SWTOR Uninterview

Interview with SWTOR Developers. As Tycho of Penny-Arcade points out, this is basically a display on how avoidance spec'd warriors tank interviews. Sorry, a little MMO humor for you. Anyhow, this is four pages of very little static information. Will there be combat in space? Will weapons and armor be customizable? Are the two factions' classes equivalent counterparts? Will API add-on support be available? How is combat paced? The answers that they don't outright just say, "we're not ready to talk about that yet," they dodge and weave around. For example:

And he says I want to feel like a Star Wars adventurer in the fray, not just another Boba Fett lookalike. Do you guys plan on allowing the player to customize their weapon, armor, and body features with a lot of variety?

Dallas Dickinson: The first one is that we're not talking about space combat yet. The second one is absolutely. We know that customization is a key to MMOs. It's one of the things that players strive for. It's one of the things that makes your gameplay experience unique. Throughout your characters life you're going to be able to find upgrades, you're going to be able to find some custom equipment, so that you will look different, you will feel different. People will be able to identify you by your achievements because they'll say, "Holy cow, you have that helmet. You must have completed this part of the game!" And it'll be a badge of honor.

Jake Neri: One of things on that too that's really nice is that we oftentimes get to interact with Lucas Licensing and they've really urged us to go above and beyond with the look of the characters and the customizations available. And I think the team is realizing that. I think that people will be pretty excited with how they can take their characters' looks.

This sounds like a answer, but look again.

Throughout your characters life you're going to be able to find upgrades, you're going to be able to find some custom equipment, so that you will look different, you will feel different. People will be able to identify you by your achievements because they'll say, "Holy cow, you have that helmet. You must have completed this part of the game!" And it'll be a badge of honor.

In WoW, we call that "Tier Gear", a class-specific gear set that you get through clearing dungeons of a certain difficulty. It's the best gear you can wear, and guess what? Everyone has it. The specific question was this: Am I going to be able to CUSTOMIZE my gear to make me different? That means, can I change the color, can I add various elements like, for argument's sake let's go with the bounty hunter, emblems, perhaps some Wookie braids, a little battle damage, pouches, etc? His answer: there will be rare gear that drops that shows what you've done. Yeah, this and every other MMO has that. It wasn't the question. And apparently the answer is no.

In many MMOs, opposing factions draw from the same pool of classes or have mirroring classes to balance the side. Are classes in The Old Republic intended to be mirrored? Or how do you balance the game?

Dallas Dickinson: Jake, I'm going to let you answer that because it's sort of a thorny one. I'm not sure how much detail we can go into.

Jake Neri: Yeah, I don't think we have too much detail. I think at the heart of that question is: Is the game going to be balanced? And the answer is yes.

Again, this is really a non-answer. Now granted, there are appropriate levels of vagueness in an interview. I don't expect straight answers to questions, because almost no one does that. Instead, they dance around and exaggerate. So be it, I know the name of the game, and I know more or less how to read through it. This is not a good example of that. Because the bottom line is this: either the factions will be congruent or they won't. Meaning the Sith and the Jedi will be more or less the same class with slight differences or they won't. The reason why this question is asked is balance. You strut a line in the play experience every time you try to make it unique. A smuggler, for example, can't play TOO much like a bounty hunter, or the player will not feel that his faction is any different than the other. Conversely, if they are too different, people will accuse the game of being unbalanced, i.e. "The fucking Jedi kills everything, OP class!" (OP = overpowered, for the unintiated.) Now, that is going to be said no matter what. Happens in WoW all the time. Saying the game is going to be balanced is a nonstatement. EVERY MMO developer will say this about their game, whether they are right or wrong. WoW has been patched and tweaked HUNDREDS of times, and each time with the statement of, "the game is now balanced." So really they should have focused on either teasing that each faction will be unique, or saying 'both factions will be similarly paced'.

IGN: How will The Old Republic differentiate itself from the WoW formula of leveling, grinding the same encounters of enemies, raiding the same encounters of enemies until everyone has the same loot and we quit until more content is added?

Dallas Dickinson: One of our key differentiators is story, right? [It's] the degree to which we are making this a truly cinematic storytelling experience for the players. We've talked all about adding this pillar of story to the MMORPG. And so we're going to be hitting that with all barrels. It's one of the things that makes the game compelling not just the first time through, but makes it replayable; because you can play through as one of our Republic-side characters, and then just start again and have no shared content when you play as a Sith-side character.

Dallas is not wrong about this one. The so-called "story-pillar" is this game's ace in the hole. I've already given thought to exactly what I am going to pick Republic and Sith side: a non-Force user for light and a Sith for dark. But story progression is a sticky thing for an MMO. How is it paced out? Do the same 'major' game events happen over and over again? The main problem with WoW is that it tries to make you feel like the stand-out hero of the game - with full knowledge that everyone else is doing the exact same things. When you clear an instance, it resets to be full of enemies again. In essence, nothing you do feels permanent. And this is because permanence is hard to achieve in this genre. And the more steps you take towards attempting to individualize an experience, the closer you get to just making a single player game. Which in this case is not even a complaint for me - I'm perfectly content to just play a giant KOTOR with only occasional interaction with other people. But that might not sell as an MMO concept, and it ensures that they will have to continually write on a MASSIVE scale to keep the game fresh when players run out of things to do. WoW's focus is not on the story - it has the story elements, but you don't have to know them. Its focus is on combat, and raid experiences. What's a new way we can challenge players to come up with increasingly-intricate strategies? Writing new plots and subplots is far more nebulous; and far more susceptible to the "I vant you to keel seecks moose" pattern. When you're not focused on story, doing quests becomes almost mindless. But when your conceit is that everything is plot relevant, than if quests start to blend into the same things over and over again, it's going to stick out a lot more. I am afraid in this regard, the longevity of this game as an MMO is not strong.

IGN: Have you thought about romances in the game?

Dallas Dickinson: This is something that we refer to. Companion characters are another thing that we've talked about a little bit --we haven't gone into detail on--but again, if you play Bioware games, you know that there are companion characters, and you know that your behavior, your choices within conversation and within gameplay can affect those companion characters. In some cases, it leads to a betrayal by a companion character. In some cases, it leads to a companion character becoming more loyal to you, and there can also be affection. So I don't think we're going into more detail than that, but again, if you've played BioWare games in the past, you've seen the systems that work like this.

"Yes" would have been a much shorter answer.

IGN: I think you hinted at this at E3, but is it possible to switch between dark side and light side at E3? I thought that was hinted at when you spared the captain during the demo.

Jake Neri: We did talk about that there is a dark side/light side system that is reminiscent of the one in the original Knights of the Old Republic, where your decisions will actually push you in one direction or the other. So you can make choices that push to towards the dark side and then in the same gameplay session, you can make choices that contradict that and bring you back towards the light side.

This is a damn good question, but I can actually see why they would play coy with it. Because this completely opens up the idea of the meaning of factions. Do Sith Empire characters HAVE to be evil? Obviously not by what they are saying. But how does that affect where your character stands within? Odds are, you will NOT be able to switch factions, and my guess is the reason for that will be that neither the Empire nor the Republic is good or evil per se. The interesting thing is both KOTOR and KOTOR 2, you started off neutral, and your powers were determined by what kind of man or woman you were. If you already start off as a Sith, will you be weaker for being nicer? Or will they fall back to the Jade Empire philosophy, in which your karma only affects you in a relatively minor way?

You said at E3 that you didn't want this to be a game about rat killing. You wanted it from the get go to feel like an epic game. Can you talk about that?

Jake Neri: Sure. I think that's where the story comes in, right? Instead of taking mindless quests, you're participating in a journey to do something awesome, whether it's becoming the greatest bounty hunter in the galaxy or things along those lines. I think that's really the spirit of what we're talking about when we talk about that. There is combat in the game--you do fight creatures, you do fight humanoids--but at the core of it your story is taking you on your own personal epic Star Wars adventure depending on what class you are. Your experience will be different from anybody else that plays it based on your ability to make different choices of how you develop your character.

Dallas Dickinson: Jake and I sort of tag-teamed on the last question. He gave the mechanics answer and I gave the story answer. On this he's given the story answer, so I'll give the mechanics side of things.

We've talked about many-on-one combat and how different that is. It wouldn't make sense if you were supposed to be a tough, heroic participant in this story and you went out and were taking on one rat in a corner of an alley and potentially dying. You're going to wade into battle and taking on two or three guys at a time. And they're two or three guys who are well equipped, who have real firepower and real abilities. We want that feeling to happen from the beginning. We want you to feel like a hero in the Star Wars universe.

I read this as, "don't expect a raid encounter that consists of a large party of players against one boss." Meaning that at the end game level, this will be absolutely nothing like WoW. Is this a good thing? That will end up being something each player will have to decide for himself. I am excited at the prospect - because it's clear they are not trying to make a WoW clone, like the past three or four major MMOs of late. My only real concern, which still has yet to be sated, is how this will all work when it's fully put together. A lot of ideas sound a lot better in the air than they do when you actually see them embodied into a project. That's not my pessimism, and I don't mean to imply that hopes should be dashed. But you have to remember a couple things: Bioware has never made an MMO, and the type of MMO they are attempting to create has not, to my knowledge, ever been made. It remains to be seen how it will come out of the oven.


This is not exactly the greatest example of an interview, but it's absolutely not IGN's fault. Their questions are right on, questions I myself would ask. And again, as Tycho said, if you aren't ready to answer questions, that's fine. We're not upset. But don't set up a meeting to be asked questions you don't have the answers to. You are not crooked execs called upon to testify before Congress. You don't have to say a word that you aren't ready to share. What this creates essentially is frustration and it kills your steam. They did answer some questions, both intentionally and unintentionally. In the end I am still exciting about this game, but for now I will maintain that it's Bioware that is making it difficult to maintain that enthusiasm.

And also, 4 classes feels quite small. WoW has 10. I hope what they say about classes feeling significantly different is true. Because if bounty hunters and smugglers are more or less the same thing, this game is going to feel small. I know there are 8 classes total, but realistically from an MMO perspective you're only going to know 4 at a time.

Possible look at Bioware's intended level of customization.