Star Wars: The Old Republic Game Director Interview
Sean W. Gibson / Jun 14th, 2011 No Comments
Star Wars: The Old Republic is a Star Wars themed MMORPG that had a hands-on demo at E3 2011. We sat down with Game Director James Ohlen in this exclusive one-on-one interview to discuss the game, new elements shown at E3 and what gamers can expect from the most hyped MMORPG release of the last five years.
Gaming Illustrated: Sean Gibson, Gaming Illustrated. If you can give me your name and your job title, please?
James Ohlen: Hi. This is James Ohlen, Game Director on “Star Wars: The Old Republic.”
Gaming Illustrated: So, we’re here at E3 2011. You’re always seeing fans interact with the game on a global scale; we know you have had a couple of private betas. How do you feel being here at E3 and seeing the fan reaction of this game?
James Ohlen: It’s always been very exciting when you get people from outside of the company to play the game and when they are very positive about it, which they have been. I’ve been working on the game for five years. I really want to get the game out there and see everybody’s reaction to it. I think it’s going to be very positive because I think we’re revolutionizing the whole space by bringing story to the MMO genre.
Gaming Illustrated: One of the problems when anyone comes out with an MMO is content. The big question with any new MMO title is if there enough content because there’s so many established brands out there with tons of content. You said you’ve worked on this for five years, how are you tackling that issue?
James Ohlen: Well, one thing is you have to have a very good plan and you have to stick to that plan. We were writing the story in 2006 and when we were doing the actual scripts, a lot of that original dialogue is in the game right now on the “Origin Worlds” such Corbin and Tython.
So, you really need to have a plan and stick with it. You can’t be changing direction midway through; otherwise you’re not going to be able to create hundreds of hours of content for two factions and multiple classes. So, it’s been the big thing, we basically leveraged the strengths of BioWare. We have always been strong in storytelling. By making sure to leverage that, we’re able to get the production and the storytelling online right away.
Gaming Illustrated: I think for me as gamer, I’m excited about the story aspect, then there’s obviously the gamers that don’t care. Are we both going to be satisfied or is one going to be more than the other?
SWTOR James Ohlen Interview
James Ohlen: We’re really aiming at satisfying three different groups. Those groups are Star Wars fans, fans of BioWare role-playing games, and fans of MMORPGs. I think all three groups are going to be excited. The MMO fans are going to be excited because we have all the things that they’re used to in MMOs. We have raids, we have battlegrounds, we’re going to have warzones and operations, we have an auction house, we have vast wide open spaces to explore, we have level curves, and we have PvP. We have everything that an MMO fan could possibly want. But we’ve also made sure to put that RPG slam time.
We’ve added story and we have cinematic storytelling. We’ve gotten rid of the grind. We’ve made sure that exploration is not wondering vast wide open spaces. We’ve really made sure that a player is having fun all the time. The fun experience of it is much more similar to what you’d expect from one of BioWare’s previous RPGs. I think RPG fans are going to be into it.
And then Star Wars fans – obviously, we’ve tailored the entire game’s mythology around satisfying our Star Wars fans. All the classes are based off of at least one of the archetypes that you’ve seen from the movies. We’ve given players their own starship and they have a galaxy map that allows them to explore more than two dozen worlds. There’re lightsabres and blasters; there are starships and space battles. There’s everything a fan of Star Wars could possibly imagine. In fact, I would say that this Star Wars game pretty well gives Star Wars fans everything they could possibly want. If you want to live in the Star Wars universe, you will play this game and it’ll give you an opportunity to relive any of your favorite moments from the movies.
Gaming Illustrated: Let’s talk about the advanced classes, something that was announced here. Could you talk a little bit about the distinction between both sides, both factions and their subclasses?
James Ohlen: Well the advanced classes enable players to basically customize how their characters fight in battle. The core classes are really revolving around the story and the fiction. And then, the advanced classes are all focused on how you’re fighting. For example, if you’re a trooper you can either specialize in having a blaster rifle or you can get the big huge blaster cannon-style gun. They’re very visually different and they also have different roles in the game.
In terms of the two factions, we have the Sith Empire and the Republic and both have four classes. We’ve balanced the classes, so that they do have, in terms of functionality, a lot of similarities. A trooper fills a lot of the similar roles that a bounty hunter might do as does, say, the Jedi Knight to the Sith Warrior. We made sure that they look a lot different and they feel a lot different, so it’s not like you’re playing the same thing. When you play either of those classes, it’s going to feel completely different. But for balance purposes, we don’t want one faction to have an advantage over the other faction.
Gaming Illustrated: You talked a bit about operations that are akin to raids. Can you talk about the payoffs for those, since usually it’s only about big loot. Are we also going to talking about big story points there?
James Ohlen: Yes. With our operations, we definitely wanted to bring in BioWare’s type of storytelling to players and give them that final payoff. You get to face off against one the most epic villains you could imagine in the Star Wars universe. At the end of it you also get a lot of loot, that’s definitely one of the big rewards. So, there is the big story award but it is, at its heart, about giving players a chance to go up against the biggest challenges in the game with a huge group of their fellow players and then get a gigantic reward at the end that, basically, is better than any other award in the game.
Gaming Illustrated: When you’re talking about a leading massive project of this kind, with your role, what’s going to be the most satisfaction you’ll feel once this game is released? Where are you going to find that? Is it going to be a big sigh of relief when it’s on the shelf or are you going to get some other metric to say, “I’ve really succeeded on my goals here”?
James Ohlen: Well really, if people love the game then I’m going to be happy. I go to Metacritic, I won’t lie. After a game gets released, I go to GameRankings and Metacritic. I want to see how the game is doing. I’m going to be happy if we have a 95 Metacritic game score. We have really high expectations. I’ll be kind of sad if we don’t get there but the good thing is I feel we really have a chance of being that kind of game because we have so much depth. We’re putting in so much work to make sure it’s very polished and it does provide players a game experience that they can’t get anywhere else.
Gaming Illustrated: Over 1.5 million is the estimate right now on the beta signups. There are a lot of patient people out there and the forms are going crazy. That’s both exciting to you and a serious challenge to live up to. Do you have any message for those people?
James Ohlen: Yeah, there is a message of patience. The thing is, when you’re building a game of this magnitude there’s a lot of different things that can go wrong. We have to make sure that when we launch we have a smooth launch and the players are able to get into the game and have an enjoyable experience. So, we have to worry about so many different things, which is why we’re taking our time. We need to make sure that every aspect of the game from game-playing mechanics to the server standing up, to security to being able to launch to that scale – all those things need to be solved because otherwise we might have a great game, but when we launch it and then it falls down. And then all that work that everyone has put in for five years goes to waste.
Gaming Illustrated: [Laughter]. Quite fickle.
James Ohlen: Yeah.
Gaming Illustrated: We had heard comments from the fans, while we were waiting and seeing all these amazing cut scenes and the story elements and the animation. We’re just going to give you a petition to start making movies. Can you do that for us?
James Ohlen: [Laughter]. Yes, we’ve been working with a studio called Blur that BioWare works with that does the movies and they’re amazing. They always have been amazing. We specifically went out to work with them when we did our first movie, like the first movie “Deceived” from several E3s back. But yeah, I’d love to continue to work with them in the future, maybe I can get a little bit more added to the marketing budget for the movies every time, so the movies can be 10 minutes, and then 15 minutes and then on.
Gaming Illustrated: And then, you have a full-length feature film, right? [Laughter]. Alright final question, just a message to the gamers, you’ve got so many followers, you’ve got the most exciting booth here at E3, there’s a line wrapped around this entire hall, what message do you have to say to those people?
James Ohlen: Well I have to say that when this game comes out, I think they’re going to have their ultimate dream Star Wars experience be what this game is to them. They’re going to be blown away when they have a chance to play it. It’s a really fun experience.
Sean W. Gibson
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tags: star wars , star wars the old republic , swtor
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