14 DAY TRIAL // Star Wars: The Old Republic, the MMO from BioWare and Electronic Arts, might be the biggest launch of the year but for one of the main developers working on it the emotions started when he realized the size of the project.
Speaking to CVG Alex Freed, who is the senior writer working on the game, stated, “We're the biggest writing project the industry has ever undertaken. We've had at any given time about a dozen writers on the project over the course of half a decade. We've written a lot of dialogue, we've figured out a lot of stories and characters... it's an enormous beast to wrestle with but hopefully we've gotten it fairly well tamed.”
He added that, “It's not so much a matter of being intimidated by it as feeling a great responsibility for it, and not wanting to let people down. Everyone is coming to this game because they're fans of Star Wars – no one is a fan of this game because no one's played this game yet.”
He says that one of the big problems for the developers is that a lot of potential gamers already have a clear emotional link with the Star Wars universe and the BioWare development team needs to make sure that they capture them and then expand on them.
Freed again mentioned that BioWare was really interested in expanding on the narrative side of the MMO genre, something that most developers have ignored so far.
The Old Republic has more than 100,000 lines of dialog and all the NPCs in the game are fully voiced in order to increase the immersion level for the player.
The developers have repeatedly described The Old Republic MMO as creating and launching the next five Knights of the Old Republic single player role playing games at the same time.
Analysts estimate than more than 1.5 million gamers played the game before the official launch date.