Starting today, those who preordered BioWare’s Star Wars: The Old Republic will be rolled into in the live game before the official launch date of December 20. The time has officially come. There will be no more beta testing, no more character wipes and no more waiting. We are down to the wire and it’s nearly time to being playing.
With that said, it begs the question “What has Bioware learned from this experience?” In this exclusive interview with IGN, Bioware’s James Ohlen talks SWTOR, lessons learned, future changes in SWTOR and more.
The interview is over 2,000 words long but well worth the read (or at very least a skim over the questions that interest you most). Here’s a snippet from the start of the interview:
GN: During beta, which are some of the elements that changed the most and in ways you didn’t expect? I mean I saw a post recently about how much the item modding has changed.
James Ohlen: Item modding is a really good one. What happened there was we had this really cool item modding system that had a lot of fans but was incomprehensible to the majority of our players. We wanted to make it more understandable so that more players could get into it because it’s a major part of our itemization. It needed to be something that everyone in the game could wrap their heads around but we didn’t want to take away all the depth and the coolness that you know the fans of the system saw in it, so we went back to the drawing board, made some changes but it was a little bit controversial because our changes didn’t all come in right away. Now that the whole system’s in there we’ve been getting really good, like the last round of feedback on it was really positive so that’s good.
You can head over to IGN to read the full interview where they continue to talk to Ohlen about flashpoints, changes in the game, unexpected parts of the process of creating the game and so much more. IGN asks Ohlen:
- Moving forward might there be something like a group finder or something like that? An auto-finder implemented into the game?
- What’s the plan for maybe three, six months outside of launch?
- I was also curious about space combat and how that might evolve. How are the later game missions different from the early game ones and will they ever become sort of a multiplayer experience
- Can you explain what the Legacy system is meant to be?
And many more great questions. You will learn more about the behind-the-scenes process in the game as well as what you can expect post-launch. They even talk about graphics options, possible tweaks and how confident Bioware is feeling about the massive rush of players who are guaranteed to be there on launch day.
