Interview with Dallas Dickinson on Star Wars: The Old Republic
Transcript after the jump.
Pete Trerice: It's Pete Trerice here with DarthHater.com. I have the absolute luck of finding Dallas Dickinson.
cheers
Dallas Dickinson: Whoo Oh, I'm cheering for myself, that's lame.
Pete: We love Dallas, so... it's awesome that Dallas took some time out of his schedule at PAX to meet up with us. First off Dallas, do you have anything that you'd like to talk about?
Dallas: Well, it's awesome to be here at PAX, I mean, we've been talking about it even the weeks leading up to it, actually being here talking with the fans as well, we're all gamers, and this is one of the few conferences that is actually about gamers meeting and playing games and talking about the games that they play. We've been doing the big press things and marketing stuff, and this is very different, I have someone looking over my shoulder and its...
Together: ...Sean Dahlberg
Dallas: Apparently he's the one with the cattle prod that's going to keep me from saying things I shouldn't say. That's awesome. Thanks, man.
Sean Dahlberg: I just want to make sure that whatever you say I know about, so I can...
Dallas: Thus far I'm saying PAX = cool.
Sean: Didn't you talk abou that cla--
All: Ohhhhh
Dallas: Zing Yeah so, that's been the best part to me is actually, this is my first time coming to PAX, it's an awesome vibe here...
Pete: Absolutely, it's a first time here for me and I love it, it's a fresh breath of air after being at ComicCon, two-hundred-and-some-thousand people fighting just to see you...
Dallas: Exactly, they lost the love in some of these places, E3's the same way. It's huge, but it's very much about talking to the sales guys, talking to the marketing guys and it's not about talking to the fans. And that's what this is all about.
I get to see cool games, I was playing uh Rock band...
Pete: Oh yeah, Beatles Rock Band up on the main stage?
Dallas: It's up on the main stage, c'mon
Pete: I was like, dude This is awesome, I sitting there with a Rickenbacker playing, oh...
Dallas: Exactly. Super hot. So we're having an awesome time.
Pete: I've got a couple of questions that maybe haven't been asked yet so far, maybe, hopefully you can give us some insight.
Dallas: Yeah, awesome.
Pete: So first off, could you talk about any kind of mounts? We've seen speeder bikes on Nal Hutta.
Dallas: Sorry, now what is the question?
Pete: Any kind of vehicles that you can talk about, mounts or vehicles of any kind?
Dallas: Uh, unfortunately.. and I know when you say "I'm asking questions that haven't been asked yet" probably means they are ones I can't answer yet. One of our general notions that we've let people know is: We don't like to talk about stuff until it's in. Until it's in, it works and we can say exactly how it works. There are a lot of systems that you might have seen little glimpses of, if you've seen the demos, the walkthroughs and all that, I can say "you've seen it, it's there" but I can't tell you exactly how it's going to work.
Pete: How is it, with making new lore and new planets and working with all that and trying to keep within the traditions and the constructs of the Star Wars universe, can you talk about that?
Dallas: It's fantastic, first of all, it's a tremendous opportunity, I am a life-long Star Wars nerd. I'm at the age where I didn't see it when it first came out in the theaters, but I saw it 'cause it was still running in the theaters for two years after that, so I was old enough to see A New Hope in the theaters when it was just called Star Wars. My whole life, I've been loving the Star Wars worlds, the Star Wars lore.
The great thing is, our relationship with Lucas is tremendous, we have a huge group of writers in our studio at BioWare who know more about the Star Wars universe, the extended universe than I ever knew was possible. They come up with great ideas, we pitch them past the folks at Lucas, they make sure that we're not doing anything that's contradictory. For the most part, our guys are really on it, so we've really had no problems with that. We've been able to create some really cool new ideas, some really cool, new stories, new lore. It's just an exciting opportunity, I know everybody on our team just loves that aspect of the project.
Pete: What about communication between the Republic and the Empire, is it similar to WoW where if you're Horde, you can't talk with the Alliance... how is that going to play out?
Dallas: Well, we are going to have PvP in the game, and it has a factional basis, the exact details of how it's going to work are obviously not anything I can give you all of right now, but I would expect it to work similar to how other MMOs work. We have the Sith Empire faction, we have the Republic faction, when you're not following your personal class story, you are going to be participating in the world story that is very much about the struggle between those two powers.
Pete: About content, what can we expect after launch? Obviously you're probably going to be working on some of the tweaks and performance, but what kind of content could we possibly be looking forward to?
Dallas: This goes back to "what you see in the top MMOs out there". We know that there are many different types of players to MMOs, and we are actually trying to broaden that even more. We are trying to attract, in addition to people who play high end end-game stuff, who play pure PvP stuff, while we are going to have some of that content, there's always going to be more of that, because we know the high-end player is someone that you really have to keep excited.
In the same way, our game is designed such that you can play it from the beginning again and it's different. It actually makes just as much sense to us to put some effort, some content into making sure the stories, the per-class stories, are exciting and fleshed out so that your Smuggler story that you played end-to-end with the original release, that there is some new, cool, pure-Smuggler story kind of stuff. So it's going to be a mix, in the same way that the game at launch is going to be, because we want to make sure that everybody has something that's awesome to do when they get to the end of their primary story.
Pete: Josh, is there's something that yu wanted to ask?
Josh (Sleeper): Yeah, how excited are you about the demo that's going to be played today?
Dallas: Oh, this is going to be awesome, this is going to be tight. We've been talking about the game, we've been showing, but we haven't had a crowd like this. We haven't had a crowd that, first of all that we know knows what's going on. We've always had to come into these demos, the ones we've done in the past, with the "you may not know anything about this game, you may not know anything about MMOs, you may not know anything about games, you may not know anything about Star Wars" all sorts of you-may-nots, caveats that we have to toss out there, and we feel fairly comfortable in believing that the folks who are going to be in the room today and tomorrow are gamers, who have probably played an MMO or two, they probably know as much about the Star Wars universe as I do, maybe more, probably more. Hopefully most of these people have played Knights of the Old Republic and they know something about our setting specifically. It's just great to be in that crowd, it's sort in an "in" crowd, they know the answers, they know the jokes, they know all the references we're going to make. We're really psyched.
Pete: Dallas, thank you for taking time out to talk with us, we can't wait to see the demo, maybe give us a little hint as what we might see today?
Dallas: There is at least one special reveal today. That's all I can tell you right now, but you're going to enjoy it.
Pete: Thank you so much again, you have a great one.
Dallas: Thanks guys, I appreciate it.
Thanks to Bonklers for the transcript.
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