While talking with Jake Neri about the Trooper, we decided to use the opportunity to gather more information about Star Wars: The Old Republic. The LucasArts producer offered what limited insight he could into BioWare's James Ohlen and his recent comments on endgame.

A thread on the official forums highlights a lecture by Ben Cloward, Senior Technical Artist at BioWare. The session, entitled Automated Emotion: Facial Animation in Star Wars: The Old Republic, goes into detail about the methods used by BioWare to generate facial animations for the huge amount of dialogue in The Old Republic. Calithlin, who attended the session, shared his experience with the community.


More after the jump.

One of larger portions of BioWare Austin's Co-Studio Director Gordon Walton and consultant Scott Hartsman's GDC session, "MMO Retention -- Learning From The First 25 Years," highlighted some of the game change management issues MMO developers encountered trying to retain existing customers. Although we plan on issuing a more comprehensive article on how some of the topics discussed in this session may relate to Star Wars: The Old Republic, we decided to release this very telling quote about Walton's experience with introducing space combat in an expansion for Star Wars Galaxies.

BioWare co-founder and CEO Dr. Ray Muzyka participated in a GDCSF session yesterday entitled "Fireside Chat: Building a Blockbuster Franchise," along with Bungie Creative Director Joseph Staten. We had the opportunity to ask Dr. Muzyka about his views on content updates versus expansions or sequels.

Eurogamer reports on a quote from Electronic Arts' Chief Financial Officer Eric Brown, who spoke at a Wedbush Morgan conference in New York on March 10th. Eric Brown stated that Star Wars: The Old Republic is "[the] largest ever development project, period, in the history of the company."

When you take a look at previous projects created by Electronic Arts, this speaks volumes. EA has several big name franchises, such as "The Sims," and "Command and Conquer". The news that The Old Republic exceeds these titles in terms of the scope of development certainly reinforces the idea that the game is being given a high priority within Electronic Arts.

Brown mentioned production costs of similar games, like World of Warcraft, which Blizzard spent "$100 million, perhaps more" to bring to market in 2004. This shows the general scope of the game as well as the quality that Bioware, and indeed EA as a whole, are aiming for. One reason they are likely investing so much is because they know they only have one launch and an MMO can be a make or break deal.

A PC Gamer interview came out today that highlights what BioWare's thoughts are when it comes to endgame:

Official Star Wars: The Old Republic Twitter feed included some interesting news about this year's E3 Expo:


E3 Expo is June 15 through June 17 at the Los Angeles Convention Center.

In the shameless plug department, if you want to support Darth Hater's coverage of E3 Expo and other conventions this year, then please help us out with a donation.

Official forum poster armenak reported that while taking a casual glance at this year's E3 Expo Exhibitor List, he noticed both LucasArts and BioWare's parent company Electronic Arts booked their meeting rooms.

Although there isn't a booth confirmation yet listed, both meeting rooms are in close proximity to one another: LucasArts will be in Meeting Room 404AB, while Electronic Arts booked Room 406AB, and no one is listed for Room 405 yet.

E3 Expo is June 15-17 at the LA Convention Center.

After reviewing many of our recent speculation articles, we felt it was time to take a step back and reveal the core foundation of the logic that drives our conclusions. We strongly believe BioWare is approaching game design in a significantly different manner than what we see in other MMOs: instead of simply copying primary game elements and introducing a few new ideas, we believe the core principle at BioWare is to completely avoid significant MMO flaws through design innovation that wont negatively affect other areas of Star Wars: The Old Republic. Therefore, we believe these design innovations will compliment each other and integrate seamlessly throughout the game.

When attempting to solve common MMO problems such as stale character progression, faction or class imbalances, BioWare must use the Star Wars universe itself to creatively consolidate their design innovations. We think BioWares fourth pillar of Story actually has to permeate even further into the other pillars of Combat, Progression, and Exploration and these pillars are intertwined in such a way that they seem to solve these issues from the outset.

The podcast team is on holiday break this week but we wanted to bring you something special to fill the void until next week's podcast. We have an audio interview with Darragh O'Farrell and Jake Neri of LucasArts. The questions/poll for this week's podcast will be held over for next week's episode. Next week's episode already looks to be a packed one. Until then, Happy Holidays.



Transcription of the audio interview is after the jump.

Note: Just because the podcast team is on break doesn't mean the editorial staff is. ;)

We racked our brains here at Darth Hater to come up with a perfect gift to BioWare on behalf of us, the Star Wars: The Old Republic community -- a community where we debate, argue, troll, praise, post lolcats, root for Aqua 31 to be a lightsaber color, watch Caleb Hiett roflstomp our threads, etc.

And of course, all of us in the community dig through BioWare and LucasArts' marketing messages to find clues about the game that we hope will be the game we play for years.

One of the mantras of the marketing team behind Star Wars: The Old Republic has been "the four pillars" that make up an MMO: exploration, advancement, combat and story. TOR has made a splash in the MMO community with a marketing emphasis on story, however the recent change in direction, hinted at by Jake Neri, is what we should be paying attention to. With many months of narrative buzz words behind us, we may be entering a new phase in the news coming out of Austin. Could it be that we are finally approaching the second pillar?