Star Wars: The Old Republic Interviews

In a new Q&A on Ten Ton Hammer, BioWare Austin’s James Ohlen tackles several questions about the Game Update 1.2 that they recently pushed out for Star Wars: The Old Republic, as well as what’s to come in Game Update 1.3. An excerpt:

Ten Ton Hammer: Still speaking of the legacy system, can you sort of explain how it works? We kind of understand that you have certain abilities that you can unlock and there are certain playable species once you reach level 50. Is it just based upon your legacy level, like as you level, you’ll automatically level that stuff or is it kind of a selection process, like the skill tree?

James Ohlen: So, there are some things you have to unlock simply through your actions, such as leveling your guy up to level 50 with a certain species or getting to Dark Side level 5 with a class or getting a companion’s affection level to 10,000. These things will specifically unlock some of your abilities. The traits, which come in update 3, those are mostly level based so you get them as you go up in levels so you’ll get the ability to unlock some of the traits. You’ll have to spend credits on the traits, so you’ll have a cost associated with them as you unlock them. They’re kind of your global abilities that your whole family has access to, which are unlocked through your actions. You can also cheat with credits on some of them, but some of them we don’t allow you to. The class ones are the flashiest abilities, such as the ability for a Bounty Hunter to use force lightning. You’ll have to level your Sith Inquisitor to level 50 if you want to get that. You can’t cheat with the money. We’re never going to allow you to cheat with those because those are the (Look at me! I’ve leveled all 8 classes to level 50 and I have a character that can force push, use force lightning, and flamethrower and everything!) That’ll be a pretty awesome character, but you’re really going to have to work at it.

As for the traits, those are the things that are going to allow you to essentially customize your alt in the game, which I think is going to be a big appeal to a lot of players. So when you play the game again, you can customize how you want to play it. You can go, (I like my class story. I don’t want to do all the world quests because I did those the first time around, so I’m going to buy some traits that give me xp bonuses to PvP and flashpoints. I’m going to do PvP, flashpoints, and class quests.) Or perhaps they’ll want to do world quests this time around or focus on the space game, so you’ll have all these different levers you can pull using the legacy system to essentially adjust how you level up with your alts. In addition, you can buy legacy items. You have the potential for having much better items for your legacy characters as you level up. Basically, we want to make leveling up a character from 1 to 50 more fun that it was the last time around, so that each time you do it, you don’t get that feeling of repeating stuff.

The conversation continues over at Massively, where Mr. Ohlen talks about PvP, endgame content, and more:

Ohlen admits that after the game launched, BioWare changed “what we are focusing on over the course of the year based on the feedback the fans have been giving us.” He put forward the level-50 content and tools as being the greatest example:

“The number of level 50s is a lot higher than we thought it was going to be. Therefore, our group finder has become a much higher priority. It’s essentially our highest-priority feature that is not going in 1.2. If there is one feature that 1.3 will have, it will be the group finder.

“A lot of our feedback from the level 50s revolves around the dungeon finder. We have two operations, four level 50 flashpoints, and the hardmodes for all of them. We have a ton of PvE high-level content, but our metrics show that a lot of it hasn’t been consumed by level 50s. Dungeon finder is the key there. That’s one of the reasons that PvP is so popular because PvP is so much easier to get into than PvE. Once I started getting that data I was like, ‘Oh, OK.’ I knew that group finder was important. When leveling up, like we found during beta, you don’t really need the group finder, but when you reach the max level, it becomes very important.”