14 DAY TRIAL // Star Wars: The Old Republic is a very ambitious project. It aims to offer full-voice acting for the characters that make an appearance, which already sets it apart from every other MMO project going on at the moment. It aims to offer meaningful, moral choices for player parties that affect their development for the rest of the game.
It also aims to offer a lot of content, with each class the equivalent of a whole BioWare-developed role-playing game. The Old Republic is so complex and takes so many people working on it that Technical Director Bill Dalton recently revealed that they tended to push the limits of the tools they were working with past their limits.
Speaking in Austin at the GDC, the BioWare man highlighted some of the challenges that the team working on The Old Republic had encountered during the development process. Because of the very different views that creators take of the game, with writers being concerned with the text and interactions, programmers concerned only with the code, and animators focused on movement, it's a complex task even to make sure that they understand that the MMO will actually become something more complex than any of their initial visions.
With so many people working on the video game, the engine used, called Hero, which allows for simultaneous development of different types of content, actually broke down initially and writers needed to work using other tools, which led to confusion and delays.
Dalton said that, “None of are huge but they're all sand in the gears, slowing everybody down.” This doesn't mean that The Old Republic will not be released because of development trouble, but that the teams at LucasArts and BioWare that are working on it need to find new and innovative ways of dealing with the challenges of the most complex MMO in development.