Star Wars: The Old Republic Interview

CVG recently chatted up BioWare Austin’s James Ohlen over the phone about Star Wars: The Old Republic’s successful launch, the impending release of Update 1.1: Rise of the Rakghouls, and the promised but as-of-yet unnamed Update 1.2 content patch. A snip:

So moving onto Game Update 1, Rise of the Rakghouls. Just who are the Rakghouls, and why are they rising?

The Rakghouls come from Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, the 2003 Bioware Xbox RPG. They were on the very first planet of Taris, in the under-city. Humans could catch a disease, and they’d transform into Rakghouls.

Taris makes an appearance in The Old Republic, and the Rakghoul plague has spread. Taris was destroyed in KOTOR, so no-one has stopped the spread of the disease across the planet.

Now there’s a mad scientist… well he’s not mad… but, anyway, there’s a plan for the disease that could be a big problem for the Galaxy. It’s a pretty epic story, and I don’t want to spoil it, but it does happen over two parts. We’re releasing the first part with Game Update 1, and then in March we’ll release the second part of it.

In the initial release of SWTOR we had story-heavy Flashpoints and story-light Flashpoints, and Rise of the Rakghouls is certainly one of the former. There’s a lot of story events and choices to be made.

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How else is Game Update 1 going to tweak the game in general?

We’ve put in anti-aliasing, which was something we wanted for launch but had to push out because we had our team working on performance and stability. Players with higher-end machines are really going to appreciate the graphical goodness that will come from that. Most of the game systems we’re saving for Game Update 2, which comes in March.