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PostPosted: Thu Jun 09, 2011 1:56 am 
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http://darthhater.com/2011/06/09/e3-201 ... son/page/1

When we found out we were interviewing Star Wars: The Old Republic's Daniel Erickson at this year's E3, we decided to switch up our typical interview format and instead perform a group interview with several members of the Darth Hater staff. Although the video of the interview will publish a little later with some additional tidbits, hit the jump for a transcript.

If you're on our site, then you know who Daniel Erickson is. But would you like to tell the one person new to Darth Hater what you do at BioWare?
Daniel Erickson: One person? That is not a very big uptick in population, but just in case we get two, I'm Daniel Erickson and I'm a lead writer for The Old Republic.
Earlier today on the official forum, we got our first post about raids, or as you call them -- Operations.
Can you give us a brief rundown about operations in The Old Republic? What makes them different than MMOs, and what makes them similar?

We'll start with what is the same: it is big; it is multiple groups. There are going to be some really interesting fights, and some interesting puzzle pieces that aren't necessarily fights. Things that really make you strategize, put a group together, and have to practice and plan for what you're doing.

What makes it different? It is very much the difference between Flashpoints and a traditional dungeon. Context, story, having it really fit in the world, and feel like a piece of the history that's going on.

Now the question that always comes after that when I say story, no you will not be having raid-group sized multiplayer conversations. That would be terrible, terrible terrible.

When you say "multiple groups," are you talking one or two?

We know there are eight-mans, and we know there are more than eight-man raids. We do not know the max size yet; it is really a thing of testing and checks. We not only have to see what works, but we have to see what is fun. Our combat is really dynamic; you notice we have a lot of knockbacks, fly-arounds and a lot of motion. We need a lot of room to have firefight combat, so we're trying to figure out what is the biggest that works and what is actually fun.

How are you managing choice and difficulty? Because you mentioned that there were no story choices inside the Operation.

We kind of sandwiched the story outside; we have some stuff later on that you're going to see as well, for repeatable content. We put a lot of the story stuff sort of in front and into the back. So you know what you're doing when you do it, and when you come out, you make some decisions about what goes on. But if you just want to repeat that content and keep running it, we don't want to slow you down and make you slog through the conversations each time.

We know companions in the current stage take up a member slot in your group. So if you have four people in a group, it is two humans, two companions. Or three humans with only one companion, etc. What is the companion situation going to be in raids? Is it the same for what we've heard for Flashpoints? Do they take up a player slot?

Companions in our opinion right now do not belong in PvP Warzones, and do not belong in raids.

Why aren't there companions in Operations?

Your companions are never going to be smart enough. The whole point of a raid is to be able to have coordination that only practiced players can do. If that raid wipes because Vette decided she wanted to wander away, people would be very upset.

You have all these different types of mechanics in the game. We saw stuff like enrage timers that made a comeback from other games. Are there any other mechanics that you can speak about that specifically harkens back to other games that you're familiar with?

I think we're probably going to keep that under wraps for right now; Gabe would probably kill me if I stole his thunder. I will say that the most fun I had so far is that raids run as raid groups, which brought us the world bosses that are in and running in the testing right now. I killed the world boss on Dromund Kaas, and I had to get a ten-man together to do it. And we had to go wander the swamps to try to find this enormous thing. We had to spread out to find him, so I was with the group of three that found him and almost died instantly. As a Sith Assassin, I went stealth and hid under a rock to wait for him to go by, and then yelled at everybody. I have a picture on my desktop of us standing in front of the giant dead world boss. It was one of the better nights I had playing an MMO.

How are you talking about managing difficulty for raids? People who may not have raided before -- is there an entry path for them?

One of the things that we want to make sure of is that the raids are going to bump up. The first raid should obviously not be the "wipe everybody forever" raid, and there is a little more context for what is going on. But as far as difficulty... it is going to come from testing like everything else. We're going to have to see how our population handles it and what our population is that gets there. If it turns out that the population is really pushing endgame as opposed to going alts, and is actually hardcore MMO people, then I'm betting those raids are going to be hard.

Is there a way to change that difficulty for those hardcore MMO people?

I don't know at this time. You're going to have to hit Gabe.
We already heard about the PvP itemization really trying to make PvPers feel like they're accomplished and better because they focused on it, while not excluding non-PvPers from being able to compete. Is the same thing in there with raids? How is itemization right now in Operations? What sort of information do we have about who gets what gear, how does that gear scale, and how many raids do I have to run before I can go run this raid?

Daniel Erickson: So today at E3 we introduced the very first idea that we had Operations! And there's a very cool movie and it shows a little teaser and it is like "Look! Operations!" It is going to be a long time until we get all the nitty-gritty stuff. And again, really going to come from all the testing, and it probably won't come out of me as a mouthpiece.

We also saw a lot about Tatooine. For players who haven't experienced Tatooine, could you give them an idea of what they should expect from Tatooine, who are the main factions, etc.?

Tatooine is really fun because it is level 26 or so. It is the first world where there is no real government enforcement and both factions are there. If you're on a PvP world, the Dune Sea is just a murder field. It is huge and wide open, and many of the quests that the world designers put together cross each other on purpose. You're going right through the road that the other people are using. I ran to the wrong taxi stand before, which is a hilarious, well... very quick death, as the other players are like "who is that guy? Let's just kill him!" Tatooine is fun because it is sort of a little break from the Empire-Republic conflict. Any PvP you're doing is really because it is fun.

From what we're seeing from the quests here, people are trying to find out what the secrets of Tatooine were. Czerka was there for a very long time spending a lot of money, doing something that they then buried under the sand, tried to erase all memory of, and then left the planet. That's what players are getting to check out.

They are also getting to check out our awesome speeders. They are not scooty-puff juniors. They're very fast, and they're very sexy. We tried to do full size speeder bikes, but they took up way too much room in the cities, so we compacted them down, made you really sit back on them, and really gave them a sexy little look. They're fast, and they're fun. There are a bunch of them. We are only showing the one right now, there will be more. We don't like to say they're faction specific because they're tuned for one faction, but if you work very hard you can steal a speeder from the other side.

What sort of level range are we looking at for this first mount?

Right now it is in the 20s. But again, you know your results may vary. Tuning will change all things -- none of this is true!

The Tatooine stuff we got to see earlier... only 20 minutes. Wish we could spend 20 hours there, but we only had 20 minutes. Very wide open, very much like what you guys were talking about at PAX East.

Did you click your world map and see how much bigger it was than the little hub you were in?

It was very large. The sparseness and how the groups seemed positioned around key instances, but there were large swathes of empty space. Is testing increasing mob count, decreasing mob count? How is that affecting large open areas? Is that just ambience?

One of the things that was really important when we were doing Tatooine and Hoth... they actually have sort of the same issue. When they were very heavily populated, they didn't feel like Tatooine and Hoth. You're not going to move through that space. Right now, the aggro is turned way down because you've got people wanting to see high-level stuff, so we've got level 26 game play for people who don't know the powers or anything. We get a lot of people dying, so we wanted people to be able to speeder around pretty safely.

What basically happens is you want population pockets and those are the places you have to go to complete your quest. So you're pushing through. There is also just a lot of nice scenery. You're going to take some nice rides, and we want to randomly have a whole bunch of droids hanging out, having a party where they're completely inappropriate. So there are planets that are extremely heavily populated like Corellia, as you might guess. It is a war in the middle of a city. Then there are places that are less populated, but still have as much to do, it is just spread out a lot further. There is a reason it is the first place we like to give you a speeder.

We also got a lot of action recently with the advanced classes; you released some of the talents. Approaching further into release, are we going to see the unveiling of talent disciplines?

Daniel Erickson: My guess is yes. I mean, you'd have to ask Stephen about exactly what they're going to release and what they're not. My guess is they're going to hold it under wraps until Georg says it is okay. These change a lot. They were making fun of me... I was on EA.com earlier doing a full play-through of the Tatooine stuff, and I was not doing very well at the combat because the Powertech was completely different from the last time I played him. I was like, "Wow, look at this ability! Boop, boop!" Getting a level 26 guy you haven't played... things are changing very quickly. I am in testing at level 19 playing an extremely fun Inquisitor tank -- not something I ever thought I'd be doing.

There is one interesting thing you mentioned, the aggro being turned way down. We did actually get to see that, we were on our non scooty-puffs and hauling rear end through the sand. The one thing I did notice though -- and this is for all the stealthers out there -- I gotta represent my Imperial Agent and Smuggler friends out there on the tech side. I noticed that the aggro was still pretty active; if you're not coming up to someone from behind, they will see you even if you're invisible. That seemed to happen to me no matter where I had it. How has testing affected the stealth game, and how has the stealth game evolved?

The stealth system right now... unless you hit a horrible bug, because again, I'm playing an assassin right now as my tank but I still have stealth. The stealth game is basically you have to hit hard and fast. Even if you come straight up to somebody and you're invisible, remember you're supposed to be sort of cloaked, and once you get five feet away from them they see you. You need to be on the side, coming at it using an angle, and even then they're going to start to get suspicious. You can't just walk behind them. You're not actually the invisible man.

That actually helps a lot, because that's something that I noticed during the PvP session that I saw more now. So understanding that you don't get to tactically do it, you have to run in there and hit hard.

Yeah, you sneak in and hit somebody. Or you go in and actually, if you're a few feet away and standing behind something, no one's going to notice you unless they throw out their ability that lets them see stealthed guys.

There are lots of new companions that we saw so far: Scorpio, Lieutenant Pierce, and also the Jawa...

Blizz, BLIZZ!

Would you give a brief little explanation on what those companions are?

So who we got out there? Xalek, who people saw a picture of a long time ago, but he is actually out. Xalek is your DPS; he is pretty heavy, he is the same species General Grievous was before he got robotomized, and he is actually very late for the Sith Inquisitor. The Agent has Scorpio, who is sort of a very, very cold droid that is not Imperial or Republic make. She is somewhere very different, and hates you with every fiber of her electronic being and wants to kill you very much.

We have Blizz, who is by far my favorite and I think probably the most likely to become a plush toy. Blizz is an adorable little Jawa who just wants to help out and is kind of crazy, and is a great little engineer. He makes little shields and stuff for himself, and has a bunch of bags of tricks. And Lieutenant Pierce is for the Warrior who has been waiting and waiting and waiting to not have to listen to one of his companions ever tell him that he should not just murder everybody all the time. Lieutenant Pierce is your right hand man stormtrooper; he is an in-the-ground, in-the-dirt, likes to get dirty, full soldier who just has a horribly sadistic streak. So if you're that guy, he is sort of your dream partner.

Thank you so much for your time!

Thank you guys.


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