- BioWare Base Q&A Live Blog
- Gamespot 'Join Us, It Is Your Destiny' Panel Excerpt Video with Working Dissection
- Interview With Dallas Dickinson
Make sure to refresh this post for the most up-to-date information coming out of the Q&A. We will transcribe the audio and update with direct quotes as soon as possible after the conclusion. Live blog and audio of the Q&A follow the jump.
- Q&A starts at 4:00p PT/7:00p ET
- 4:15p: Giving a wrap-up of yesterday's panel, showing off vehicles from panel.
- 4:16p: Talking about exploration and how to get around. Showed off low level, mid level, and high level speeders as examples.
- 4:17p: James Ohlen talking about companion customization in terms of visual and AI. Small improvements and large improvements have been made to companions but can't talk about the large improvements made, like AI and.... SR: No, you can't talk about that. JO: ok, I won't talk about it. But some of the small improvements to companions characters are like the ability to customize the appearance of your companion character, not just what he/she wears but what they look like. To give you an example, one of the companion characters is Vette, the companion for the Sith Warrior, she is a Twi'lek and Twi'leks have different skin colors such as blue, red, yellow, and if you want her to have a different skin color - you will be able to do that. But that's just one example, there are a lot of other things you can do with that. The reason we've put this feature in is because it is one of the features that fans who have been testing the game are asking for. SR: And of course you'll be able to customize your companion with different armor sets and weaponry. We'll have much more to talk about on that in the weeks and months ahead.
- 4:18p: Now onto pre-orders, talking about the three editions and perks.
- 4:19p: Detailing what comes in the Collectors Edition, showed off the box and what is in it on stage.
- 4:19p: Soundtrack has 17 tracks from the game on the CD.
- 4:21p: Talking about beta testing weekends starting in September, release date for the game is Holiday 2011. SR: The sooner you redeem your code, the sooner you get to play the game. Everyone who pre-orders the game and redeems the code is going to get early game access. It's not going to be cut off at some point before we launch.
- 4:22p: Questions from the audience starting. Stephen Reid introduces the guests - Rich Vogel, Dallas Dickinson, James Ohlen, Drew Karpyshyn, and Holly Fields (voice actor for Nadia, companion of the Consular).
- 4:23p: Question about multi-person speeders. JO: Not for ship but it is definitely something we have discussed so currently you are going to be a little bit lonely in the land-speeder. RV: But it's reserved for future expansion. SR: And the back seat as well, is that reserved for future expansion? RV: Always. JO: That's where were storing the Star Wars Chess mini-game...just kidding.
- 4:24p: Question: Will there be expansions? DD: So We aren't announcing anything yet about the business plan for the game. There certainly will be content that comes out after the game, some of it that will be free to play, some of it that you will have to pay a little extra for. RV: Just remember that it takes a lot of money and time to make these expansions, they're not free. Expansion will be a major release for us.
- 4:25p: Question: When you get your star ship, will you be able to upgrade it by improving its shields, weapons, speed, hyperdrive, engine, missle bays, all of that stuff? JO: The answer is yes, you will be able to customize your ship, you are able to customize all of that stuff. In fact, you don't have to wait until you are higher level, as soon as you get your ship you can start looking for ways to customize it and make it easier to blow up those enemy fighters. SR: We should be clear that we are talking about additions to your weaponry, shields, and stuff for the space combat mini-game when we are talking about customization. JO: Yes, that is correct.
- 4:26p: Question: How many worlds at launch? JO: Oh, so this is the question that I have to answer again to make up for my screw up from yesterday. There are 17 full major worlds in the game, there are other minor worlds in the game as well.
- 4:27p: Question: How much customization did you put into the companion characters in terms of what you can do to customize the whole experience of playing with those characters? JO: You can customize all of their wearables: armor, boots, gloves, helmet. You are able to customize what weapon they have and upgrade their weapon. You can do everything to their weapon and armor that you can do to your own armor. So you can upgrade their armor slots. In addition, you are able to modify your companion character's appearance, like we were showing up there - character appearance, skin color, facial features, stuff like that. Stephen Reid: You can't do major changes, like changing their sex or their species. RV: Well we're not ready to talk about that (in reference to AI question from audience) yet.
- 4:28p: Question: Will there be space pvp? JO: Not for launch, It's on the big wall of crazy. SR: You get to do PVP combat on a space ship, does that count? Audience: It's a start.
- 4:29p: Question: What are advanced classes? - BioWare lists them.
- 4:29p: Question: Can you change your Advanced Class? JO: Yes, easy first time, after that, it if you screw up twice for instance, too bad for you.
- 4:30p: Question: Is HK-47 in the game? DK: Yes, BioWare understands the fan expectation with HK-47. You will learn some things potentially about certain characters, not necessarily HK-47 in the Revan Novel as well. So...buy the novel.
- 4:31p: Question: Are there worlds devoted to pvp? JO: We have confirmed that we have open world PVP in the game. So one of the worlds, yes, has a huge area of it that is devoted to open world PVP but we're not going into details yet on how it plays until the near future. SR: We'll be talking a lot more about PVP over the summer though.
- 4:32p: Question: Will dark/light alignment affect character appearance? JO: We would love it to but we can't reveal anything about that right now.
- 4:33p: Question: Will romance arcs be crazy, will they just go off to never be seen/heard of again, be psycho ex girlfriend type, and the stalker ex boyfriend type? SR: (Speaking for Daniel Erickson) He points out that there are lots of different romance arcs in the game. The crazy romances are in there as well as the nice storybook romances.
- 4:33p: Question: Will there be companion character death? JO: Well the answer is, we wanted to do that and had that in prior games like the Knights of the Old Republic series where you had to choose between companion characters. In SWTOR though because it's an ongoing game that you're going to have a companion character for possibly years, we have kind of avoided that as a storytelling mechanism. We don't want to take away your companion character forever because unfortunately what we found through testing was that players would make that choice just to see what happens and they would get really mad that their companion character is gone forever, you can't reload the game. DD: And if you're used to having a healer as your companion because of their aspects of aiding combat and you lose your healer, that hurts a lot. We got a lot of feedback when people would lose their healer that it was not cool. JO: Our original strategy was if people are dumb enough to kill their companion, they're just going to have to deal with it but there were just way too many people who were saying, well, "are they really going to kill my companion character?" SR: They were just like "oh wait, they're dead" and if you choose the Jedi Consular class you'll be playing with Nadia who is voiced by Holly here and I don't think anyone wants to kill her right? That would be mean.
- 4:35: End of Q&A
- 4:36: Drew Karpyshyn now doing signings for Revan.
Audio to come later along with full transcription. Q&A Media gallery is now online.
Note: Until there is a full transcription, do not consider any of this 100% accurate.
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Posted 7/23/2011 7:59:35 AM-
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Posted 7/23/2011 6:54:44 AM-
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Posted 7/23/2011 8:13:03 AM-
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Posted 7/23/2011 3:36:32 AMIt was initially announced w/ release date of Nov 15th, but the Star Wars Insider excerpt (linked on AskAJedi) mentioned it would be out Oct 18th.
According to the schedule on his webpage, Drew K will be at BioWare base and at the meet and greet Saturday evening so hopefully someone can ask him directly.
12PM-1PM: Book Signing at Random House Booth
2PM-3PM: Writers Panel at BioWare Base
4PM-5PM: Signing at BioWare Base
7-10:30PM: Community Meet & Greet at BioWare Base
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Posted 7/23/2011 3:27:13 AM1. How does the holo cam work?
2. What is the progress on guild capitol ships that James O. mentioned at PAXE?
3. Has there been any re-thinking of the faction locked planets, especially on PvP servers?
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Posted 7/23/2011 2:48:14 AM-
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Posted 7/23/2011 10:40:28 PM-
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Posted 7/23/2011 12:07:39 AMand still no one asks for a release date on species/class list or if all species have been announced
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Posted 7/23/2011 8:16:04 AM-
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Posted 7/23/2011 10:43:20 PM-
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Posted 7/22/2011 11:55:30 PM-
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Posted 7/22/2011 11:49:21 PM-
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Posted 7/22/2011 11:41:53 PM-
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Posted 7/22/2011 11:59:08 PMSadly quit :/
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Posted 7/22/2011 11:36:06 PM