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‘Star Wars: The Old Republic’ article: The Special Edition!
Character sketches for BioWare Austin’s massive online game “Star Wars: The Old Republic” which officially launches on Tuesday. Photo by Rodolfo Gonzalez / AMERICAN-STATESMAN.
In every saga, there is some fat that needs to be trimmed.
Such was the case in Saturday’s lengthy Austin American-Statesman profile I wrote about the Austin development of “Star Wars: The Old Republic” the biggest game ever created in town. After visiting the studio, speaking to some of the creative team members, fans and players of the game and even a G4TV celebrity about the game, I had a good 20 pages of notes, most of which couldn’t make the final cut.
Here’s some of what was left out, a set of deleted scenes with tidbits that didn’t make it into the final piece:
- There’ll be a launch event tonight (Monday) at Best Buy on 4970 U.S. Hwy 290 from 10 p.m. to 1:30 a.m. Members of the creative team will be there signing limited edition prints.
- One of the ideas for an MMO that was being tossed around by Electronic Arts back when “Old Republic” was conceived was for a game based on George R.R. Martin’s “Game of Thrones” books. Of course, this was long before the HBO series made that fantasy world a household name.
- How much story is in “Old Republic?” Says John Posavatz, senior director of BioWare Austin’s business and studio operations, “40 man-years” worth of writing, about the equivalent of 60 novels.
- BioWare Austin has its own set of servers for its internal work (which is backed up remotely), but the actual game servers are located in places including Virginia, California and overseas. There’s a significant support team based in Ireland.
- The team is a big believe in practices like heat mapping and data mining, making changes to the game based not just on player feedback, but on trends they see in the game itself. (For instance: if people are having trouble navigating a certain area, BioWare can see that movement and track whether things need to be fixed or rebuilt.
- A lot of the talent recruited for “Old Republic” came from Austin teams that had MMO experience (from companies like Sony Online Entertainment, NCSoft as well as from Southern Methodist University, which has a strong game development program called The Guildhall.
- Creative director James Olen says you can’t look TOO far ahead in a game that hasn’t yet officially launched, but that there are plans about 2-3 years ahead for expansion packs and future content for the game.
- Olen says that one of the challenges to recruiting programmers for such an ambitious piece of code is that some top talent doesn’t want to be a “Cog” in a large machine. “For a programmer, it’s a gigantic process. It’s a little bit scary,” he said, “But at least you own a piece of the product. You might own half an entire world that would be as big as an entire other game.”
- Olen got a chance to stay at Skywalker Ranch and get a personal tour of a warehouse with props from the original “Star Wars” trilogy. George Lucas and Robert Redford happened to be having dinner there at the time. “We didn’t get to go near them, but it was cool to stay at a place where George was hanging out,” he said.
- Rich Vogel of BioWare says that it took about nine months to work up concepts before deciding on a game in the “Knights of the Old Republic” universe. it took another year of negotiations with LucasArts to get the game moving. One of the central challenges, he said, was, “How are we going to put story in an MMO?”
- The rise of this game means the end of “Star Wars: Galaxies,” the first attempt at a “Star Wars” MMO.
I hopped into the early access for the game last night and there were lots of full servers, which means the game so far is off to a good start (if waiting in a queue to get in doesn’t hurt your feelings too badly). Expect a big surge of players when the game officially goes live tomorrow and another big surge after Christmas.
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