Darth Hater

Last week, LucasArts & BioWare extended an invitation to Darth Hater for another round of Star Wars: The Old Republic hands-on game play at the beautiful Presidio campus in San Francisco. Eager to take another look, Meg and I left GDC and made our way to Lucasfilm where we were treated to playing Level 6 Troopers on Ord Mantell, and also spoke in depth with Jake Neri of LucasArts and Daniel Erickson of BioWare.

As the news coming out of Austin continues to pick up speed, mining information is becoming much more exciting. The response to our recent speculation articles inspired us to delve deeper into what we were previously told about Star Wars: The Old Republic with surprising results. We used our recently acquired knowledge to give context to older news items, and realized BioWare was giving us hard facts all along.

As we touched on in our previous article, we believe all the developers public statements solidified BioWare's direction of class design. We searched high and low looking for clues, kicked around hypotheses, made charts and graphs, followed several threads in the Character Class section of the Star Wars: The Old Republic official forums and we discovered that the answer to every class two paths were possibly outlined plain as day in the Holonet.

Today is the day The Information Extravaganza has begun Below you will find links to all of the articles posted on December 3rd pertaining to what we learned at LucasArts about Star Wars: The Old Republic. This includes information regarding the Jedi Consular, Sith Inquisitor, Smuggler class trees, second part of our interview with Jake Neri, other general information learned during the hands-on demo, and our take on the four force users debate.

A couple weeks ago we released the first part of our interview with Jake Neri and now we can finally bring you the second half. We used many different sections of this interview in our other articles, but this is the complete transcript for context.

There was a bit of interesting information that came from a Goha.ru interview with Daniel Erickson of Bioware that seemingly hints at custom UI mods in SWTOR:

M: So this is, incidentally, means that you will support the fashion for the interface that will make the players?

D. E.: Well, yes, this, in general, has become a standard, support for mods, so that everyone can make yourself comfortable client.

It also hints at skill trees:

M: Then, what role will play a skill tree? It is one of the smuggler will be different from each other according to his abilities that he learned?

D.E: Tree of skills will be essential. Already during character generation, you can not only choose his special appearance, but also the unique skills that may not be with the other characters in the same class. And developing, you can concentrate on fighting style, which you like. So one smuggler will not be like another. And if we add more characters and companion, then this opens up an entirely new level of specialization.

There is a little portion near the end as well that mentions Bioware's philosophy on the game's death system:

D. E.: We can not talk about the system of death. But I can say now is that the penalties for death in the IMO are becoming less and less, and with good reason. We want you to be a lot of fighting. To give you a fun game. And so the game has always been a fast, action games and a lot of fun. So we will not severely limit the player ... Well, no, there is always the hardcore players who will say No This is so cool, when you can lose their arms or when I need to run eight o'clock before his corpse ...

It must be said that this is a Google translation and should be taken with a grain of salt until we can completely verify it via someone who speaks Russian.