14 DAY TRIAL // Damion Schubert, who is a systems designer at BioWare, has talked about the way the development team approached the challenges of creating an MMO with Star Wars: The Old Republic and how the game proved more difficult to create than it seemed at first sight.
One of the core BioWare mechanics is choice and the developer stated, “No choice is so bad it actually kills the game experience entirely, and going with choice is the idea of consequences of your actions. Your character is affected, but your decisions also actually affect the world around you.”
BioWare had experience with the Star Wars universe since working on the Knights game, but the team needed to adapt in order to create the deep and branching storylines that MMO lovers expected.
Schubert added, “We wanted each story to really feel like it was about someone of that class. We wanted the knight to have a Luke Skywalker story, we wanted the warrior to have a Darth Vader story, and we wanted the smuggler to have a Han Solo story.”
The risk for BioWare was that gamers would see just one of the storylines and they would then stop playing, which would mean that much of the game would not reach the entire player base.
Star Wars: The Old Republic was a massive undertaking, which included 260,000 lines of dialog on launch, with 321 actors called upon to offer their voices to more than 4,000 characters.
Since the MMO was first launched, BioWare has added a lot of content via the 4 core patches, all of it fully voiced.
Despite the massive effort, The Old Republic had a mixed reception, with solid initial sales but a big drop in players as 2012 progressed.
BioWare has announced plans to make the Star Wars MMO free-to-play starting with November, with a number of bonuses offered to those who are continuing to pay for the game.