Could some of the old BioWare team get back together to work on a new project? It’s a theory we tossed out there back when the news of many key BioWare players leaving was first revealed. Well today Twitter gave us a little more insight into this very topic! A tweet from former BioWare develop Daniel Erickson today confirms Emmanuel Lusinchi has left or will be soon leaving BioWare to start work at Bluepoint as a Lead Designer. There were previous rumors about Lusinchi leaving but nothing solid or in the public until this tweet today: — Daniel Erickson (@DanielAErickson) November 5, 2012 I have to admit that it’s tough to see how passionately these developers and designers talked about SWTOR earlier this year at the Guild Summit and now they are dropping off like flies. These are people who put their heart and soul into their work and for those of…
Emmanuel Lusinchi
Force Junkies Interview Emmanuel Lusinchi – PAX East
Emmanuel Lusinchi the Technical Design Director of Star Wars: The Old Republic also had a lot to say at PAX East 2012 and Force Junkies have published their interview for all of us to see. Here’s a snippet of their chat with Lusinchi: Do you coordinate your gear based on armor type? It’s based on color sets that we created intitially. Every piece of gear belongs to a set. And what happens, when you coordinate [your gear color] we’re actually going to read the color from that set and apply it to that gear. Let’s say you have a set of gear, and your chest is blue and you coordinate the rest of your gear, the rest of your gear is going to use the data from the blue chest piece? Yes, exactly. The fact that you can disable it per slot is important because if something doesn’t work you might…
Emmanuel Lusinchi Says Shame an Anger Aided Development of SWTOR
Speaking at the Vancouver Game Design Expo, the Associate Lead Designer of SWTOR Emmanuel Lusinchi had some interesting things to say about the development of the game. He described his experiences summarized from six years of development on Electronic Arts’ high-profile MMO, what many consider to be the most expensive MMO to date. Venture Beat shares the story: Lusinchi started his insightful and entertaining lecture off with the advice “You are not working enough on your development tools”. He emphasized the return on investment for tool optimization because of the development time-savings, especially in the MMO genre, where content creation continues long after the game launch The more I hear from this guy, the more I’m starting to like him. He went on to cover lessons two and three of communicating with the fan base: “Everything you say can – and will be – used against you” Yup, sounds like…
Lusinchi brings Some Clarity to Item Modification Issues
Associate Lead Designer, Emmanuel Lusinchi posted a very long revision today on the official SWTOR forums about the modification system patch notes. He says his patch notes were poorly written and that he wanted to make the post to clarify any confusion. It was a bit of wall of text, however, and I honestly don’t see how the modification system changes were so confusing in the first place. Lusinchi says: To start with, we’ve introduced a new color and item type: the Custom items. Those are shown with an orange border and are fully moddable. This change is purely cosmetic. What we have done is take all fully moddable Prototype items (blue) and simply changed their icon color. This helps us create a better and more unique identity for fully moddable gear. Ok, we’re with you so far. He then describes the main issues with the old modding system: The…