Star Wars: The Old Republic Interview
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The MMO Gamer: From a design standpoint, how do you handle heroic storytelling in an MMO?
In your standard online game you might walk up to a quest NPC, see a guy right behind you, and know that he's getting the exact same quest you are to do whatever the heroic thing you're doing is.
Do you have to segregate players, emulate the single player experience within an online world to make them feel as if they're the protagonist, as opposed to just one player out of hundreds of thousands?
Daniel Erickson: Well, we kind of showed that in there. When you saw the piece on Hutta, one of the things you might have noticed is that the main room where his people were that he was going in and out of, there was a visible barrier there.
We can't go into how it all works, but we didn't want to separate the player base. We definitely are not a. there have been some MMOs that are basically instanced games with common areas. We didn't want to go there.
What we wanted to do was be able to separate out people just long enough for the parts that were important for it. If you're going to go have a discussion with your dad Darth Vader, you probably want to go do that by yourself.
Or, with your party, you can bring your friends with you.
But you probably don't want a thousand people there, especially if a fight's gonna break out, because it wouldn't really make sense.
But, most of the world actually holds it together pretty seamlessly. One of the things we do that makes it much easier, which you saw in the game, when you go into conversation everything else drops out of the world.
So, when you're in there, we can do things while you're talking to the NPCs that aren't necessarily being represented to the rest of the game world.
James Ohlen: Plus, you don't have to put up with when you're talking to your Sith lord somebody coming up and doing the /grind dance right beside you. [laughing]
