What BioWare has planned for Star Wars The Old Republic

Star Wars: The Old Republic’s first major content patch releases today and we speak to the game’s lead PvP designer Gabe Amatangelo about what BioWare has in store.

Q: Could you first describe some of the major features in this content update?

Gabe Amatangelo: We’re going to have a new flashpoint Kaon, Kaon Under Siege. It’s going to be a full story flashpoint. It has a whole lot of new action elements, including the first boss where your back’s up against the wall and you have a turret and you have to fight back these waves of enemies coming on. But sorry, let me take a step back. The Kaon Under Siege outbreak has occurred and you have to figure out what’s going on and try to figure out how to stop it. Because of the war between the Empire and the Republic and the recent conflict, there is kind of a power vacuum in the galaxy and there’s a bunch of different contenders trying to fill that. So something is going on on Kaon where someone is trying to fill that hole so to speak, and part of that includes an outbreak of these Rakghouls: a different strand of the Rakghoul virus. So it has a really great sort of ambience – it’s dark – like your guys are going through there with flashlights and things are creeping out at you from the corner and the shadows and you have to fight back. And the first boss fight you encounter, literally your back’s up against the wall with some explosives, a turret, and then waves of monsters coming at you.

Q: This introduces Kaon, the planet. Could you describe it?

GA: Kaon is a full metropolis-type planet, it’s like a city planet but because of the outbreak it’s kind of a post-apocalyptic type setting. The Tyon hegemony is there and there’s someone there who has risen to power and they’re doing something with these Rakghouls trying to get a super army together and fill that power vacuum.

The other thing that we do have coming is Karagga’s Palace, which is an operation. There’s going to be four new boss encounters including facing off with Karagga. Karagga is a Hutt in the Hutt cartel, now this operation starts a story arc that’s going to be going across various updates we have throughout the year and that’s going to be the start of a major story arc and a major galactic conflict with the Hutt cartel.

And you’re able to make some choices when you first face off with the Hutt cartel which will carry over with some of the future updates.

Q: Can you talk about that, in what way will it carry on?

GA: I don’t want to give away too much in terms of spoilers, but for example as Republic you decide if you want to try to engage in this big conflict. You arrive at Hutta with your flagship and you see some illegal activities going on, you see the Hutt Cartel, attacking some neutral ships, and you need to decide whether you interfere or don’t interfere.

Whether or not you destroy them or shoot them down, you just try to be diplomatic about it, or you ignore it altogether and then just go down to Karagga’s Palace and try to start a diplomatic kind of approach.

So those things carry on and they actually carry on at the end of the operation. But we’re going to use some of those decisions to see things change in the future of the game as well.

Q: Do you have plans to regularly introduce new planets in the future?

GA: Yeah, regularly we’re going to be introducing flashpoints and new operations, and various other solo content as well as system updates. As far as new planets, or if it’s part of an existing planet like Karagga’s Palace, it really just depends on where we need to take the story and where the story is going. So that’s going to be a case-by-case basis. But definitely new planets in story for sure.

Q: Can you talk about the process behind deciding what content to put in to these content patches, do you have a plan pre-launch?

GA: We start off with just the track record of MMOs and BioWare games and what appeals to the playerbase that we expect – like the BioWare playerbase, the MMO players. And then at the same time we look at metrics as to what is frequented. Like what are they playing a lot of. And I recently did a blog post, where we saw that literally half of all our players participate in Warzones on a regular basis so we’re going to be supporting more PvP features in the future ongoing.

In 1.1 we have some light PvP things. We’re going to be doing some adjustments to Ilum, which is the open world PvP area, as well as introducing a new level bracket for the level 50 players within warzones. But we also do have a lot of exciting things in the future including ranked warzones.

So it’s a combination of that sort of intuitive thing based on the past and track records as well as taking a look at metrics.

Q: The next update is scheduled for March. Do you plan on sticking to bringing out a new content patch every two months?

GA: Regular, regular updates. And a pattern similar to that, yeah!

Q: How important is it for a modern MMO to stick to a very rigid update schedule?

GA: Well we have goals and we want to deliver quality things so they need to be flexible based on what’s going on and how it’s turning out but I mean we want to get into a fairly consistent pattern with these things and I do think it’s important for MMOs. Because MMOs are a service, it’s subscription so it’s a service, and obviously there’s a suite of content in the original game, but we need to keep supporting it.

Q: BioWare is new to having to create regular content updates at this pace, how has the learning curve been?

GA: Well fortunately we have developers from all over the place. We hired in developers, like myself I’m from Mythic. So there’s a lot of people who have experience with MMOs. And there’s been a sort of meshing of the different experiences, we think it’s combined together for a really fun and unique and great product. But you know, there is a learning curve and we’re getting through it.

Q: The patch also covers bugs and tech issues obviously, but in terms of tech issues how smooth do you feel the launch went?

GA: I think if you’ve followed MMOs in the past 15 years I think it was incredibly smooth as far as the deployment. Naturally when you have the breadth, the volume, the depth of content there’s going to be bugs. And we’re hammering out a lot of bugs throughout January. It was to be expected there’s going to be bugs here and there, there’s going to be certain bugs you won’t see until you go live. Because when you have server critical mass some things rear their head. We’re going to get a major chunk of them particularly in this patch.

Q: Can you talk about how you’ve dealt with the server queues.

GA: The queues now are down to a pretty reasonable rate because we’ve been able to open new servers and spread out the population, so it depends on when you log in but we’re not talking about any six hour queues like we’ve seen in some MMOs in the past.

Q: Is there anything that didn’t make it into this update that you had planned?

GA: I wanted it all in this update! I wanted everything in this update! There’s a lot of stuff that we’re excited about doing. I’m also directly in charge of the PvP stuff, so there’s a lot of things I want to do with the PvP stuff for the PvP community like ranked warzones, we’re doing several different [kinds of] combat gameplay, just like field optimisation and we’re going to do more of those as time goes on. We’re prioritising and we’re putting in the stuff that we think we need to get in first before next obviously.

Q: What’s one thing in particular that you’d love to see from a future update personally?

GA: Personally it’s ranked warzones. I’m a pretty hardcore PvP player as well as raider. I look forward to being able to have the rank and show off the rank. New warzones. We’ve got a lot of endgame content and we’re going to extend on Karagga’s Palace and Eternity Vault are so to speak Tier 1, and after that we’re going to be expanding on Tier 2. And one thing I wanted was to make the Normal mode very accessible to casual players and based on metrics what we’re seeing is the people who get to 50, who aren’t the “I play 50 hours a week” kind are able to get through Eternity Vault. Like, the casual level 50 players. So that’s really exciting and that’s what I want to do, introduce people into that environment and kind of gameplay, and then I want a ramp for them to get into some of the more exciting challenges. The different difficulty modes do that but I also want to do that with new and exciting content. We’re going to experiment with higher tiers and challenges.