Zam Interviews Jake Neri and Hall Hood

During Comic-Con last week the website Zam managed to sit down with Producer Jake Neri and Senior Writer Hall Hood to talk a bit about Star Wars: The Old Republic. And they recently posted this interview.

Here's an excerpt:

ZAM: Let's talk about some of those achievements. This is the world's first fully-voiced MMO, for example. At E3, we were told you started this project five years ago.

Jake Neri: I don't know when we actually started, but I know it's ongoing. It's something that starts with Paul and his team—they write a tremendous amount. What's the stat you just gave?

Hall Hood: (Laughs) I keep a running word count of dialogue that I've created for the game, and then I compare it against how many words of dialogue are in The Empire Strikes Back. As of this weekend, I've written enough dialogue [to fill] 23 Empire Strikes Backs! And I'm just one writer of many…

ZAM: And all of that dialogue is professionally voice-acted?

Hall Hood: It's beautifully professionally voice-acted. LucasArts is bringing in incredible talent and a real commitment to quality. The actors take our dialogue and make entire characters out of it. You listen to what people are saying and you get a sense that they have an entire history before [we] showed up.

Not a whole lot of information, but nice to read regardless. Though I must say that I'm getting increasingly fed-up with BioWare's general "we're not talking about that yet" answer to just about every question asked.

Even so, one writer already having written what amounts to 23 "Empire Strikes Back"s is quite impressive. And they're not even done yet. Just again shows how big the scope of this project really is.


[link] to the ZAM interview.