New SWG Interview from SOE Game Day

[Guest DarthMaulUK]

How They Make Star Wars Galaxies

Published by Michael May 14th, 2007 in SWG, SOE

At the SOE Gamer’s Day event in LA the week before last, I spoke with a couple of fascinating people. Getting to nerd it up with Scott Hartsman about the class balance of Inquisitors may be the most fun I’ve yet had covering a games media event.

 

John Blakely, head of the SOE-Austin development house, was onhand at the event and a nice enough guy to put up with my nattering questions about Star Wars Galaxies. It was, of course, all we had to talk about … he staunchly withstood the temptation to talk about DC Online. (Curse your Will Save, Blakely!)

 

Here are my notes from our talk, which I (for reasons I can’t comprehend) didn’t record:

 

The Galaxies team has been stripped down to just about 20 people. Their aim is to be agile, flexible, and focused. IE: The whole group turns on a single project, attacks it, succeeds, and then moves on to something new as soon as they can.

 

The folks that are there now are dedicated and passionate. They’ve learned a lot of lessons from the last two years, and all they want to do now is shut up and make the game.

 

Despite my best efforts I couldn’t get any hints about what Chapter 7 will be about. John said that what they like to do is take some time every few months to do some ‘bug squashing’. Once Chapter 6 is stable on the live servers, they’re going to make some time to get on their list of outstanding problems. They essentially take the list of known issues, prioritize them (with input from the community), and then knock em off starting at the top and working down.

We spent a goodly amount of time talking about the company’s relationship with LucasArts. He was reluctant to place blame with their group, but he did admit that SOE and the house that Skywalker built have occasionally had rough patches. His statement was that, if you look at the project’s history it’s possible to see where there were problems based on how the game was doing. Problems in SWG probably equated to problems between SOE and LucasArts.

 

Mr. Blakely took pains to note that, while they have had problems in the past the relationship between the two companies is probably stronger than it has been in over a year. He also shared a bit about their process. Every year SOE-Austin meets with the folks at LucasArts to decide goals for the coming year. The tacke the queue of ideas they’ve built up over the previous 12 months, and use feedback from the community via boards, IMs, conversations, and player events to prioritize what needs to be done first.

 

This year’s goals are exactly what has been said in public: no expansion this year, just lots of free content, making the game great for the players.

Now that the profession expertise systems are all in place, they can start turning their attention to more ‘pure fun’ additions. He said to expect a lot more new content into the summer and fall.

 

The one thing I could wrestle out of him is that … eventually … they are going to be expanding the Legacy quest series. They’d love to just be rolling out additions to the quest line all the time, but one quest is a not inconsiderable amount of effort.

 

The problem is one of time. We talked at some length about the problems facing designers the simple act of adding a quest to the game. SWG was not designed to have quests added on a regular basis; SWG’s sandbox concept when the game launched is still working against them. As a result, the tools they’re using (to this day) are awkward and clumsy when you consider the amount of information they’d like to add for a given quest. It’s something they’re working on.

 

When they work on systems in the future, they’re going to get a ‘big slice of the pie’ as they’ve done with the new version of creature handling going in with Chapter 6. If they spend time working on new systems, they essentially want as many players as possible to have access to those systems. Mr. Blakely didn’t rule out the possibility of more expertise systems, like creature handling, in the future.

 

Thanks again to Mr. John Blakely for his time at what was certainly a busy event.

[Xirion]

nice read

[BaronJuJu]

"Mr. Blakely didn’t rule out the possibility of more expertise systems, like creature handling, in the future. "

 

Hmmm, intruiging. Droid Commander maybe? What other expertise could be added?