BioWare on Star Wars: The Old Republic’s Price Tag

Brave New Gamer recently chatted up BioWare Austin’s Gordon Walton about the absurd amount of money that’s being pumped into the development of Star Wars: The Old Republic.

“We have literally thousands of roles which are voiced in our game,” said Gordon Walton, BioWare co-studio director. “which are done by many, many hundreds of voice actors, so there’s not like not one voice actor doing 2,300 people. They’re doing a few roles, and those roles tend to be pretty damn different too.

“I think that what you’re going to see is that it’ll be engaging,” he continued. “We’re not drawing men off the street to do our work. We’re drawing professional talent, kind of across the board. You’re going to see a high-quality experience that, if we hit our mark, will be compelling the entire way through, not just partially through your class story…We want to keep people engaged. We want them to actually buy in and feel the emotion that is possible with the kind of games that we build at BioWare.”

“We don’t get repetitious, and we really get the right voice behind every role because all those characters in the game have to be emotionally compelling,” commented BioWare co-general manager Gordon Walton. “And if some are good and some are not so good, it’s not going to work. Everything has to be good or great.” Talking about the game’s overall content he added, “We’ve already determined our game has more content than all the BioWare games ever made at one time…we have tons of hand-crafted content, so every class story has hundreds of hours of entertainment involved in it, which means it really is KOTOR 3 through 25.”