GDC 2012: Vogel & Dickinson Share Secrets Of TOR’s Development

This week at GDC in San Francisco, two BioWare developers very familiar to fans who have followed the development of the game participated in a special panel entitled “There Is Another…” The Escapist was nice enough to give us a report on this session, and we learn some pretty interesting facts in the process!

To make Star Wars: The Old Republic, the staff included 30 people in production, 75 designers, 80 engineers, 40 platform experts, 10 people to localize the game, 10 composers, 140 artists, and 280 people in quality assurance.

Author Megan Carriker goes on to summarize some of the original goals of the game:

One area where they initially failed was with scaling. There are over 240k lines of dialogue in SW:TOR. Over 4,094 characters. Over 321 actors used to create these characters and dialogue. They’re in the Guinness Book of World Records now for this gigantic effort. There’s more voiceover work in SW:TOR than all previous Bioware games combined. The end goal for the game was 20 full planets, over 90 unique areas, and more than 200 hours of gameplay per class (with eight classes).

Needless to say, it’s an interesting read and wish I could have been there for the panel in person! Head on over to The Escapist for the full read!

There Is Another...