Interview with Sean Dahlberg
Update: All of our video content will be posted on monday. Unfortunately it is too much content to upload, convert, and post during PAX.
Transcript after the jump.
Pete Trerice (Misensus): Hey guys, it's Pete Trerice her with DarthHater.com and I have a special interview here.
Hi, Sean, how are you doing today?
Sean Dahlberg: Been doing pretty good.
Pete: So, obviously we've compiled a lot of questions, you uh, probably know who we are in the first place, right?
Sean: Definitely do.
Pete: Awesome, that's fantastic. So, one of the questions that sado (Darth Hater) had was: "Do you have an alias on the forums that you can use to post without having other people know?"
Kind of like a pseudo-account?
Sean: No, I've heard of using that tactic in the past, I've seen it blow up on people when they realize who you really are, 'cause sometimes it's a little obvious. So, no, I figure if I'm going to just be me, I'll just do it under my normal account.
Pete: Okay, very cool. 'Cause we were thinking that you might do that so you can get something put on Dev Tracker, just in case, you know...
Sean: Nope, no. I just use SeanDahlberg.
Pete: So what faction are you and what is your alignment?
Sean: Course, ah, gotta be Sith Empire.
Pete: What do you think we'll be able to have add-ons for the UI?
Sean: Will you be able to?
Pete: Yeah.
Sean: That's a great question I can answer that at a later date. chuckles No, I mean, obviously UI is very important to playing games, I've been an MMO-er for a long time, so while I can't answer that question, I will tell you that the UI is very important to us, we will have new information about that and I think most people will be pretty pleased about it.
Pete: Very cool. Do you think you are going to play a human class or are you going to play an unconfirmed alien?
Sean: I'm gonna play a species.
Pete: Oh-ho, any hints? Please? Let's get a world exclusive
Sean: One that's not human laughs
Pete: Wow. You guys heard it first.
Do you prefer playing with a companion or going solo?
Sean: So far, mostly solo. I'm more of a-- I like to have a team of real people instead of companions. Companions still work great y'know, but it's sometimes a bit more fun to throw it away and make it a little more of a challenge.
Pete: Sure. Do you think companions are going to be encouraged in groups or will they later be... not used or reduced?
Sean: We haven't finished that system yet, so for the most part, I think they will be encouraged to be used, we're putting a lot of time into them, little sad to do all that and then encourage you not to use them. And if you've played a lot of BioWare games, you've seen how companions are very integral to many things, not just the gameplay, but the story itself, they bring a lot to that.
Pete: Cool. We have a question from Zoidberg about the fankit, when are we going to see that?
Sean: That's a great question also. We actually have most of it done right now, we're basically waiting on some web framework to get all that done, to make it a bit easier to distribute and people to put all their fansite information on there. We do have a couple clauses in there because it is Star Wars, we want to make sure people are using things appropriately. We hope to have that pretty soon.
There are a couple things that we wanted out first, definitely the localized sites, we have another thing coming up soon, I'll just say keep your eyes open for it, most people will enjoy it a little bit more. Then we'll have the fansite kit. laughs
Pete: That's great news. Now outside of the game, what did you do previous to working on The Old Republic?
Sean: Well I actually was a systems designer for another company on another MMO, prior to that, actually community for - let's say - six years and before that I did a lot of live events, in-game events, running y'know... basically an actor in-game.
Pete: How did you get your job at BioWare?
Sean: Begged and pleaded.
Pete chuckles
Naw, it was funny, I was at the Awesome Game Conference couple years ago, this was still when there was a rumor there was a Star Wars MMO being made by BioWare, y'know everyone seemed to know, but it was never confirmed. I ran into some people from BioWare they said, "hey we need a community guy soon", I was at the point where I was like, well I'm doing game design now... yes, but this is BioWare, you might think you know about our project... I'm like, eh, maybe so.
So I put my name in the hat, a lot of people applied so I guess I did something right.
Pete: Tell me about a day-in-the-life of Sean Dahlberg, King of the Forums
Sean: Oh god, it's almost different every day. Just depending, conventions obviously throw a little monkey wrench into things, I'm not in the office, so a lot of things go weird there. Most days I come in a little early, get my coffee so I actually wake up, read most of my e-mails, I get a lot of e-mails every day.
Pete: I can imagine.
Sean: I do Google alerts on everything to see if something got mentioned that maybe shouldn't have, trying to keep up-to-date with all the information out there. I read a lot of the forums as much as possible, answer what questions I can at this point. Right now it's a little bit harder 'cause there's so much we haven't announced. As things progress I will be a little more forthcoming with information.
Pete: Absolutely, I imagine you've got tons you want to talk about, it's just finally hitting that time where they say "okay, we can finally talk about all this great stuff."
Sean: Exactly, that's the nice thing now, y'know I said a couple weeks ago about it's been a little bit of a lull in information, that time is pretty much over now.
Pete: Yeah, we're well aware of that, it's been really hard to try to write stuff for the site and podcasts, so..
Sean: Yeah and E3 was where we had a little bit of a hiccup, we did so much that first couple days of June that I think all we could do was stretch it out because we already did all of our big announcements that month, so it made that month really really long.
Pete: What advice would you give to those people looking to get into the industry?
Sean: Have a very thick skin? It depends on the position, for community, yeah have a very thick skin, being able to interact with a lot of different positions; we don't actually do a lot of the forum stuff, I mean we read them everyday, but we interact with the art team, the programmers, designers, making sure we're as knowledgeable about the game as possible because it's a little easier to actually talk about the game when you know what you're talking about.
Between that, all the website content we create also, so it takes alot of work in there.
Obviously having good grammar never hurts, uh writing skills...
Pete: i iz goign 2 tell u alotz todayz
Sean: Exactly. That and, y'know, try not to take things personally. A lot of people, that's where they mess up is, someone makes a flame post and they direct it at you because you're the unintelligible and most people will take it personally and you just can't, you have to understand the people are making a bad post 'cause they're really frustrated and maybe they're not telling you in the right way, but it's good to get to the base of that frustration as quickly as possible.
Pete: What can you tell us about the crafting system that might exist?
Sean: That it might exist
Pete: Oh c'mon, a little more tease
Sean: Well we're not going to have, I think -- what was the term? -- the Uncle Owens game. We definitely want crafting but we actually want crafting that works well with our game itself, so we will have things that are pertaining to a lot of the game's systems and supporting them in different ways. You probably will not be baking bread.
Pete: Aw, that was my favorite thing to do in WoW What about mana biscuits?
We have a question from a South American fan, he says: "Is there going to be a South American set of servers or a Latin American set of servers?"
Sean: Is he asking for servers or is he talking language-specific?
Pete: Servers specifically.
Sean: Servers now, we're still working on our infrastructure for that, we will obviously have some in Europe, we will have some in North America; a lot of that will just depends on where we're seeing a lot of orders/traffic coming from. We wanna support the communities where they are at but we don't go overboard with it, find out there's ten people playing in country 'X' and have ten servers that doesn't seem to work out.
Pete: Yeah, and not have it be cost-effective. Another question from some of the European fans is will they be able to play on American servers or will they have to import copies, kind of what people do with World of Warcraft, where they get somebody they know state-side to purchase the game for them and get them the code.
Sean: That's another thing we haven't finalized yet, the nice thing is, we're doing everything under one publisher. A lot of MMOs have to segregate it because of the different publishers, so our hopes, and the thing we're planning on right now, is to let you go where ever, that may change, so.. I'll wait for the official announcement but that's definitely, my whole vision is having one, global community, yes we have different languages, but at the end of the day, we're all here for The Old Republic. We want to make it the best playstyle and servers as possible.
Games I've been in I've played with a lot of Europeans who are on U.S. servers, vice-versa I'll play on European servers sometimes.
Pete: Question we have about collision detection, or collision between characters, are you going to be able to walk through the characters or is there actual collision detection where you bump and you have to move around?
Sean: That's something they're playing with now, there are some server performance issues with having a lot of character collisions, so it's determining what's actually best for the game. Right now you can actually walk through them, we may make it where there are certain abilities that sort of block you off. Some of the things to think about with that... I'll put on my designer hat: it's easy to grief people with stuff like that. You get your group of people in front of the door...
Pete: Exactly You start pushing them in the door, it's like stun-locking with rogues.
Sean: ...exactly...
Pete: I can definitely understand the reason...
Sean: ...so there's that, there are system performance issues, that's a lot of calculations you have to do on the fly. So, more than likely I'm going to say no, but there is always the possibility.
Pete: So, just kind of out there, do you know how many people are you going to try to average per server? A quarter-million, less than that, more than that? What do you think?
Sean: I know what our goal is, but that's going to actually come up with the stress test. We're going to stress test as best as possible, and see where we should keep that many people on, and if it's still performing well, then great. If not, then obviously we're either going to re-tool things or we're going to lower the limit.
Pete: Sean, thank you so much for your time, I know you're really busy here, I'm really excited that hopefully you're going to have some big announcements for us, maybe tomorrow?
Sean: You never know what might get announced tomorrow
Pete: Well thank you so much Sean Dahlberg, this is Pete Trerice for DarthHater.com, thank you so much.
Thanks to Bonklers for the transcript.
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