The Old Republic Development Was Like Teaching Elephants to Do Ballet

The developers at BioWare who have created the MMO Star Wars: The Old Republic have likened the development process for the video game with “teaching elephants to do ballet”, because of the large number of different teams that needed to be coordinated to produce content.

Speaking to the Los Angeles Times the developers at BioWare, including company co-founder Greg Zeschuck, have said that the artwork for The Old Republic was created in such far flung places as China, Russia and Estonia.

Meanwhile the voice acting for the English, French and German version of the MMO was recorded at the same time in London, England, New York in the United States and Paris, France.

When the components of the game experience were put together testers in Argentina, India and Romania were called upon do see that the quality of the entire game was up to standards and to squash all potential bugs.

The technical core of the game was created in Virginia while the customer service center is located in Ireland, in a brand new BioWare studio.

The developers have also revealed that a shuttle flight is still ready to fly the team which works on Star Wars: The Old Republic from BioWare Austin to the headquarters that publisher Electronic Arts maintains in Redwood Shores, California.

The massive project was created over as many as five years and some are saying that, when taking into account both development and marketing costs, Electronic Arts has spent more than half a billion dollars on the creation of The Old Republic.

The MMO launched in late December 2011 and gamers have been impressed with the effort, with the publisher saying that initial adoption rates from the public were higher than initially expected.

EA says that the game can be profitable as long as it has half a million long term players.