Star Wars: The Old Republic Interview

Ten Ton Hammer brings us a short interview that they conducted with Star Wars: The Old Republic creative director James Ohlen during a private meeting at this year’s E3. Starships, instanced content, class ratios, and a couple of other topics are addressed:

TTH: What kind of thought goes into creating encounters? We did get to see the first revealed group footage. We saw people playing as a group live here at the demo. We got me was that every class in that team had a specific role and they were playing it well. What kind of thought do you have to put into designing these kinds of encounters?

James: There’s a lot of work that goes into designing all of our encounters. We have a huge design team and we first had to figure out what each class’ role was going to be in the game, and we had to balance that. We also had the fact that we have advanced classes and when you choose an advanced class, which can change your class’ role. Then the designers who were responsible for spawning the game were putting encounters in, they had to make sure that when spawning the game, they had to take in multiple factors into account. How you spawn the game differs on what you’re spawning for. If you’re spawning in a public area where anybody could play in at any time, you have to spawn in a particular way. It needs to be soloable, but at the same time, there has to be an advantage for a group to go through that. We also have group only content, which is content that if you’re trying to do it solo, you’re going to get your butt kicked. That’s to encourage people to link up to see content that they wouldn’t be able to see otherwise.

In the terms of boss monster fights, our big huge fights at the end of some our flashpoints, those we’ve put a lot of thought and effort into to make sure that it’s balanced, so we encourage players. The first few times, they’re going to die, but they’re going to have to figure out, (how do we beat this? Is our party working together making sure that we’re going to win? We have to make sure that the bounty hunter plays his role, that the sith warrior plays his role.)