Are there some parts of the story where it is supposed to be with multiple people?

Daniel Erickson: Well, all of the world content -- which is a huge, huge amount of the content. That is what I'm saying in the Bespin example. In that stuff, if you're going to do multiplayer and do multiplayer storytelling and the stuff you saw, then yeah you get to have arguments and you get to go different directions. Some of the most fun stuff is to write is party chatter. People will actually address you instead of her and you can actually call them back and be like "Hey, excuse me I'm the Sith Lord. You don't talk to the Bounty Hunter -- you talk to me."

And you have decisions where it goes to the decision making process , and one person loses. You decided to kill that person, and your Bounty Hunter friend gets mad. And he is like "hey -- you killed them" And you're like "well, alright, but they are dead, so what do you want me to do about it exactly?" That dynamic is actually really fun.

One of the things we really wanted to try to create when we first started was... we keep saying role playing game and we've been saying this for years. But one of the things we never hit is the feel of playing an old party pen & paper based game, one where usually you have a pretty mixed party, and a bunch of different ideas.

And it is the same thing when you watch Star Wars. Eventually Han gets good guy'd by Leia and Luke, and that they end up pretty much in sync later. But when they start up, their decisions are never in the same place.

Is there any class where you started out writing a class story a certain way, then it somehow went way off the charts, and was not what you expected at the end?

Daniel Erickson: I think the class that surprised us the most was the Imperial Agent. And it wasn't that we started writing, but we definitely started planning it one way. We wanted to have a class that would sort of balance out and give us perspective on the Sith that was not Sith, and a perspective on the Empire. What were the people like? We didn't want to do -- you know, we've got the bucketheads in there -- we've got our sort of Storm Troopers. We didn't want to do that because we felt like we'd just end up back with the Trooper.


So we thought "okay, Imperial Intelligence is something that is very them." We get these great KGB or SS sort of feels. But we kept saying "he is a spy, he is this, he is that." Even though it is the Empire, we had a very sort of James Bond-feel to it when we were conceiving it.

And then Alex Freed (who is the writer for the Imperial Agent) came on board, started looking at it, and really helped develop what the Empire was and really changed it. He came to James Ohlen and I, and said "no, no. This guy has got to be 24, Bourne Identity." This is a very different sort of Agent: he is going to live in this world, and deal with these people and make these decisions. Yes, he is going to have scenes where he's got to seduce someone to do this, and yes he is going to have crazy gadgets. But tone-wise and feel, this is not the type of spy we're talking about. We're talking about something closer to, in a Star Wars cinematic perspective, what it would feel like to be a CIA agent. And yeah, that one turned out to be one of our great surprise hits. But it is not where we thought it was going to go at the beginning.

Was there anything that you said to yourself "well, this is kind of boring?"

Daniel Erickson: No, no. (laughs) Well, yes, but it's all been rewritten.

Is there a planet that you had a challenge developing or coming up with the writing for? Maybe it was something that nobody touched before?

Daniel Erickson: Those are the best and the easiest ones to do. And the thing is, it doesn't work that way because it is not like somebody said "you have to write this planet." We picked the planets because we wanted to put things on those planets.

So the planets in-game are all ones that have been super exciting, and obviously the ones where we've got some stuff we've not got to talk about yet. The big passions were definitely the totally original pieces that we got to do which are really exciting, and I think people are going to freak out about them. And the places where we got to go and touch things near and dear to our hearts. And obviously, the big one we just talked about for that was Taris, and getting to say "hey, what would 300 years after you demolished everything on a city world look like?" And Taris very nearly didn't make it. Taris is an extremely difficult art and technical challenge. But everybody really wanted it. And there were a lot of revisions of Taris before you got to see what you got now.


Are we going to see some very familiar BioWare tropes, like where you go to a far off place to maybe discover some things, and it is an awesome place?

Daniel Erickson: Well, the sort of the final note on this is that one of the things people kept getting concerned about, and rightly so, is we showed flashpoints and that sort of stuff.

One of the real things we wanted to show at GDC this year is that our worlds are huge, actually. They are giant, you can explore. They are massive. You can just wander off one direction and go forever. There is tons of content there.

Many MMOs are sort of flat or rolling plains with points of interest inside them. Our stuff is hand crafted in every foot, and there's detail and interest in every foot. And the ability to do this, as opposed to BioWare tropes, is one of the things I'd put out there as a hint of things to come.

Because we have so many planets, because we have more companion characters than we've ever had to do in anything, because there are so many romances in this game -- we have the ability to do things that are not your standard pieces. We can cover the standard pieces like this is fantasy fulfillment, and this is something you got to have in your game. And then we still have tons more content to do.

So we can say "here is a great piece that I never got to see." And when you add the class stories in, the class stories allow us to do individual story-telling. Every BioWare game has always had to work for any class you could possibly choose. So now we get to do the Smuggler action-comedy, the Bounty Hunter western, etc. So it's far outside the BioWare tropes.

Thank you, Daniel. Thank you so much for everything.