Rich Vogel.

Behind the Scenes of Star Wars: The Old Republic from PC Gamer

There was a lot of great information coming out of GDC this year and much of it was in regards to SWTOR. A talk given by director of production, Dallas Dickinson and BioWare executive producer Richard Vogel brings us some interesting information about the game. First, building it was hard. There’s no real surprise there, right? Making a game of this size and caliber is certainly difficult with many, many hours put in by various team members. That’s just to launch- there is still behind the scenes workers every day to keep it running as intended. PC Gamer brings us the full story on this talk at GDC: In an hour long session, the pair took us through the production and lessons from a long and gruelling development process that saw Bioware Austin hire huge numbers of developers, outsource much of their art, completely rebuild how their team was integrated,…

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SWTOR Developer Blog: Busting Bugs and Fixing Exploits

The developers of SWTOR announce they are in the business of busting bugs and fixing exploits to make the game more fun and fair for everyone. This is a big job in an MMO as large as The Old Republic but apparently, there’s a large team available to deal with these issues and to create new content for SWTOR. Rich Vogel, the Executive Producer of SWTOR talks about how servicing the “live game” comes first and that everything else such as creating new content comes later. He also explains how fixing some of these issues can be very tricky and how they go about determining which issues need to be fixed first. Here is some of what he has to say. “If an exploit is discovered that threatens players’ experience in the game or the in-game economy, we will usually try to create an Emergency Patch to fix that exploit….

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RE-Live TV from BioWare Base at Comic-Con

Yesterday BioWare had a live Q&A with Stephen Reid, James Ohlen, Dallas Dickinson and Rich Vogel. unfortunately I was sleeping like a baby while it was on, but WeekendJedi and SoMuchMass has made sure the full Q&A is now on Youtube. Here are the highlights ( Thanks to Ask a Jedi): Collector’s Edition store is actually an exclusive location that only CE owners have access to! Items from this store however will not give people an advantage in power, though weapons and armor will be available Color Stone is gold in addition to adding effects Sharding may be used on launch day, only if absolutely necessary (the practice of creating multiple copies of the same area) Advanced Class change is in the game. 1st swap is cheap. After that it gets expensive Companion AI – off-limits for talking about! James Ohlen is in trouble. Companion customization is flexible, but you can’t…

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