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At last, Star Wars: The Old Republic is out. Writer Alexander Freed got a break just days before the game launched to talk about the process of penning multiplayer storylines, the future of BioWare MMOs, and just why there’s no playable Wookiee race.
Q: How have you taken the feedback so far?
Alexander Freed: In beta, obviously, we had a tremendous amount of people in there. But we’ve been doing internal testing for probably a year and a half now since we first opened it up to small groups and kept growing it and growing it and feedback throughout has been very positive. There have been issues that have come up and new things we have adopted, what you would expect – we revamped the item modification system half a dozen times, that sort of thing. But the last month or two, on the road to final build, bringing in a million people for Thanksgiving weekend, it went pretty well. We stress-tested the servers and we did not have everything explode. Things have been performing…never exactly as expected but about as well as we could have reasonably hoped.
Q: Do you think you have won over the sceptics who thought it was too single-player driven?
AF: I don’t think we’re going to completely overcome that until the gates are wide open and then everyone comes in but it’s certainly something people change their minds about once they play.
Q: Do you even desire for that to happen – for people to interpret it as having a single-player focus – as the writer slaving away on these storylines?
AF: Absolutely, one of the things that makes writing for it interesting is the multiplayer element, writing the group quests where one person says one thing and another person can say something else. The multiplayer is important to the storytelling as well. When we’re writing flashpoints and operations it’s always with the idea: “Alright, here are a group of people, how is their conversation going to interplay, what makes for interesting group dynamic, what is going to split people down the middle light side/dark side in ways they wouldn’t normally?”
Yes we want the majority of the game to be soloable if people really want to do that. But even from a storytelling area the multiplayer stuff is incredibly important.
Q: You’ve obviously worked on the comics as well, how is it different writing for both forms of media?
AF: It’s very different. The comics are very much stories about defined characters and the arcs that they go through. For games writing it’s still about characters and the arcs they go through but you don’t know what those arcs are going to be necessarily and you don’t know who those characters are so creating a story that works that way and can push people in a direction they’re inclined to be pushed from a thematic and mechanical standpoint is very difficult.
Q: What is your process for doing that successfully then?
AF: I and a lot of the other writers on this tend to be very outline driven, which is necessary in this sort of environment anyway so that everyone is on the same page. So figuring out what are the high level things, where are players most likely to start, what are the fantasies they have about the class. So the Sith Warrior, it is the Darth Vader class. So even if you’re going light side it is going to be marching into battle, topping a fight, that’s primarily going to be fighting other force users. The Sith Warrior is not the guy who is going to be mowing down armies and nothing but armies. So figuring out what do people want from this experience and then how can we play with that.
Q: One of the main issues in games writing is how to funnel players through scenarios while giving them a certain amount of free will. How do you deal with that?
AF: Well there is a core storyline, so choices have to eventually weave back into… not the exact same narrative but a similar narrative that ends up dealing with a lot of the same things. You can’t make your choices branch into a completely different game. But there are ways to respect the choices while still doing that. It’s not hard to change lines of dialogue so long as people eventually come back to the same place they can be having very different experiences in those places.
Q: Is this the game that people will look back on and say “yes, it is possible to make a narrative driven MMO”?
AF: I certainly hope so, I don’t think anyone attempted it on this level before. Obviously people have made nods in the direction and taken other routes to immersion in storytelling but in terms of “we are playing through a clear character driven story”, no one has done anything like this before and I think it’s going to be a while before anyone tries this. This was a massive, massive undertaking. Even we didn’t know what we were getting into at the start. I think it will be difficult for people to attempt it the same way. I kind of hope they do – it will be interesting to see.
Q: Now that narrative MMOs do seem to function do you think BioWare will see it as a valid medium for storytelling in the future?
AF: I think so. Obviously we’re focused on The Old Republic but multiplayer is a huge part of the industry landscape and if we’re successful then it’s going to be an important part of the company.
Q: What sort of plans do you have post-launch?
AF: Right now I can’t talk in detail but lots of stuff! It’s an MMO. MMOs live and die based on content and we have people working constantly on that sort of thing and we have post-launch plans that I can’t talk about!
Q: Would you be excited by the possibility of bringing in new playable alien races, as right now you’ve stuck to rather humanoid looking races without touching on the likes of Wookiees or Sullustans?
AF: So, again I can’t speak specifically for future content. You know, the reason for our humanoid range of species, it’s a matter of relatability to a large degree. The further you get from human the more difficult it is for players to get into their mindset, the more difficult it is for all the other characters in the game to relate to them the same way. There are enormous technical obstacles, there is building all the lip synching, all the emotion into the face of the human is incredibly difficult and time consuming, doing that for something like a Wookiee – and we couldn’t half do it, we couldn’t let Wookiees be only a third as expressive as humans. At that point we’re just giving up. We’re building a game designed to do these things, we can’t do it in half measures. Same with customising appearances. Adding one dramatically different alien, we still need as much variety as we would need for humans. Between the relatability aspect and the technical aspect it seems best to focus on what Star Wars has always done best which is people who look like us.
Q: Could you talk a bit more about relatability? Obviously there is a huge fan base who love the lore and all of the races, and also you have games like Star Wars Galaxies which offered tons of races to actually play.
AF: Yeah, and there are a lot of people who are really into playing the incredibly alien stuff but I think what a lot of those people are into is the fact that they are strange and different. So if we can’t pull that off in the storytelling. If we can’t make you feel like yes, you are a Wookiee, everyone is going to look at you differently than if you were human, your entire background is going to be very different, that’s going to shape everything you do differently. If you were doing humans with Wookiee masks in the story then I don’t think it’s going to satisfy most of the people who are going to play Wookiee.
It’s not the aesthetic of it, it’s the whole package. It’s being the barbarian from some planet who is stronger and wilder than everyone else and who is only half understood. That’s what people love about Wookiees. We don’t have anything against that storytelling, it’s not a moral opposition to not having inhuman characters but in order to do it right you need to write a story around that character.
