Star Wars: The Old Republic Developer Blog
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Category: News ArchiveHits: 723
There were a few decisions we made early on. First of all, there would be two distinct factions. This was Star Warsâ„¢, not Star Neutral Guy's Adventure. When there is a war that spans an entire galaxy, nobody can stand on the sidelines. Sure Han is unaffiliated for about six minutes of the movies, but that doesn't last long, and even if he's not with the good guys he sure doesn't like the Empire. The war affects everyone, even if they'd rather it didn't.
Second, no story content would ever cross factions. Star Wars is a story about good and evil -- it simply doesn't make sense to have Jedi and Sith doing the same quests, answering the same calls to adventure, etc. Creating one batch of content for all Players would have been half the cost, taken half the time and solved any number of organizational headaches but it was simply the wrong choice from a storytelling perspective. Unique content for both sides was the only way to go if a Player went all the way through the game playing a Jedi and then playing a Sith, he wouldn't experience even one repeated piece of story content.
Which leads me to the third decision we made: No class would exist in both factions at least at first. Each class gets its own story; no story content exists on both sides. If we did Bounty Hunters on both sides of the fence we'd have to write two different Bounty Hunter stories at the expense of a different class that was more iconic to the Republic. Was the idea of a Republic Bounty Hunter cool? Absolutely. But far less iconic than the Imperial aligned one and we had other Republic classes we wanted to get in there instead. At least for now.
