Biographies and Smuggler's Vanguard

For a long time people have speculated what other HoloNet tabs there might be, and today BioWare revealed one of them: Biographies. This gives us a bit of background information about a couple of the NPCs in the game, but more on that in a moment.

The first update today is the release of a short story by Robert Chestney named "Smuggler's Vanguard", giving a closer look at one of the characters from the Timeline. Here's the official news:

Get a closer look at one of the most popular characters from the Star Wars™: The Old Republic™ Timeline series. Hylo Visz, the daring Mirialan pilot who broke the Mandalorian Blockade, is the protagonist in a new short story published on StarWars.com. Written by BioWare’s Robert Chestney, ‘Smuggler’s Vanguard’ tells a story from Hylo’s past, when she was contracting on a high profile job for the Hutt crime cartel. Caught between two of the Hutts’ most brutish goons and a suspicious Corellian corporation, Hylo is forced to rely on her instincts and her luck to squirm out of a difficult situation and find a way to profit against the odds.

Check out ‘Smuggler’s Vanguard’ on StarWars.com now!

And as said the other update reveals a new section to the HoloNet and with it some background information on three characters: the imperial Grand Moff Kilran, the independent Nem'ro the Hutt, and the republic Grand Master Satele Shan. Here is the official news:

Curious about some of the characters you’ve seen in Threat of Peace™, the Developer Walkthrough, or the “Deceived” cinematic trailer? Now you can find out all about them!

We are thrilled to introduce a new expansion to our HoloNet archives: Biographies! Now you can view profiles of several of the galaxy’s most notable figures. Each entry highlights someone you may meet, travel with, or fight alongside or against as you help determine the future of the galaxy in Star Wars™: The Old Republic™!

Just like the Classes, Planets, and Timelines sections, the Biographies archives will be expanded regularly, so check back often to make sure you get the latest updates!

To commemorate the release of all this background story information I'm adding two new labels. One for blog posts reporting on official story content: story. And another for these new biographies: npcs ([UPDATE] changed label name so that it can also include news post for "inhabitants"). The intention is that the first one will contain such things as official short stories and the second one contains any new biographies they post; based on the HoloNet layout they've got room for a lot of them.

It's a bit of a gamble as there might not be any more short stories, or the number of biographies might remain very limited, but if that turns out to be the case then I'll just edit this post and roll them up into some other label.

For now, enjoy the background information.

oh, and I'm off on vacation next week (for an extended Easter vacation), so it'll take a while to report on next Friday's update, and any other news popping up next week.

This is not the Game Tester Login page that you are looking for...

Sean Dahlberg posted on the forum in regards to the "hidden launch website", confirming that it is indeed a game tester login page:

You have indeed found the login portal for Game Testing. That said, this is not a new page and we are not ready to make any additional announcements about our Game Testing Program. When we are ready, we will make sure The Old Republic Community is the first to know!

If you haven’t signed up yet to be a tester or wish to learn more, access our Game Testing Portal.

And a little later he posted some more answers:

A couple of quick answers:

• Yes, it is indeed called the Game Testing Program and not anything else. As when we originally announced sign-ups, Game testing for Star Wars: The Old Republic will be rolled out in several phases over an extended period of time. These test phases will begin with smaller, tightly focused test groups, and later tests will expand.
• We thought about waiting until it hit 2,000 posts but figured it was more important to get the information to you sooner than wait.
• Good insight, Skyewauker.
• In regards to swtor.bioware.com, just know that we'll always keep the TOR Community updated here
• I would have posted the announcement sooner but I spent too much time working on this (not really).

The site has probably been around for a while, maybe as they were working on setting up the portal in advance, maybe for running demos at conferences and for publishers and such, or maybe for internal testing. Either way it'll likely be what's going to be used by beta testers and such as well. But with the launch at least a year away it'll probably take a while before they open it up to the first players.

Rumor: Hidden Launch Website

No post for over a week and then suddenly three in a few hours; go figure.

Darth Hater are reporting that industrious forum goers have uncovered an swtor subsite. Here's their news:

Two ingenious forum goers by the names of Ianril and Zechio discovered a little IP that then became launch.swtor.com. Originally Ianril discovered an IP address 159.153.229.171 that appeared to come from EA after doing a ARIN search. After a couple minutes of investigating Zechio found that the security certificate referenced launch.swtor.com as an address.

At this point the community is trying to figure out what this all means. A few members of the community reported seeing this after logging in:


This along with the quotes from the interviews with the dev team, here at Darth Hater, seem to suggest that testing might be starting.

Intriguing.

Random Dev Quotes

Over the last week or so a number of developer quotes have popped up across the Internet as well. They're all pretty minor things on their own, so I thought I'd collect them together in one post.

Kotaku notes that BioWare's general manager Ray Muzyka made some comments about the pricing plan for Star Wars: The Old Republic. According to them he said that the game's pricing plan will "be more of the traditional business model with maybe some twists as well."

He didn't specify what "twists" those might be, but he did note the following:

With Star Wars: The Old Republic, we haven't announced anything yet. But what we're striving to do, to clarify what I said earlier, is to make sure the fans and the audience that we're trying to reach feel they are getting something they understand and feel that it is a good value for their money — and feel that there is a way they actually want to engage in the experience, both in how they play it and how they pay for it. That's our high-level goal.

Ars Technica had a discussion with lead writer Daniel Erickson in which he gives some views on how the Sith might see themselves. As he notes it is, after all, unlikely that they'd see themselves as evil. There's quite a few good quotes through the link (and the article fairly short) so I recommend reading it. Here's one of those quotes:

You're training children to deal with this power, and then demanding them to be incorruptible, and holding them to a standard that we don't even ask from any of our own societies. We looked at these issues and said, 'We could come up with an entire thematic run with this.

Over on the official forums he explains even further:

An interesting thread. I always like to see what responses the philosophical discussions provoke. Hopefully people noticed that there were no quotes from me saying the Sith were good--even the interviewer ended on it being an excuse to unleash one’s hate. It was a clever title masking a more complex truth, which is that morality is shaped by culture and people. Genocide, slavery, human sacrifice and more horrific wars against people who have different beliefs than can be easily counted have all been part of the human experience and to my knowledge not one culture has ever stood up and said “We’re doing this because we’re terrible people.”

If you were raised in a culture that believed that an all-knowing god chose one man to rule over all others and passed that right through their bloodline, it would not seem odd, evil or tyrannical to you that there was, in fact, a king who fulfilled that role. Similarly if you were raised to think an entire group of people were marked as superior by their abilities (the Force in the case of the Empire) as to be above the law in the same way it would seem as natural as the aristocracy did for thousands of years of human history. If you were one of those privileged people and were taught to embrace your most base emotions, to take whatever you could grab by strength of arms or scheme and wit, that it was your ambition and lack of restraint that brought you freedom and purity…

You see where I’m going with this. It’s important to realize that while no amount of a dark side embracing Sith justifying himself to us (if for some reason you could get one to deign to do so) would convince us that he was a good person (he is after all pro-hate and pro-murder along with being anti-restraint), he does not see himself through our filter or he could not be who he is. Nor does the Empire as a whole see itself as the Republic sees it. If it did any stories told from that side would lack depth or compelling drama. “So, Darth Evil, it seems like we’re in the wrong here…” “Yes, Admiral. We are. We’re very bad people. My mother is extremely disappointed in me.”

Storytelling is about conflict and the conflict between ideologies and cultural perspective gives us some of the richest material to work from.

According to VG247 producer Jake Neri told them that they have no idea just how large the MMO could get. he said this as part of a larger interview; here's the bit about the game's size:

As far as planets in the game go, are more going to be added to the MMO map with more expansions, or chapters? Going back to the lore, with so much there to play with, just how big do you see the game getting?

Neri: I have no idea. I mean, I guess it really depends. We would love to imagine this game lasting for years and years and years, so I don’t know how big it could get. I know that at launch we plan on providing a substantial amount of content; stories, planets, adventures, zones, zones that are ripe for conflict and others that are safer for low level players. I am not exactly sure where we will net out by the time the history of the game is done, but we do have to continue to support new exploration and new planets.

One of the things that you hit on is the fact that there is all this rich lore and so there’s endless possibilities of what we can do, and endless planets that we can go to. I think it’s safe to say that we would love to continue tapping into that as time goes on. So, I don’t know if that gives you the number that you are looking for or not, but philosophically you’re right. We want to be exploring either the current stuff that’s going on or the extended universe stuff that’s going on. We want to be in the mix with all that and pull the really cool stuff out and give people what they want and expect from a Star Wars game.

And finally over on the official forums Damion Schubert made a comment about experience gain in groups:

We increase the XP pool for each group member in it, and then divide that pool. I don't have the number in front of me, but its something we'll be tweaking as we play anyway.

The general gist is that we want to reward grouping, but not so much that grouping is the only way to play the game (something that is very easy to do if you tilt the table too much, and then balance the levelling curve to that rate gain). That being said, as some have mentioned, grouping with another person increases your killing efficiency and reduces your risk of death substantially, to the degree that being in a group of two is vastly more efficient than 2X killing efficiency (this is like most MMOs). Still, you want to reward grouping enough to help ensure that you overcome the friction associated with grouping (finding groupmates, getting to them, tolerating idiots, etc).

Other notes:

• Yes, we have anti-twink measures. Yes, high level players get shut out if they kill creatures too far below them. This is a fine line - you want to let high level players help their new friends, but you really don't want high level players hunting in low level areas, as that can be disruptive to the lowbies.
• Yes, compared to other MMOs, we give you more XP for completing quests and less for killing creatures. These numbers will also likely be continually tweaked.
• Yes, harder things give more experience.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Xavior Group of 5 level 10's killing a level 10 mob: 100 xp each Group of 3 level 10's killing a level 10 mob: 100 xp each Solo person of level 10 killing a level 10 mob: 100 xp no one gets screwed, no one is forced to group and everyone is happy.

Balancing it's not that easy. Instead, you need to look at XP gain per hour. A group of 3 can kill (let's say) 5X the creatures than a solo player can in an hour, which means that if you give everyone the full XP value, grouping is 5X(!) more efficient than soloing. If you balance the curve to that, the solo player gets screwed.

In our curve, we push that towards being closer to 2-3X. Still a significant advantage, but the grouper has to deal with all of the inertia of forming a group.

And that's it for now.

GDC Fan Friday

I guess I'd better post this before it's Friday again. But yes, I'm terribly late on this one.

Last Friday was a Fan Friday in which the developers also put up a list of GDC-related posts for The Old Republic around the web. But I'll get to that.

First there is the section of "Community Creations". Let me quote the original post:

Fan Art

Community member Hazaz created some beautifully detailed character sketches that can be seen in the Hazaz Art thread on the forums. You can see the finished art along with some line drawings that help illustrate the creation process. Great job, Hazaz!

Daennika took a shine to the Sith characters shown in the “Deceived” cinematic trailer, and was inspired by The Old Republic concept art for costume design in his recent Sith Warrior creations. He is a completely self-taught, casual artist with no textbook background, and only started digital art about four years ago. There are multiple images that depict the Sith “warrior”, or cool dudes from the trailer forum thread. Very cool style!

Fan Fiction

Community member terminalpleasure posted a captivating piece of Fan Fiction titled “An Unexceptional Jedi.” All six chapters of this gripping narrative are sure to keep you entertained from start to finish!

Sith Guide

Have you watched the Star Wars™ movies and played the games, but still find yourself wondering about certain aspects of the Star Wars™ ethos? Danik Kreldin, a member of The Old Republic community, created a Short History of the Sith for Newbies guide that will help you better understand everything there is to know about the Sith. If you’re leaning more towards the dark side, this information is sure to bring you up to date before diving into a Sith class. And if you’re a member of the Republic forces, get to know your enemy by reading this guide. Fantastic work, Danik Kreldin!

Next up is the "Developer Corner" in which they show us some work-in-progress stuff for the game. There's some animations showing Sith (Inquisitor) Lightning, but I'm not going to embed the video since it plays automatically and makes noise. You can watch it at the original post. But there's also some images of customization for female faces, showing a variety of hairstyles and makeup and such:

(Embed code doesn't seem to be working; find it instead at the original post.)

They also added a couple of new forum avaters:


As said they also posted a bunch of links to articles coming out of GDC, but I covered pretty much all of them already in my previous post. In fact, the only new link is the one to Giant Bomb (and they're still missing the Gamespot and The Escapist links).

Oh, and they also mentioned that they'll be at E3 again this year, which shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone.

And that's it. The most exiting thing was definitely the shots of the character customization.

GDC 2010

I'm not entirely sure what happened. All that I can think of is that when Darth Hater updated their website it broke my rss feeds to them (both on this site and in my Google Reader). So I pretty much missed all their updates over the weekend and they had a lot of them. Hopefully the feeds should be fixed now though.

And they weren't the only ones. With GDC last week, even though Star Wars: The Old Republic had no specific presence, there were a number of interviews and details popping up all over the web. In particular from the off-site event that LucasArts held where the press got some hands-on time with a Trooper.

Over on the official forums Sean Dahlberg made a post listing a lot of them (some of which I already reported on before):

While there were no panels this year specifically related to The Old Republic during Game Developers Conference (GDC) 2010, there are a few panels that consisted of BioWare developers.

There was also an off-site event specifically for The Old Republic that various press and fan sites were invited to. None of this information will show up till early next week so keep your eyes peeled for that.

We will be updating the list in this post as more articles and threads appear and we plan on having a wrap-up article next Friday.

• GDC 2010: Gordon Walton (SW:TOR Dev) on MMO Retention
• Hands on [Eurogamer]
• GDC10: Hands-on with Star Wars: The Old Republic [Massively]
• LucasArts' Jake Neri on BioWare's James Ohlen, Endgame & Intertwining Pillars [Darth Hater]
• Interview: Story In-Depth With Daniel Erickson [Darth Hater]
• GDC: Trooper Hands-On & TOR Game Play Impressions [Darth Hater]
• STAR WARS: The Old Republic Preview [1Up]
• GDC: Facial Animation & More Aliens! Session Breakdown
• Star Wars: The Old Republic: GDC 2010: Hands On With The Trooper [MMORPG]
• Trooping Through The Oblivious Enemies of The Old Republic [Kotaku]
• GDC 2010: Video Preview of SW:TOR's Troopers [ZAM]
• GDC 2010: Hands-On with SW:TOR's Trooper Class [ZAM]
• Star Wars: The Old Republic PC Games Interview - Daniel Erickson Interview [IGN]
• Star Wars: The Old Republic Hands On [IGN]
• Preview: Star Wars: The Old Republic MMO [G4]
• Hands-on: Star Wars: The Old Republic's Trooper class [Joystiq]
• Shawn Schuster from Massively dishes the dirt on his secret trip to Lucas Arts to see Star Wars: The Old Republic! [GameBreakr]
• Set Blasters to Question: A Star Wars: The Old Republic Interview [GameSpy]
• GDC 10: Grabbing a bomb in Star Wars: The Old Republic [Destructoid]
• Star Wars: The Old Republic [GameDaily]
• We Get A Deep Look Into Ranged Combat [GameInformer]
• Star Wars: The Old Republic: GDC 2010 Jake Neri Interview [MMORPG]

Check out Star Wars: The Old Republic on X-Play as Adam Sessler covers GDC2010, Wednesday, March 17th @ 6:30 PM ET

He didn't get everything yet though; here's a couple more he missed so far:

• Star Wars: The Old Republic Roundtable [GameSpy]
• Star Wars: The Old Republic Updated Hands-On - The Republic Trooper [GameSpot]
• Hands On: Star Wars: The Old Republic [The Escapist]
• What Are They Hiding at Lucasarts? [The Escapist]

Since Sean posted the X-Play video has also been released:


As for a few other things; IndustryGamers reports that, according to one analyst, EA are looking to get 2 million subscribers when Star Wars: The Old Republic releases next year:

Between major successes like Dragon Age and Mass Effect 2, BioWare has quickly become one of the most important studios throughout all of Electronic Arts since the publisher acquired the RPG specialists. EA has already indicated that the upcoming Star Wars: The Old Republic MMO is the "largest ever development project, period, in the history of the company,” and it's quite clear that expectations for this title are huge.

Sterne Agee analyst Arvind Bhatia recently came away from a meeting with EA and reported that although "earnings are somewhat depressed due to ongoing expenses of the Star Wars MMO, management has high hopes for this and believes 2M+ subs is possible." He added that a little over 1 million subscribers is needed to reach the break-even point, but the ultimate goal is to get several million subscribers.

According to GamerVision Star Wars: The Old Republic isn't the only Star Wars MMO in development. They say that "trusted sources" confirm that Sony Online Entertainment is working on a Clone Wars MMO. This is not the first time that we've heard this rumor. Here's what they had to say on it:

Thought EA's The Old Republic was the only Star Wars MMORPG in development? Think again. Trusted Gamervision sources have confirmed that there is a second MMO in development by Sony Online Entertainment, the creators of once awesome, now less-than-awesome Star Wars: Galaxies. Supposedly called Clone Wars Adventures and due by the end of the year, it's to be a browser-based game aimed at a much younger demographic than The Old Republic. Namely pre-teens, the same audience for the popular Clone Wars television show, and far away from those who might even consider subscribing to BioWare's RPG.

So far that's all the information we have, though I'd be surprised if there wasn't an official announcement fairly soon. We're still waiting on details involving the gameplay and pricing model, as any specifics are still unknown, though thinking it's going to be modeled after Free Realms, Sony Online Entertainment's free-to-play online RPG, isn't a stretch. Odds are it will follow a similar pricing model, built on microtransactions instead of a costly monthly subscription. Either way, we expect to hear more information soon, and will be sure to keep you up to date on the other Star Wars MMORPG. Odds are it's going to be much, much different than The Old Republic.

This Friday is said to be a Fan Friday, during which they'll also do a GDC Wrap-Up.

IGN Video Interview with Daniel Erickson

I just barely made the previous post or a video interview popped up on IGN. It's fairly brief at two-and-a-half minutes and has Daniel Erickson talk a little about the Trooper.


"A lot more of the game, really soon" is what caught my attention most, though that's probably referring to E3.


[link] to video interview with Daniel Erickson at IGN.