This episode covers the live Q&A we held on March 15th. It contains only the Q&A and is not a regular podcast episode. We hope you enjoy this special episode of the Darth Hater podcast. Thank you to all that attended and participated.

Feel free to give us your feedback on the Q&A and we will try to address some of it during the next podcast.

Last week, LucasArts & BioWare extended an invitation to Darth Hater for another round of Star Wars: The Old Republic hands-on game play at the beautiful Presidio campus in San Francisco. Eager to take another look, Meg and I left GDC and made our way to Lucasfilm where we were treated to playing Level 6 Troopers on Ord Mantell, and also spoke in depth with Jake Neri of LucasArts and Daniel Erickson of BioWare.

While attending GDC last week, Darth Hater was fortunate enough to be invited out to the LucasArts office in San Francisco for a hands-on demo featuring the Trooper class. After finishing our time with the game we spoke with Daniel Erickson, Star Wars: The Old Republic's lead writer about the classes, their stories, and a few of the choices players will be facing in game.

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.

Today revealed more tidbits about Star Wars: The Old Republic. First up, a new planet:

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.

Join us for a Darth Hater Live Q&A session on Monday, March 15 at 6PM PST / 9PM EST. The Q&A session will last approximately one hour, and take place on our TypeFrag-hosted Ventrilo server.


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For those who cannot attend, please note we will make the recording available within a few days.

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.

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Sean Dahlberg sent word that next week's Star Wars: The Old Republic friday update will be a Fan Friday and commented on a tweet he made earlier: