Another issue of Pro Tips is up today for your visual enjoyment. Do you think they have live puppet shows at the Sith temple? Surely the Jedi would not participate in such frivolous fun. Honestly, with The Force at the command of so many people at this period in time, I bet amusement parks are pretty god damn badass. What a time to be a kid. That stupid game where your big brother flings you around by your arms would be a hell of a lot more fun, and probably a lot less stressful on your shoulders.
Last Friday BioWare added a blog entry to their site where Live Producer Blaine Christine looks at what's involved in being a live producer. In his article he includes some quotes from the people included in the game testing program. Here's an excerpt from the article:
What sort of feedback, you say? Rather than bore you with details of the bugs that were found and the fixes that were made, we guessed that you’d rather hear about what The Old Republic is like to play, right? So we asked our Game Testers to share a few of their thoughts with you. Please note, their names have been changed to protect their NDA compliance!
“The questing experience in TOR was amazing! The voiceovers and cinematics actually make me wonder how I ever survived the 'grind' without them.” – GP
“As one of those people who didn't really care about story in an MMO, after playing TOR I can't imagine playing another MMO unless it has as much focus on story as TOR does.” – PA
“I've been waiting years and years and years for an MMORPG experience like this. The combat is incredible and never gets old. The grind is gone. I am so happy the grind is gone (so, so very happy). The stories are fantastic, well written, well acted, well animated, incredibly immersive, and the inclusion of choice takes it into territory that other MMOs have only dreamed of. Lastly, this game makes you feel like a bad***. The entire time. And I love that.” – JA
Though I'm sure that these quotes were picked because they were overwhelmingly positive (and, in one case, funny though in fairness I don't think that they've tested long enough yet to know whether there is a new definition of pain and suffering over a thousand years) and it would be interesting to hear how representative these views truly are, it's still nice to hear (and in the end the only thing that will really satisfy people like myself is playing it ourselves and thus making our own opinions).
This weeks episode of the TOROcast Samm and Musco are joined by Kimi to discuss this weeks news from BioWare, on Star Wars: The Old Republic. To be honest the news was not quite most had hoped it would be, so instead Episode of 92 is a Mailbag show.
This week’s update from Bioware is a Developer Blog from Blaine Christine, the Live Producer for Star Wars: The Old Republic. As he puts it: “I work with the development team to ensure that anything released to our fans (read – you!) meets the quality standards that are so important to any BioWare product. That… Read More
I was just finishing my mid-term exams when I had a thought. Is there school in Star Wars? Then I remembered that yes, in A New Hope, Luke wanted to go to the Academy. But what about the first, what was it, nineteen years of his life? Was he home schooled? Was he taught in… Read More
Blaine Christine takes us through what his job as the Live Producer entails, some reactions from Beta Testers and Blaine’s secret diary crush.
Living the Life of a Live Producer
This week The Old Republic’s Live Producer Blaine Christine finally reveals to us what it really is like working for Bioware.
“I’ve been on the BioWare team for three and a half years now and I’m happy to report that all of the mental images you have of us working at a world class RPG development studio are true. Yes, we have rivers of chocolate running down the hallway, yes, a live animatronic ogre lives in the basement and of course, yes, we have LARPing parties from 5PM to midnight every weeknight. (I usually dress up as Princess Amidala and practice my diplomacy skills on Daniel Erickson, who pulls off a very convincing Gungan ambassador.)”
Blaine can raise my diplomacy skill anytime.
An interesting look at what it is like working at the Bioware studio. Although I imagined more pink elephants and less ogre’s but we can’t be 100% right all the time.
He continues to explain what his job is as Live Producer. He’s responsible for the quality of the game that the lucky beta testers play. So if you have a complain to make about state of game please send all hate mail too;
Princess Amidala
Bioware
Austin, Texas
USA
I’m sure he’ll get it.
Blaine also takes some ‘randomly’ selected comments from the lucky few Beta Testers to share with the rest of the world. This is the first time we’ve heard anything out of the game testing. Enjoy
““The questing experience in TOR was amazing! The voiceovers and cinematics actually make me wonder how I ever survived the ‘grind’ without them.” – GP
“As one of those people who didn’t really care about story in an MMO, after playing TOR I can’t imagine playing another MMO unless it has as much focus on story as TOR does.” – PA
“I’ve been waiting years and years and years for an MMORPG experience like this. The combat is incredible and never gets old. The grind is gone. I am so happy the grind is gone (so, so very happy). The stories are fantastic, well written, well acted, well animated, incredibly immersive, and the inclusion of choice takes it into territory that other MMOs have only dreamed of. Lastly, this game makes you feel like a bad***. The entire time. And I love that.” – JA
“I suppose my only major complaint was that when I jumped into the sarlaac’s belly on Tatooine, I did not find a new definition of pain and suffering from being slowly digested over a thousand years. It is still early though. I’m sure they will fix that before release.” – CL
“This is the Jedi game to end all Jedi games. If you’re a gamer and you don’t throw your hands up in triumph when you get your first lightsaber, you’re not really alive. This game is, bar none, the best interactive Star Wars experience ever.” – VI”
Apart from not being able to die, horribly and slowly in the giant anus of the desert its a very positive reaction. What is very noticable is that the testers say that the grind is now gone. Now the word grind in MMO’s has had a love/hate relationship. Some love that the game is a grind and see it as challenging, whereas others see it as an annoyance to bypass to get to their goal. However, the definition of the word grind has been altered so many times of the years that many people hold different meanings for it.
For example Grind could mean to kill millions of innocent boars for one person, whereas to another grind could be repeating the same instance again to find that one item drop. Its become so personal that it has lost all meaning to the wider audience, and what only matters is YOUR definition of the word. Bioware seems to have disgused the grind very well through story, but i’m sure we’ll have many that say that story is just another grind.
To join in with the discussion head over to the official forum threat HERE.
As always please head over to the Torocast forums to join our community in discussing this Friday update and many more things. Samm, Musco, Fo, Kimi, Taln and myself can all be reached on the forums.
Today’s Friday update features a Developer Blog from Live Producer Blaine Christine. He discusses what his job entails and his role in the Star Wars: The Old Republic game testing process. He also included some quotes from various game testers.
Blaine Christine said:
I work with the development team to ensure that anything released to our fans (read you!) meets the quality standards that are so important to any BioWare product. That means any time a new build of the game makes it into our Game Testing Program, I need to ensure that any content or features that we specifically want to have tested meet the designers needs and don’t contain any major bugs.
Update: Stephen Reid explains the reason for the Developer Blog showing up this week and hints at a heroic update incoming next week leading into PAX.
This week’s blog was originally intended to be part of next Friday’s update. We ran into some unexpected issues finalizing this Friday’s originally scheduled content, and so chose to move that content out to next Friday. As a result, next week, you’ll get an update-and-a-half… and then after that, you’ll soon see the cool stuff we’ve all been hard at work on for PAX East.
Part of the reasoning for this blog was to give you a peek into some of the feedback we got from our Game Testers; on the whole, feedback has been very positive and we’re excited to see the response. We also wanted to remind everyone about our Game Testing Program, as feedback from our community so far has been extremely valuable to the development of The Old Republic.
We realize we can’t please ‘all of the people, all of the time’ but we remain committed to giving you regular updates on the development and features of The Old Republic.
More excerpts from the Developer Blog and official yellow post follows after the jump.
This week marked the release of the demo for BioWare’s upcoming Dragon Age II video game. Naturally, I downloaded it immediately, on both the Xbox 360 and on the PC, and played through it six times. One of the things I noticed is that one of your starting companions—your ‘sibling’ companion—is determined by which class you pick. We’ve been told that players can lose companions in Star Wars: The Old Republic, but would BioWare be willing to do so at the very start of the game?
The two characters in question are Champion Hawke’s siblings, Carver, a warrior, and his twin sister Bethany, a mage. The story starts—oh wait, spoilers I guess?—with Hawke and his family fleeing the destruction of Lothering, the first town overrun by the darkspawn in the events of Dragon Age: Origins. In the tutorial mission, you gain access to both of your sibling companions but one of them is not long for this world. The destined-to-die character is set to “rival” status in the friendship meter and the destined-to-live character set to “friendly” status. The survivor even gets an appearance in an intro segment before the game starts properly. So you get to run around with both of them, interact in four or five conversations with them, and then splat. An ogre scoops up your rival bodily and enthusiastically draws their attention to some interesting features of the local terra firma.
The point, I assume, is to prevent players from starting the game with access with more than one mage character. If you choose Mage as your starting class, Bethany is done for. If you choose Warrior or Rogue, say farewell to Carver. Considering that the combat has been overhauled—with d20 effectively abandoned, thank Poseidon—and that Mages are no longer vastly superior to other classes, I’m not entirely sure that this is necessary. Still, it’s nice to know that they’re being careful about it and it does raise some interesting possibilities regarding starting companions.
Starting companion choices
There are number of player decisions that could possibly be used to determine your starting companions in SWTOR. Class obviously affects your companions, but as each class in SWTOR gets it’s own narrative this doesn’t really count. None of the companions will be shared between classes, so in that sense DA2 would only have one “class” by SWTOR standards. The closest comparison would be Advanced Class selection, which isn’t decided on until about level 10. Certainly they could key companions off of AC selection, but at that point it wouldn’t be about starting companions. However, BioWare could also use the selection of certain abilities to get a sense of what AC the player would be looking to enter, and key the starting companion off of that. Similarly, if they use the “background” mechanic that appeared in the first Dragon Age, that could determine what your starting companions are like, working your starting companion’s back story into your own.
The appearance of your character could also be used to determine starting companions. While players aren’t allowed to edit the character’s appearance in the DA2 demo, it’s been revealed that both Bethany and Carver will be altered in appearance to resemble the player character. This could be taken a step further to change the species of companions, or to just select starting companions based on your species. Likewise, gender could be used to determine starting companions—as Knights of the Old Republic IIdid with the Disciple and the Handmaiden—but keying anything in an RPG off of gender tends to be asking for drama, even with character romances.
Then of course there’s the narrative method of determining your starting companions. The choice could be keyed off of early alignment shifts in the tutorial section of the game or they could make it an obvious choice. This could be a blind choice where you make a decision—”door on the right or door on the left”—without knowing the consequences, or you could make this a bald decision between two characters, such as in the first Mass Effect where players had to choose which of two companions were going to get blown up.
But enough of the how, it’s important to look at why BioWare might want to do this in SWTOR, and why they might not want to do it.
Benefits
There are few benefits of forcing a choice in starting companions. Most importantly, it establishes early that choices matter in SWTOR, a key selling point of the game. It might be deemed worthwhile to set the tone early that actions have consequences and that there’s no quick-load button in an MMO. The narrative can be better suited to the character as well, with companions being determined by species or by character background. Anything that lets BioWare improve the story would be valuable with their narrative-first approach to MMOs.
For practical purposes, it might also allow the developers to better fit the starting companion to the playstyle of the player. If a player seems be leaning toward—for example—the healing build of the Jedi Consular, it could be beneficial to make sure they start with a strong tanking companion. Not to mention this would add a little more variety to the different companions you see running around the world and provide another encouragement for players to play the same class narrative twice.
Also, while not really a “positive” so much as a lack of a negative, starting companions are probably the most acceptable to miss out on. BioWare tends to select basic classes for their starting companions according to what they expect you to need. For example, in Knights of the Old Republic you start with a basic soldier companion, Carth, and then you get Mission, a scoundrel. Along with the Jedi player character, this provides the basic three fantasy roles: mage, fighter, and rogue. You’re also likely to get similar companions later on. If you had for some reason lost Carth, you would have gotten access to Canderous not long afterward, who is basically the exact same thing except with a different alignment.
Detriments
Of course, not everything is good about this approach. It might be considered a waste of valuable development time to sacrifice a starting companion in SWTOR. Starting companions will be with you the longest and therefore have the most work dedicated to them as far as scripting and voice acting. Even if most players will have moved on to flashier companions at that point, BioWare would still need to write each companion as if the player will never use anyone else, because that’ll be true for somebody. The work isn’t reduced even if people tend to swap them out. In a single-player game it might be considered acceptable to toss that amount of content out. After all, any subsequent play-through at all would provide an opportunity to choose the other companion(s), but in SWTOR players will probably want to try different classes entirely for their extra play-throughs. I assume it will be rare for a player to actually invest in the same class twice. That means a missed companion is one whose story you’ll likely never get to explore.
You also lose some of the narrative payoff of a sacrifice in SWTOR because you’ll be seeing the deceased companion running around following other players. This will be true for any companions who die at any point in the narrative. And really, was anybody moved to tears by Carver/Belany’s noble sacrifice? We didn’t even know them, and the game told us they were our rival. We didn’t have enough time with them to give a damn.
And of course, the reason DA2 needed the sacrifice won’t be a concern in SWTOR. The companions are already tailored to your class and you’ll only have one companion at a time, so there’s no concern over “broken” combinations of roles, such as there is in the Dragon Age series with the Mage class. In fact, you could even cause imbalance by removing a starting companion. One companion might have superior abilities that players don’t realize until said companion is beating them like a dirty rug in the endgame at the side of a wiser or luckier player.
To be fair, many of these concerns are going to be valid for companions generally. Companions have more impact on your gameplay than pets in other MMO games. A pet is simply a piece of equipment you use to perform your character’s role. A companion is like having an entirely different role, different skills, and another set of armor at your disposal. As the stakes are higher, passing on or losing a companion becomes more damaging to the player.
Players will have to consider the consequences of driving off a companion that they need and being left with those who don’t work as well with their preferred build. Considering most companions in BioWare games have a default alignment, you could easily end up alienating companions that are important in combat for narrative reasons. Or players might have to make decisions between how best to utilize a companion’s time between crew skills and adventuring. Or you might feel comfortable with your choice between two companions at the time the choice is presented to you only to have subsequent patches change how your build or the companion’s behavior works, suddenly making it tragic that you don’t have that companion available. If BioWare is going to have to deal with these concerns no matter what, then they might as well put them up front. These problems won’t go away just because you move the choice to a later act of the narrative.
It’s interesting to think about the possibility of an early choice between companions and I’d love to see it, but I’m doubtful that we will. Not because it’d be problematic in the narrative or with gameplay. I think the potential benefits outweigh the detriments—or at least, the detriments that aren’t concerns for companions generally. No, the reason that I doubt we’ll see this type of decision because of limited development time, plain and simple. They have eight sets of starting companions to design and script from the start of the narrative to its conclusion. I can’t imagine them including a choice between starting companions for some classes and not others, and I definitely don’t see them doubling their workload on starting companions by giving every class a throwaway character.
But what do you think? Anyone have thoughts on starting companions? On potentially losing access to a companion? Or just generally about the Dragon Age II demo? Comment below or discuss here!
This week’s DevTracker Highlights are less about hard data and more about social aspects and interaction in Star Wars: The Old Republic. Principal Lead Combat Designer Georg Zoeller talks about the selling of vendor trash, recovery and player downtime, and the importance of social hubs. Lead Writer Daniel Erickson explains culture as it changes during the time period of The Old Republic. Check out the full posts after the break.
It is podcast time this week, and as always, we’re looking for questions from the community. If you have any Star Wars: The Old Republic or website related questions you would like to have answered on the podcast, then feel free to ask them in the comment section of this post. We also have our new voicemail line 559-9-HATER-4 (559-942-8374) for those that would like leave a question/comment in audio form.
This week’s community poll/discussion after the jump.
