Building The Old Republic: Interview wth Daniel Erickson

The guys and gals over at TechLand recently posted a new interview conducted with BioWare Lead Writer on Star Wars: The Old Republic. Although there’s no new game information revealed, they touch on some familiar topics from a different perspective:

Many parts of our combat system were not originally planned. With so much innovation just in designing and scripting the incredibly complex quest structures of BioWare’s single player games in an MMO environment, we had a huge amount of work on our hands. Everything we do gets held up by Creative Director James Ohlen to the “Does this look/feel like Star Wars?” light. When we put in traditional MMO combat–with two people standing in front of each other and playing unconnected animations–it failed the test hard. So James and our combat designers, especially Lead Systems Designer Damion Shubert and Associate Lead Designer Emmanuel Lusinchi, sat down to not only make Lightsaber combat look dynamic and exciting, but to make the gun classes look like they were in the movies. The answer was obvious. When you look at any big gun battle in Star Wars, there it is: cover. Implementing that answer successfully would be the work of years.

If you are a fan of Daniel or the game, it’s definitely worth a read!  Click here to read the full interview on TechLand.