Jan 21, 2012

Posted by in News | 1 Comment

The Making Of Star Wars: The Old Republic – Gamasutra

Although this feature is a few weeks old now, I found it extremely interesting when I read it and haven’t seen it covered elsewhere so thought it might be of interest to the AAJ Army!

Gamasutra’s Paul Hyman sat down with a few of BioWare’s best to discuss the formation of the Austin studio and the challenges they’ve seen during the making of the game, as well as their expectations for the future.

BioWare Co-founder Dr. Greg Zeschuk remarked about BioWare’s beginnings, and should be enough inspiration for fuel any entrepreneurial fires you may have burning. It wasn’t always a sure thing:

“When we formed BioWare, we weren’t even sure we would be doing anything more than playing games in my basement,” he recalls. “It’s fair to say we’ve been more than surprised at how things have unfolded.”

Game Director James Ohlen comments about different plans going forward, depending on how successful the game is. He believes WoW-like success is a once-in-a-lifetime thing, though “it would be great”:

“While I can’t give away exact numbers, I can say that we have plans for super success in the millions of subscribers… and then we have plans for if we have a much smaller subscriber base. While it would be great to get the kind of numbers that World of Warcraft gets, we don’t have to come close to those in order to be wildly successful. We could be well below WoW and still be incredibly profitable.”

One interesting fact that some players may not realize is that the Austin studio was formed, and design documents were being written, before they even knew they were going to use the Star Wars license. Daniel Erickson had mentioned this before, and they talk about it in this piece.

Head on over to Gamasutra for the full 3-page read. If you’re interested in BioWare history, and the making of Star Wars: The Old Republic, its well worth the click!

  1. You know, I’ve always thought of Bioware as being a very good game company and never compared them to Blizzard in any way. Both companies make great games, and in wildly different ways. I believe in what both companies do, regardless of perceived success or failure. I look forward to their continued success and enjoying their games.

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