Eurogamer Expo 2011: Meet and Greet Q&A Highlights

Question: I got my ass kicked in hutt-ball, how are you going to stop that happening?

Daniel Erickson: We have the fire traps and the acid trap, we actually have a lot better abilities for the classes. One of the problems that's going on right now is that you guys are playing at level 14, and because we wanted to make it a demo that everyone can sit down and play, we've actually taken some of the powers off the bars as well. Like we kept you with sort of your core stuff. One of the things people kept asking is "Hey, it seems really slow when I'm running?" Sprint comes at level 15. So it's right after that. By the time you're actually up a bit, people come in at different levels and have different main abilities they're going to use for it. By the time that everybody's up running around 30, you've all got enough control abilities to balance it out. At the very beginning, that's why there's the fire stuff and the acid pit. As you guys get better at the game, you'll learn that different classes emphasize different pieces. So people tend to learn very early, if you're playing the Bounty hunter right now, he doesn't have his lasso I don't think. When he gets it, you very quickly learn to stand on one side of the acid pit, and see if anyone comes close on the other side of the acid pit. Other people are very fire central, other people are very drop pieces, some people make better escorts. Actually Gabe's team has gone through really well and defined roles for each of the classes powers and how you're supposed to play, let's be clear, a team based game.

Stephen Reid: And no one is really using guard right now, and the cover classes aren't being used to their maximum potential. There's a lot of tactics there that we haven't been seeing at this stage. There is a lot more to it than what you're seeing.

DE: What you're not going to see, is places that are not team-based things. Like when you're on Alderaan, when you're on the Void Star, which are actually more objective based, or when you're out in the open PvP wastes, you're not just going to see acid everywhere.

DE: The question was "How are we going to stop specific classes getting cornered into specific roles," and actually what we've seen is that's not really a problem because things are so flexible. Nobody cares what your class is actually. People do not advertise for an "Inquisitor Shadow." People say "I need a tank." So what we actually see a lot is - and we're actually - we can't talk about all of this. We're doing more things to make your role more visible to other players, because that's actually what people are looking for. They don't care if you're an Inquisitor tank, or a Juggernaut tank, or you're playing a Bounty Hunter tank. They care about getting a tank, so because you've got the different pieces, you've actually got a lot more flexibility to play the story you want, and then pick the type of player you want to be.

Question about guilds.

DE: Guild functionality, obviously creating guilds, correcting guilds, all that stuff, the stuff that's basically in the phase 2, not for the online stuff, which Stephen can talk about, but with the end game stuff, the stuff that did not make the cut for launch, is basically rankings, guild banks, all of that stuff. It is the stuff that's sitting at the highest priority post launch. So expect to see it in like, basically, the quickest we can get that in the update. Communities is massively important, and it's massively important, to be completely frank, for people making subscription decisions, right? Like, this is number one is all of the things that are going to allow people to keep their friends in, get their friends interested, get all your guild stuff together, and yeah, all of that is our top stuff.

Question about species.

DE: There are, uh, oh, the species questions...there are not any races to be announced, that would be super funny. We have people from the Caucus Mountains. There are no more species that are going to be announced before the release, and we will not see, we talked about this before, we're not going to see any of the super crazy ones like, oh, the (?), I want to be an Ithorian, and relate to people in squeaky two-mouth talk, uh, and have nobody ever notice that I'm an Ithorian. There's a reason, and I know people don't like the response that comes, but it is the design decision that was made. We're not a sandbox game. We are telling a Star Wars cinematic story, and there has not been a freak race lead character of any major Star Wars product in history. Not one comic book series, not one book series, and there's a reason, you cannot--I'm not going to say you, there's always the guy like "I can! I know Trandoshan's in my heart!"--but, people cannot relate and understand those species. Star Wars as a fictional piece is the journey of us, being a human perspective, going out into the unknown and meeting crazy, freaky things. So we're going to get all kinds of awesome, freaky aliens to fight, to talk to, to hang out with, to have as companion characters, but if, remember we said is if we ever do actual, like, "I'm going to be a wookiee, I'm going to be a droid, I'm going to be an Ithorian," it will be a class, so we can do the story right. You'll learn what it is like to be that thing. We don't want to just come out and say, "Hey, we just slapped--," we don't want you to be a human in an Ithorian suit.

SR: Unless that's some weird plot line.

DE: That may be an Agent plot line.

SR: Another question please.

Question about Facebook/Twitter integration.

SR: That's been looked at. It's not going to happen for launch. I'm sorry, the question was, if anyone didn't hear it, "Are we going to link it to things like Facebook, Twitter, and that sort of thing." It's really being looked at very, very closely, as are things like mobile apps, and that sort of thing. Anything that connects outside of the game to inside of the game. But it's probably not going to be a launch feature.

DE: If you tweet to Stephen about what you're doing in game, he will retweet it out for you. So, uh..

SR: It's a manual retweet service. Now, I would actually say, me personally, I will fight with all of my heart to avoid us doing automatic tweeting based on achievements in the game.

DE: Or the...how to make everybody stop following you on Twitter.

SR: Yep. I did exactly that when everybody started playing a game that shipped last year.

Q: What about surnames?

SR: There's a very good reason we haven't discussed surnames yet, and that will be revealed before ship.

DE: Or not. Those are the only two possibilities.

SR: It's one or the other. I think it'll be revealed before ship. I'm hopeful.

Q: Will there be achievements in the game?

SR: There will not be achievements in game at ship, correct?

DE: Not correct.

SR: Not correct?!?

DE: Not correct. Achievements have made ship in fact. They're not going to be the achievements, the crazy achievements that you have to place everywhere, that are like, "Hey if you drink 6 beers and fart in a cantina," those are not going the achievements to go in. Version 1 of the achievement system which go in, which is actually doing big, heroic stuff, because there's a ton of great optional content in The Old Republic, like, "Hey, I went to every world and kicked the world boss's ass." Those kinds of achievements. That's going to be the level one system. People need reasons to go back to planets and run around and do that other stuff, so that will come second. The first system is, "Hey, here's my bragging rights, here's the bad ass stuff I did in-game."

SR: And you thought you weren't going to get any other good news today. Awesome. I didn't even know that was happening.

Q: Is there a Stephen Reid achievement?

SR: What would that be? Get banned by me on the forums. Achievement unlocked.

Q: Question about PvP game types

SR: We have three warzones at ship. Huttball and Alderaan you've seen, Void Star is the other one. Void Star we announced in this room.

DE: A long time ago. This is one of the big ones that testing came through. So we announced the Void Star and people have actually asked me, "What happened to the Void Star?" We announced the Void Star, which was our assault map, so you go back and forth doing a boarding action game. It actually had a lot of problems in its first incarnation. It was fun, but people didn't understand the basics of it. Gabe's team pulled it. They said they didn't even want testing on it. This is bad. They've completely redone the entire game and it's come back out, so Void Star is actually looking fantastic. We'll have a new one to get in front of people.

SR: I'm pretty confident you'll see Void Star relatively soon. Open world pvp is available of course, with objectives that is, and just find a guy, and hit him in the head. That kind of pvp as well.

Q: Do you have something to share for people here in the EU that they can hear first?

SR: How about a release date? That was pretty good, right? We're opening a customer service center in Ireland. You can apply at bioware.com/careers. And actually we have someone who is a new BioWare employee as of like next month. Something European. I'm going to tell you the whole sordid tale of the European testing thing, and Chris will cry with me as we relay this story. So everybody here probably knows this, right? We were like, "European testing is coming really soon. We're about to open up European game testing where you invite a whole big wave of people." Remember this? It was like two days away. It was two days away. And that was the week of the first game testing weekend. And we were not going to invite a lot of people but we were going to invite a significant number. And then the invite system broke. Which was really embarrassing because it's the first time it broke in a year and a half of game testing. So when that happened all we were doing was scrambling to fix the invite system so we could invite the number of people we needed for the testing weekend. And at that point there was just no way we could invite anyone from Europe. And then immediately following that we realized that yes this new build was coming down. And we decided that we weren't going to go with it because it was a huge download and we were concerned we wouldn't get that many people in. Now I understand that people, particularly those who live in Scandinavian countries, who have light speed internet who can apparently download 27 gigs in five minutes. Most people are not capable of downloading that fast. So we made that decision. I apologize. We shouldn't have gone out and promised that. And that's the reason why I am reticent about talking about when European testing is going to start. I'm not going to make the same mistake twice. And then when I say, "It's coming as soon as possible," that means the first opportunity I have to put people in I will be putting Europeans into testing. In fact, as you can tell, we took five hundred odd names today. So we're taking them in as fast as we can. Will we invite people in this room? If you weren't given a little ticket today from me, if you weren't at the keynote session, assuming you stay around, because you're going to have to stay around so we can get your name and everything else, we'll put everybody who's here tonight in testing.

DE: Stephen Reid, ladies and gentlemen, knows how to work a crowd.

SR: And it will really suck for the people who have already left. I'm serious, yeah, we'll do that. It may take a couple of weeks. There you go, that's a European question, Dover. Thanks for that.

Q: When are we going to find out which crafting skill goes with which gathering skill?

DE: A lot of them are really obvious. Like biochem and bioengineering. Its something we could pretty easily address. Make them tell you on the boards, its not really a big secret.

Q: Are you working on systems for replaying of the same class?

DE: You can already replay the same class and make different decisions. Every class has as much twists and turns and as much stuff in it as any BioWare game that came before it.

Q: Character limit per server?

DE: Eight, there will also be a full character cap, but I'm not sure what it is.

Q: Are servers faction locked?

DE: Not right now.

Q: Is there a solo world.

DE: There is a world to do end-game solo quests, but there is not a solo instanced planet at the moment.

Q: Are individual spaceships customizable?

SR: It is a potential future feature.

DE: Ships are customizable in all of the accessories and all that stuff. You can get new shields, new weapons, all that stuff. Cosmetics customization is not in for launch. No interior customization in launch. No guild ships at launch. We'll have to see in the future. The interesting thing about guild capital ships is it actually argues against its own reasoning. Which is, "Hey, we're guilds and we love social space. Give us some social space." Let's put all the guilds in their own ships, and now there's nobody on the planets. Until we sort of figure out a way around that and have a whole lot more time.

SR: Well the other thing about a feature like that is it doesn't take more than a five minute conversation to start coming up with all these other cool things you want do to. Like, "I want to dock my capital ship and do a boarding action against another guild!" This is not related to TOR, but I worked on a game called City of Villains. And the plan in the City of Villains expansion pack was that you would be able to make your own base and then you were going to be able to raid another person's base. That was on the back of the box. It was never in the game. Even today as far as I am aware. So that's the kind of stuff that we don't want to start promising or even suggesting. Because if we can never put it together then it's kind of sad.

DE: We still like the idea. When we look up we do not see any guild capital ships on the horizon.

SR: Starships are your personal housing.

Q: Will we have 3-D, free-form, space combat?

DE: Usually that one is the always same for me. If that is the thing that is what people want most after launch... I can't imagine we'd line up and say no. Once we're live, it's the fans. And not just the loudest fans, we have metrics, we can tell what you're doing.

Q: Now that released date is announced, how does the team feel about it?

SR: I don't know, it doesn't feel real.

DE: I was really, really excited to be here for it... It's going to be nicer to watch it go green.

SR: Its nice to not have to answer the same question a billion different ways every single day.

Q: Can you have a Twi'lek dancer in your starship?

DE: No, but if you have the CE, you can have a holo of a Twi'lek dancer in your starship.

Q: Faction change?

DE: NO.

Q: Custom pvp matches?

SR: Not at ship. I know we want to allow more features for more competitive PvP, but that's post-launch.

DE: The question was about European servers.

SR: I'm going to tell you where the European servers are, but you're not allowed to freak out. The European servers are going to be located in Ireland, in Dublin.

DE: Don't tell them the address, they'll go now. Mission impossible.

SR: And here's the reason you're not allowed to freak out. Ireland, as a country, is upgrading its internet infrastructure for our game. Which is a big damn deal, right? I had a conversation with the guy who's doing the server build a few months ago. They were talking about the fact that if you look at the gap in time between when we were guessing to launch and then when we were starting to do our servers, because you're obviously locking down the server hardware and what you need to buy and everything else. The time between that point and launch is so small that we are ramping up and buying hardware faster than any tech project ever. Faster than Google. Faster than Facebook. And this is what we're hearing from the server guys who are working on it, they're like, "This is unprecedented scaling you're talking about." So when you combine that and you go to the Irish government or whoever it is who runs internet in Ireland, and you say, "Hey, look at the bandwidth requirements of our game." And they're like, "Uhm, we might need to get something bigger than a T1 line." So they are literally upgrading the internet infrastructure of the country itself. Which I think is damn cool. And then the US servers are going to be on east coast and west coast. So it doesn't really matter where. Any major metropolitan city in that case is going to be fine.