James Ohlen Interview At Ten Ton Hammer [UPDATED]

Ten Ton Hammer has just dropped a brand new interview with Star Wars: The Old Republic Game Director James Ohlen. The game was done during Syndcon which took place since San Diego Comic-Con, so Ohlen was able to elaborate on some of the items revealed during that show, such as companions.

There are some tidbits in there, but one segment adds some confusion to the current stance on cross-faction communication, which had been remarked previously as being allowed in local area chat:

Ten Ton Hammer: We are also curious about the banking system. Will players be able to share items between their own characters through the bank on the same server, or even across factions so long as it’s on the same account?

James Ohlen: Currently no, you have to do it the old fashioned way through the mailbox, but only if they’re the same faction. There are multiple reasons why we don’t want the different factions to communicate with each other.

We had the big argument that this isn’t like Horde and Alliance, we all speak Galactic Standard so we should just allow it. So we actually did allow it for a little while. The argument against it was that, what happens is people start saying inappropriate things to the other side. That’s just the way it is when you’re on a different side and you gank each other, people tend to say inappropriate things.

So we thought that maybe it won’t be so bad, but then when we started doing testing with external people, and then we’d look at the chat logs and say, OK, that’s gone. And it wasn’t the swear words that were bad, let’s just say that lots of inappropriate things get said. Usually our testers are more mature, and if this is what was happening with them, imagine what will happen when we go out into the wild.

We just wanted to get rid of that, so that’s another reason why you can’t mail your incredibly dirty messages to members of the opposite faction. The unfortunate thing is that’s just human nature. Suddenly Empire players would start sending horrific messages – and I mean horrific – so that’s what we want to avoid.

Ten Ton Hammer: How does that translate to something like a PvP environment then? Is it a case where you’ll only see chat from other players of your own faction, and don’t see the other faction’s chat at all?

James Ohlen: You won’t see the other faction’s chat at all, so they can’t chat with you and you can’t chat with them.

We’re not sure how to interpret this yet, but we’ll try and get some clarification. What, dear AAJ readers, do you make of it?

[UPDATE] Georg Zoeller took to the forums today to clear up any confusion resulting from this interview with James Ohlen. In a nutshell, nothing changed:

Nothing has changed since San Diego Comic Con.

As discussed at SDCC, the decision was made to separate the general chat channels by faction. However, this decision ONLY affects the planet-wide chat channels such as “General Chat.” If you’re standing next to another player (local chat), you can talk to them regardless of what faction you’re part of. 

Click here to read his full post.

Head over to Ten Ton Hammer for the entire interview.