BioWare discusses future of Star Wars: The Old Republic

January 18, 2012

Late last year, BioWare’s long anticipated MMORPG, Star Wars: The Old Republic, was finally released in selected territories.

Sadly, South Africa was not one of those selected territories, but that hasn’t stopped local gamers from importing their copies or buying CD keys online. We’ve posted our review of Star Wars: The Old Republic, and found the game to be remarkably promising for a newly launched MMO.

Today Bioware released the first major content update for The Old Republic, and to celebrate, Videogamer.com conducted an interview with the game’s lead PvP designer, Gabe Amatangelo, to find out more about where the MMO is headed.

Star Wars: The Old Republic

In terms of what we can expect from today’s patch, Amatangelo confirmed a new flashpoint, Kaon Under Siege, which introduces its own story. “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 in 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,” said Armatangelo.

The patch introduces an entire new planet, and Armatangelo promises that future patches will introduce more planets, flashpoints, operations and other solo content as well as system updates.

In terms of gameplay tweaks, update 1.1 will make slight changes to PvP. The open-world PvP area, Ilum, sees some adjustments, and a new level bracket for level 50 players within warzones is being added. Armatangelo also confirmed that ranked warzones are in the pipeline.

Star Wars: The Old Republic

Armatangelo confirmed that the next content update is scheduled for March, and that regular updates will follow roughly every two months, saying: “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.”

He also confirmed that BioWare is hard at work “hammering out bugs”, and that doing so is a core focus for the developer right now. “Naturally when you have the breadth, the volume, the depth of content there’s going to be bugs,” said Armatangelo, going on to promise that “we’re going to get a major chunk of them particularly in this patch.”

When asked how BioWare has dealt with server queues, Armatangelo said that the developer has managed to get them to a “reasonable rate”, especially in comparison to other big MMO launches which have seen up to 6 hours waiting times to get online.

Star Wars: The Old Republic

So far The Old Republic has received a highly positive feedback from players and critics. It remains to be seen if the game will stand the test of time, or fade into the shadow of World of WarCraft just like pretty much every other MMORPG released in the past 10 years.