Star Wars: The Old Republic – A New Hope For MMOs?
Steve had the chance at E3 to sit down with James Ohlen and Daniel Erickson, the Lead Designer and Lead Writer of Star Wars: The Old Republic.
In an extensive half-hour long interview the three discussed how BioWare’s traditional role as a storytelling company is making the transition to the MMO world, and their attempts to capture the look, feel, and flavor of a single-player RPG within a genre which is anything but.
An epic storyline that doesn’t involve killing rats? Heroic, action-packed combat? Living out your Han Solo fantasies (or Princess Leia fantasies, if you were into those gold bikinis) you’ve had since you were a child?
This was the way Star Wars: The Old Republic was pitched to my very skeptical ears. I walked into the demo expecting something along the lines of WoW with lightsabers. I walked out picking my jaw up off the floor, and scrambling towards the nearest PR guy to find out if there was someone, anyone, available to talk to about what I had just seen.
As it turned out, there was. And I could scarcely have picked two better people to interview if I had been given the run of the entire company.
Read on for the transcript.
The MMO Gamer: First of all, for those among our readers who may be unfamiliar, could you both please introduce yourselves and tell us a little about what it is you do at BioWare.
James Ohlen: My name is James Ohlen, I’m the Studio Creative Director, and Lead Designer on Star Wars: The Old Republic.
Daniel Erickson: My name is Daniel Erickson, I’m the Lead Writer on Star Wars: The Old Republic.
The MMO Gamer: Now, I just sat through the demo, and I have to tell you, I was very impressed by it.
I was impressed, primarily, with the storytelling aspects of the game. I’m sure many people would agree that storytelling has been a major neglected factor in the MMO genre over the years; where the story in most games can be boiled down to why Farmer X wants you to go kill ten rats.
Obviously, BioWare is a company steeped in storytelling tradition. But, just for people who are complete novices to your games, could you talk a little about the philosophy with regards to story that’s going into The Old Republic?
Daniel Erickson: Sure. Really, we tried to take the same storytelling traditions we’ve used in the rest of the games. A Massively Multiplayer Online Role-playing Game is exactly what it sounds like. It’s just a role-playing game that you’ve taken, and allowed a lot of people to play in a large social space.
We always talk about the four pillars that create RPGs: You’ve got exploration, you’ve got progression, you’ve got combat, and you’ve got storytelling.
When we said, hey, we’re going to do our first MMO, the obvious one to talk about first, even though none of the pillars can stand without the rest of them, and none of them are more important than the rest of them, we’re talking about story first because story is the delta. It’s the thing we’re doing that other people have not done.
We’re approaching it the same way we’ve always approached storytelling in games, which is that you need to have a heroic, unique experience, with choice that affects what you do.
In fact, the MMO has given us a place to actually be able to do more unique storytelling than we could in an RPG, normally.
Baldur’s Gate is a great example. With Baldur’s Gate you had a huge, epic story, it’s awesome, but guess what? It’s a fairly every-man story. Because you might have rolled a Druid, and somebody else might have rolled a Warrior, and they had the exact same story, right? We had to make it work for everyone.
Because we did all class-specific stories for The Old Republic, we’ve allowed ourselves to basically make, “Knights of the Old Republic: The Smuggler,” its own game. Everything in there, when you’re playing a Smuggler, you feel like a Smuggler.
The adventures are crazy, and madcap, and you’re flying by the seat of your pants, and there’s romantic stuff, and you’re spouting off crazy one-liners, etc., etc.
Then, when you’re playing as a Sith, it’s a completely different game. Everything is from that perspective, you come from a very dark world, you’re on Korriban, you’re dealing with Sith politics, you’re dealing with some very, very dark people who are allowed to do anything they want.
It completely changes the way we do storytelling.
The MMO Gamer: From a design standpoint, how do you handle heroic storytelling in an MMO?
In your standard online game you might walk up to a quest NPC, see a guy right behind you, and know that he’s getting the exact same quest you are to do whatever the heroic thing you’re doing is.
Do you have to segregate players, emulate the single player experience within an online world to make them feel as if they’re the protagonist, as opposed to just one player out of hundreds of thousands?
Daniel Erickson: Well, we kind of showed that in there. When you saw the piece on Hutta, one of the things you might have noticed is that the main room where his people were that he was going in and out of, there was a visible barrier there.
We can’t go into how it all works, but we didn’t want to separate the player base. We definitely are not a… there have been some MMOs that are basically instanced games with common areas. We didn’t want to go there.
What we wanted to do was be able to separate out people just long enough for the parts that were important for it. If you’re going to go have a discussion with your dad Darth Vader, you probably want to go do that by yourself.
Or, with your party, you can bring your friends with you.
But you probably don’t want a thousand people there, especially if a fight’s gonna break out, because it wouldn’t really make sense.
But, most of the world actually holds it together pretty seamlessly. One of the things we do that makes it much easier, which you saw in the game, when you go into conversation everything else drops out of the world.
So, when you’re in there, we can do things while you’re talking to the NPCs that aren’t necessarily being represented to the rest of the game world.
James Ohlen: Plus, you don’t have to put up with when you’re talking to your Sith lord somebody coming up and doing the /grind dance right beside you. [laughing]
The MMO Gamer: That happen a lot in internal alpha?
Daniel Erickson: Oh yeah! [laughing]
James Ohlen: [laughing]
The MMO Gamer: I imagine that would be slightly immersion breaking.
James Ohlen: Yes, it is.
But, what you saw right in there had the working system. It’s basically a staged system. When you start up a conversation, everyone is on their stages and they’re able to play all of their animations, say all their lines, it’s very cinematic.
But, it still works within the confines of the public zone. What you saw in there was in a flashpoint, which is instanced, but that could also have taken place, and looked just as good, had it taken place in a public area.
Continued on next page…
These guys practiced their bullshitting and doublespeak like politicians. "Oh we have all this shit other games have done, but we wont be like those dirty games, we're bioware, we shit quality and twilek sex"
story story story nah nah… the entire group waiting for the smuggler to do his story quest wont be any more revolutionary than Age of Conan's destiny quest lines, and you know, AOC did it first. Maybe Bio can do it better. Or nah, they haven't done anything mindblowing since KOTOR. Jade empire and Mass Effect were weak efforts in comparison, particularly when they moved away from making anything you did in their whole game-long morality system meaningless by letting you choose your ending with a dialogue pick before the final battle in both games, irrelevant of your choices until that point.
These guys have had so much smoke blown up their asses about how good they are that they really believe it.
We are pavlov's geeks barking on command whenever we see a lightsaber.
And nobody forget: Star War has ALWAYS been aimed at 13 yearolds, from the first movie to the blatant present CGI toons where Anakin battles alongside a pubescent twilek jedi girl.
RT @TheMMOGamer: #mmo Star Wars: The Old Republic – A New Hope For MMOs? http://bit.ly/3JPHhH
Star Wars: The Old Republic sounds more appealing every day… http://bit.ly/P3OMM
RT @TheMMOGamer: #mmo Star Wars: The Old Republic – A New Hope For MMOs? http://bit.ly/3JPHhH
Will you shut up you imbecile.
Please try to keep the comments civil. This isn't the VN boards.
Called it. We can't have even have simple interview with standard PR treatment without some jaded manchild who thinks he's got it all figured out shitting up the comments section.
Nothing like cry baby SWG vets still crying over SWG and complaining because TOR isn’t the crapbox they always wanted. Guess what? Go play Second Life if you want a sandbox. Oh and I keep hearing the SWG emu is the best thing ever from some of you, so why aren’t you guys playing that instead of boo-hooing all over the interwebs over a game you will never play?
Incredible interview about @swtor. The stuff they say, it’s like a dream come true. I know that makes me a huge nerd. http://bit.ly/3JWYZQ
FANTASTIC interview.
Absolutely great. Got a hell of a lot of insight into a hell of a lot of things, and sadly just made me more anxious to see TOR come out asap.
I'm really not much of a gamer, and actually find 99.9% of all games out there mindnumbingly boring. The list of games I've thouroughly enjoyed is short indeed, with Bioware's KOTOR 1 poised at the very top. Later, Blizzard managed to suck me in to the World oW, and I enjoyed that too for quite some time. Sure, it had severe flaws, and it eventually ended on a sour note for me, because nothing you do really matters, and you're actually more bored than entertained most of the time.
But even so, playing WoW actually taught me a couple of things:
(1) Multiplayer ROCKS! Never again could I see myself playing a single-player RPG, no matter how great. I'd just feel isolated and alone. Cooperating with real people is unbeatable (especially when those people are real-life friends as well).
(2) PVP is a lot of fun! Whooda thunk? Surely not me, big pseudo-pacifist chicken as I used to be. But WoW taught me to fight to kill, and enjoy it! I actually skipped military service in the real world because of my wussy ways, but my lvl 29 priest twink topped 10,000 kills!
But the lack of IMMERSIVE STORY eventually made the WoW experience bland. I quit playing, and have been looking for an alternative MMO to play ever since. Nothing has really piqued my interest until rumors of this one came along.
I was caitiously positive in the beginning, but I'm getting more eager to play this game every time a new scrap of info hits the street! In my opinion, these guys seem to be doing EVERYTHING EXACTLY RIGHT with SW:TOR. No more, no less.
You can't really beat that.
Oh RunOnSentence, you thrust a cruel dagger twixt my ribs! Hurt me more!
Jade Empire was a flock of bad design choices and Mass Effect was the same bad ideas with more money behind it. It wasn't good, it just lacked any similar games available to compare it to. The ugly girl at the party is still going to be ringed by suitors if she's the only one there. High Budget SciFi RPGs are that kind of sausage party. We're desperate.
TOR devs saying there will be voice acted story quests ( just like AOC) and instancing (just like a number of mmos since Anarchy Online and WoW) is really all these guys are saying.
The rest are just triggers people have been conditioned to salivate in response to over the years. Lightsaber duels, Darth Vader is your dad! Han solo! I'm amazing they didnt bring little tape players to tweet out the Imperial March or the main theme anytime they spoke just for further effect.
You are indeed right we sci-fi fans are often prepared to accept whatever crap comes our way, just because it's sci-fi, and we desperately need our fix.
But this is different.. If you actually read the info on TOR that's out there by now with an open mind, all of it, you'll find we have a pretty good sense of where this baby is going. And it's actually going the right way.
Guess what. Just as you stand there looking at that ugly girl, wondering if you should go for it for lack of choice, a real beauty just entered the room. She's the girl of your dreams, and amazingly enough she stops in her tracks and smiles right at YOU! You're wondering if it can really be true.
THAT girl is SW:TOR.
Sometimes even a sci-fi nerd gets lucky. You'll see.
exited as hell.i played kotor four times,played as sentinel then guardian,evil,good all combinations.i really enjoyed it.Its true Dangling tht all came up with ending dialogue pick,but it was all the way.i dont think tht last pick is soo important becuase if u had fun playing 4 days,ending dialogue is like crown on all tht.if wht this two say its true then im for this game.who knows how more days of fun,and small funny dialogues like a)i will help you b) get out of my way and c)you are boring,i will have to kill you sounds pretty good to me,plus mmo playing with thousands of people,plus bioware and SW,i think many people will stop playing wow,and many will start playing SWtor
BTW Great article, one of the best yet!
Thank you, good sir. I do what I can.
Where's the shacky-cam footage?
Filming and photography weren't allowed during the demo. I did get the audio on my voice recorder, but MMOs are not exactly a non-visual medium.
Did you get a sense of the scale of the worlds? One thing that really bugged me with AoC (which did have some good story elements early on), felt really confined when you eventually aquired a mount. Are the worlds they're designed these "small zones" or big continents ala WoW?
They only showed a few areas, one of which was entirely on board a spaceship, which is by its very nature confined, and the other two both seemed to show somewhat close-quarters areas, with a clear path to follow.
Could have just been the things they had the most polish on to show off in the demo, not an indication of the game as a whole… but I would have liked to have seen some wide open country, myself.
Too much open dpace is bad too. Let us not forget the empty cities and planets of SWG too soon ;p
Cannot wait for Bioware/Lucasarts Star Wars The Old Republic MMORPG. http://bit.ly/P3OMM
Star Wars: The Old Republic – A New Hope For MMOs? [via feedly]: Steve had the chance at E3 to sit down with Jam.. http://bit.ly/vujuz
So how do players interact in this game with purpose? It sounds like its single player with the options of having friends tag along.
I loved(past tense) swg when it came out. I would do anything to test swtor.
Star Wars: The Old Republic – A New Hope For MMOs? : The MMO Gamer: "And then, there was this glee, as I wa.. http://tr.im/ovSb
Star Wars Old Republic interview: http://bit.ly/P3OMM
Sounds promising…
Star Wars: The Old Republic – A New Hope For MMOs? : The MMO Gamer: "And then, there was this glee, as I wa.. http://tr.im/ovSb
Star Wars: The Old Republic – A New Hope For #MMO s? #SWTOR http://is.gd/12DRF @gamerdna @myen
Halp I no see ansers. Can we have butt sex on are companyen
I'd love to hear more from Bioware on how they'll support our random/spontaneous exploration and a player's freedom to move through their class story at their own pace. This may (or may not) have alot to do with the more general 'common' story of the war and how the galaxy will allow us to make our own side-plots within the context of the war.
How much freedom will I have to take a break from my smuggler plot to go and RP my own adventure for a while? How compelling will it be to do so? Can we then seamlessly pick back up with the developer created story line again when we're done with our little tangents?
I'll be sure to ask them that in the next interview.
Interesting interview with the Lead Designer and Lead Writer of Star Wars: The Old Republic #MMORPG from Bioware: http://is.gd/12ruP
SW:TOR interview http://bit.ly/3JWYZQ I expect the story, presentation to be good and the combat mediocre. Exploration’s an unknown still.
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DanglingParticiple
Obvious Troll is Obvious
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i wonder if they will have space combat, SWG had excellent space combat. Will this play into effect do you think?
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do you know a site to play a online starwars game for g 11 year old girl
I have been playing several internet games since years ago, starting with Lineage 1, Lineage 2, WOW, Connan, WAR, Aion, etc. After reading the interview, I cannot stop thinking and wondering at which level will the players have enough freedom to move around and explore the world as they like.
From all the games I have ever player, WOW was and is the game which really allows you to move as you like and where you like. I remember when I started playing Connan, a game from which I expected much more, I noticed that you couldn't reach some places, it was like you had to run through that path, like if everything was designed and planned beforehand… I just hated.
Having such storylines as StarWars is saying could be seen as great, however it scares me a lot that they just make the same mistake as the designers of Connan did. Hope and wish that they are able to apply a similar system as WOW where you can do the things as you want and how you want.
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