Set a course for March, 2012 and the planet Denova!
In last week’s Star Wars: The Old Republic media blitz promoting the (still upcoming) ‘Rise of the Rakghouls’ update we reported on a number of juicy developer interviews.
However, one chat slipped under our radar and I’d like to bring it to your attention. SWTOR Game Director James Ohlen spoke with Computer & Video Games(CVG) and, as per usual, had many interesting things to say about the game.
The interesting bits include “we’ve got hundreds of thousands of players in the game. So they’re stretching a lot of the higher level systems. So we are finding more bugs, but we are fixing them as fast as we can.,”
“sales are going extremely well. We had the announcement that we’re the fastest growing MMO, and we’ll probably have announcements in the future too,”
and
“We have people working on content that won’t be showing up in the game until 2013.”
Also revealed, the new upcoming planet in the March update is called Denova. Denova doesn’t have an entry on Wookieepedia so it’s an entirely new creation or perhaps an error and they meant to say Denon? We shall see. Read it in full.
CVG Ohlen Quote:
“CVG: What are the most commonly chosen species and classes when players go into the game? What’s the overall balance?
Ohlen: I don’t have the exact stats on that, but I do know that it was a little bit different to what we thought it was going to be. The Sith Inquisitor was a lot more popular than we predicted. I guess people just like to use Force Lightning!
CVG: A damning indictment on humanity if we’ve ever heard one. So, which worlds and storylines have had the most positive player responses?
Ohlen: Well, they’re all getting positive reviews so far. Some people are surprised at the Imperial Agent storyline, which is good as it doesn’t really have an analogue in the movies – there’s no Imperial Agent in Episodes I through VI in the Star Wars movies.
It was a class that people weren’t familiar with, and a lot of the people who tried it out found that it was the favourite of the stories available to them. Then people really like the Jedi Knight story, the Sith Warrior story, people who like Han Solo just love the Smuggler story, Boba Fett fans like the Bounty Hunter story… It depends on what you love about Star Wars.”
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When I saw the title for this article I became furious. Why not fix what is wrong with the game now? More man power the better right? I mean the patch meant to fix bugs was bugged. Lets fix the now before we get to the future.
They have teams doing both, and they’re not exactly lacking the funds or manpower to keep both teams large and fully supported. At some point though, there’s only so many people you can have working on the same thing before it just becomes a huge mess.
Like others have said, their Bug Fix people are not the same people who do Graphics, Story, UI, Models, or even Gameplay Systems. Every MMO developer is as forward-looking as is reasonable.
For example, WoW had some Burning Crusade assets ready when the original “classic” game was released, and were working on Wrath assets while Burning Crusade was officially live. Devs have to do this, or they won’t have expansions out in a timely fashion.
Eff, they have different teams assigned to different tasks.
There is a team for bug fixing, and they are dedicated to that 10)%.
Conversely, if you have a team of trained, dedicated artists, art directors, 3D modelers, voice actors, and writers on the payroll for a subcription based MMO, you want to put them to work creating new content.
Well said!
You became “furious” over a title of an article about a game? Yikes. Get to the yellow pages and look up “psychiatrist” in a hurry please.
I agree with “k” , this shouldn’t upset you THAT much (if at all)
I think the key is “until 2013″ which is only a year away btw
Why shouldn’t they be working on content for release a year from now, one of the bright spots of this game is the massive amount of content. Remember they have 8 classes to continue story for
That’s what I’m wondering: Is the new planet coming in March going to have the start of Chapter 4, will it be a new endgame planet (maybe one a little more PvE focused), or will it be something else entirely?
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