Star Wars: The Old Republic Interview

Fansite TORWars has put out a brief design-centric interview with BioWare’s principal lead systems designer Damion Schubert on, you likely guessed it, Star Wars: The Old Republic, and although many of his replies fall in the “can’t talk about this yet” realm, it’s a fairly interesting piece overall. Here’s a sampling:

TORWars: Thanks so much for chatting with us today, Damion. What system are you most looking forward to watching a million players get their hands on and why?

Damion Schubert: By far, Crew Skills. Making the crafting system take advantage of the existence of your companions has been an extraordinary success, and allowed us to do some neat things under the hood. Also, we have a couple of twists that we’re pretty sure are going to surprise people in the amount of depth and extensibility they bring to crafting.

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TORWars: Will there be naming rules and will they be enforced? Will we be playing alongside (IPwnzJoo,) (Drizzt666) and (XplaguesX)?

Schubert: There will definitely be naming rules that will be automatically enforced (first letter only capitalization, no numbers, for example). Profanity will be weeded out, and our customer service staff will also be working to weed out offensive names that manage to get by our automated filter. That being said, everyone has a different idea on what constitutes a cool, stupid and/or roleplaying-appropriate name, and so we probably won’t try too far to make judgment calls beyond ‘˜offensive’. My advice for players of any MMO is, if naming standards are important to you, find or form a guild with likeminded people who share your standards.