Hands off the spacebar - this is one ancient holo you'll want to pay attention to

Game industry magazine and web site, Gamasutra, has a three-page article up entitled “The Making of Star Wars: The Old Republic.”

The article looks at the initial establishment of BioWare Austin back in 2005 and features comments from BioWare co-founder Greg Zeschuk, as well as Game Director James Ohlen and Lead Writer Daniel Erickson. Fascinating details about the early creation of the game are revealed and some future topics explored. Any fan of BioWare will want to give this one a deep read.

Gamasutra ‘Making of SWTOR’ Quote:

“‘Even though it hadn’t been the plan, we ended up with more than 40 companion characters, each with their own dialogue and their own quests,’ Erickson says. ‘Originally we thought we were going to do a small set of companion characters and all eight classes were going to share them.’

‘It just didn’t work out that way, mainly because companion characters at BioWare have always grown very naturally out of the plot. The one ambitious thing we knew we were going to do were the eight different class stories… a separate story for each class that runs all the way through the entire game, from beginning to end. That’s something that I don’t think has ever been seen in an RPG, except maybe for the origin stories in Dragon Age.’

So, in theory, SWTOR’s story can be played all the way through eight times, each time enabling the player to work their way through a full trilogy.

‘To give you an idea of how big these stories are, Chapter I of the bounty hunter is longer than the entire old Knights of the Old Republic,’ says Erickson. ‘And then there’s Chapters II and III. If, after that, you go and re-roll on, say, the Republic side, you won’t see a single piece of repeated content, not one line of voiceover, nothing.’”

Read it in full.