Inside the lore and development of The Old Republic

7:00 PM on 12.08.2009   |   Ben Perlee

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Last week, you all had the opportunity to take a look at my hands-on preview with the much anticipated Star Wars: The Old Republic. Representing the latest collaboration between LucasArts and BioWare, The Old Republic is ambitious strictly for being a Star Wars MMO, much less the most story-driven MMO ever made. With the bad taste of Star Wars: Galaxies still in gamers mouths, and excitement for the game higher than ever, the two companies have a lot to gain, but even more to lose if they mess this up.

It was fortunate that I had the opportunity to sit down with two heavy hitters for the game, Daniel Erickson from BioWare, the Lead Writer for The Old Republic, and Jake Neary, a producer from LucasArts. Between the two of them, I was able to take a peek inside the development process for one of the biggest MMOs to come out since World of Warcraft, as well as see how some of their decisions were made. Things are not obviously what they seem, but one thing is clear, this is is a BioWare game through and through, and anyone who considers themselves an MMO player, a fan of Star Wars, or a fan of BioWare really needs to check this out.

Like I said in my preview, The Old Republic is a big deal for both companies, as well as gamers. Both mentioned that they are sure that The Old Republic is going to offer plenty for gamers to see and do. “It's a brand new, carved-out in a zone” says Neary, “where we are not infringing on movies or what people know, so it is pretty much a fresh opportunity for us to collaborate with BioWare with this tremendous opportunity to create a really cool lore, story, characters, emotion, all those things.”

Erickson pointed out one integral element of this game: “People are going to be there, and they are going to see these characters for far longer than you would ever see a movie. They are going to talk to Companion characters for hundreds of hours. They are going to build relationships that are longer than watching the seasons of your favorite show that has ever existed, and they are going to have connections to the world.” Obviously, The Old Republic is designed from the ground up to expand upon the Star Wars universe in a very thoughtful way.

The biggest selling point for The Old Republic is obviously the lore, for both BioWare and LucasArts are well versed in telling stories. Erickson, who is the man in charge of the largest writing team on any project in history, is adamant that writing comes first and foremost in the game. “When we talk about story, some gamers will start rolling their eyes because what they think we are talking about is talking, they think we are talking about narrative.” he says.

“But context is all important. Even if somebody doesn't know themselves that we have thought long and hard about why those enemies are there, and what they are doing, it changes the way you do level design, it changes the way that you spawn your creatures. Knowing the motivations for everyone you see, knowing what they were doing five minutes before you got there, what's happening, what the history is, enriches all of the experience, even if you don't listen to a word a single NPC says.”

“You are still having story telling, whether you know it or not.”

While the story is such a foundation to the game, as well as something that both feel is the biggest selling point against rival MMOs, the restrictions have been what really made a change to the game. Fans of BioWare games are well versed in the slower, but more visually dynamic, battle systems of the past. However, due to the constraints of multiplayer, this was just not possible.

Says Erickson, “We can't do this as traditional MMO combat because that doesn't look like we want it to look like in Star Wars. We have to do something completely different, and we really went down the path, like with a few things, where we decided what we wanted it to look like, what we wanted it to feel like, and then everybody told us you can't do that, and then we decided, 'hey, we have got a whole bunch of smart people on two sides of the fence, let's see what we can do.'” [laughs]

Another element the teams really had to address was what makes a good Star Wars experience. Both made it clear that The Old Republic was a Star Wars game first, then a Old Republic game second. This means that anyone who comes into this after watching the movies should feel comfortable right away. They should want to come right in and feel like they are in a place they know and recognize. KOTOR players should not be alarmed.

“There are planets like that that are sort of super-sized and amazing version of the things you loved, and then there are planets that have radically changed in the 300 years since Knights of the Old Republic.” says Erickson, “You'll get to go back and say 'hey, what are some of the things that I did do to make an impact on history? What are the outstanding questions? What happened to those stories major characters?' For fans of all that stuff, it's all there, but again, it's new content first, it's Star Wars first.”

This philosophy applies to their character design. Some fans have may object to the idea that there is two Jedi classes and two Sith classes, something that may seem redundant. BioWare has declared that the classes were chosen to fulfill certain fantasies, not typical MMO tropes. Thankfully, according to Neary, each character class has a depth that is not immediately obvious.

Each character can be tweaked at any given moment to play differently given to the play experience needed. For example, a Smuggler can become healer focused, and bring along their healer Companion, an NPC character that is unique to each character type, and become a healing unit. Neary says “we want you to quickly customize, get in, fill a role, and go on.” Between your character and your Companion, you'll be able to fill almost every hole in a quest.

And anyone who might question that BioWare is not the right company to be doing a massively multiplayer game, considering their single player background, no worries. “There were things we could be taught, and there were things we couldn't be taught” says Erickson, “and there is always going to be deltas that are going to be your big problems.”

Combat was one such issue. However, he was quick to counter with this: “BioWare's story telling, not voice-over, not writing dialogue lines, but interactive choice based branched story lines is one of the most complex design things in games...when you take that and add the multiplier in a server that could go down, people that need to be able to abandon quests, of things that can go wrong, of multiple people playing together, of making decisions together, of you not knowing where anybody is, little things you would have never thought of.”

Obviously they had a challenge of dealing with typically easy BioWare options. A basic plot element of “he got thrown in jail” becomes something that is impossible to do. Omniscient story telling is a no-no. These details caused huge headaches to the team making everything line up. The fact that they were able to get so much experience on games like Dragon Age and Mass Effect, they were able to pull of the scaled up narrative of The Old Republic. By using people within BioWare who knows the story, and by hiring some of the best people from the MMO side of things, people who have seen the worst in MMO development, and they were able to solve these problems.

In the end, Erickson sums it up nicely: “If you do it right, and you stick to your guns, and if you take the time to make sure you polish it, and if you deliver a quality good product that you can be proud of, well, in the past history, good things have happened.”