar kill his lifelong friend. And I remember playing it, really being disgusted with what I had done and really feeling regret. Which was a very complex emotional concept from a game at that time. It really sparked me off, and it said, “Okay, we're in the early days of storytelling in this medium but it's going somewhere, and I want to be a part of that.”

Right now I am playing my incredibly Care Bear, nice as peaches-and-cream Sith Juggernaut. Literally, he is the sweetest Sith you've ever met. I was surprised because a lot of times we test the primary path, even though I had read the dialog and read the pieces a long time ago (the warrior was one of the original prototypes we did, and one of the earliest characters we had done).

The reason I had chosen it was the one I had not seen the longest amount of time. So, I wanted to see what the Cinematics Team had done there. And what I had forgotten was how many extra options there were for light-side warriors. How many scenes you end up in, how many quests you go and do that you never would have seen if you had always taken the number one option of Vader (who tends to be the “Kill everyone for everything”-guy). There's some incredibly interesting story telling there.

About the Lore

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Oh definitely. We talk about our “Tempt and Test” options which are just a good part of dramatic storytelling. The guy who says in the movie, “I'm going to be the best guy ever”, always going to be moral – and then never has temptation not to be – is not an interesting character. So one of the things we like to check are, “What are your trigger buttons?”

I know a lot of people were very surprised when we took the prequel's route and said that romances and relationships were a bad idea for Jedi. And very quickly, we saw a lot of the BioWare fans who both wanted to be the Jedi Knight and sort of the Paragon – almost the prototypical BioWare hero-- but also wanted their romances. And you put them in some interesting quandaries. This is where you get really interesting role-playing.

It would take a long time to go down that list. I think there's 20 accredited writers on the game. At the end of The Old Republic we did the final calculations and there were 60 man-years worth of writing on The Old Republic. So it would have taken one person their entire natural life to write this game.

Sure, yes they see everything. One thing that's amazing about working with Lucas is that they are completely open. They empower their authors and their storytellers to a huge degree, which is why we have so many Star Wars extended universe lines and books, comics and series.

All of the writing was done at BioWare Austin with some help from the folks at BioWare Edmonton. We did do some borrowing. But it was all BioWare-side. That said, they see it all, they approve stuff and so on. One of the things that's really good about working with them is sometimes they'll be able to point to you some things that you did not know because it's a really odd piece off to the side, or it's in a novel coming up where they'll say, “Hey, there is a series that will discuss the beginning of the Jedi. You're probably going to want to see this.”

So they were really, really good on the publishing arm about getting us the information we needed. But really, they were empowering us to do our own stuff.

Game Development

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Understand that multi-path dialog and multi-path story telling is probably the most complicated scripting and is the hardest undertaking in the industry. And taking it to an MMO level multiplies it exponentially. You really have to be process-driven. You have to check every box, cross every “T”, dot every “I” because every problem that sneaks in is going to cascade. And it's going to hit tons of people.

In the traditional world of development, even if you did have a bug which was sort of off the beaten path – a pretty big edge case-- you might actually be able to get away with it by saying, “Well, if this happens, people will just reload their game and it'll be fine.” In an MMO world, everything becomes about precision and details.

There is a lot that has actually surprised me when I got there and played it. I would have to go double on that one because they are mirror pieces of each other. The Black Talon and The Esseles, which are the first big flashpoints you come to on either side. It's where not only is the storyline tight, but because we can do these incredibly scripted pieces, game design, combat and music; it really comes together to feel like you're playing your own Star Wars movie.

Class Design

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My main is actually a Juggernaut tank, and I had some of the same questions early on. Right around your 30's, you start getting some of your AoE taunts and things begin getting a lot easier. That being said, the combat guys are on top of this stuff all the time. They are pulling all the metrics and they can see who's soaking the most damage in warzones, and what all the classes are doing in raids.

The one thing I recommend to the community is-- in a well-thought out, polite manner-- please post your feedback and experiences on the forums. One of the messages we always want to get out is that we take all the feedback very seriously. Because sometimes it just turns out to be a fluke, sometimes it 's something random was going on that rolled really bad. But we investigate each and every one of those.

Summary

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