Gamasutra Interviews James Ohlen

Gaming industry blog Gamasutra today published a new interview with Game Director James Ohlen, otherwise known as the man in charge of building Star Wars: The Old Republic!

In the piece, Ohlen talks about where the project is at, the polishing that’s being done, and what his days are like at this stage of development:

Gamasutra: When you go back to the office now, as the project director, what are you doing?

James Ohlen: There’s a lot of different things. There’s obviously the post-release stuff that I have to be working on, because all that stuff has to start much earlier in the process. I look at all the feedback that’s coming in. I play the game a lot now. So one of my jobs is to kind of sift through all the feedback I’m getting, both from the internal team and external sources, and figure out what to do with that. So I like to make sure that I’m playing the game a ton so I’m not just taking someone’s word for it that a part of a game needs fixing.

James also talks about the necessity of delegation when building an MMO as opposed to previous BioWare games:

Gamasutra: It seems like the BioWare philosophy is that everyone is on top of the game, but it seems like you have to spread yourself a lot more thin on an MMO and learn to delegate.

James Ohlen: Yeah. I have to trust my lieutenants. I have senior designers underneath me, and basically my management style now is I give my guys freedom, as long as they feel that they’re going the way I want them to go, then I don’t get involved. Even if I don’t totally agree with something. There’s no way for any one person to be able to be controlling a project this size. And the fact is, there’s elements of the projects that I’m not going to be as knowledgeable about.

Anything with James is always a good read, so head on over to Gamasutra to check out the full interview!