Darth Hater

In an interview with Eurogamer, James Ohlen addressed concerns over performance issues players have had since the launch of Star Wars: The Old Republic.

James Ohlen

However, we know that it's important that there is a smaller group of people usually with lower end machines that are having problems in some areas. And one of the most important things for us to grow our service is to continue to bring in more players, including those players who only have low-end machines.

So we have a client team, a team of programmers, whose entire job is to optimise the code, find out where some of the issues are, and then fix that up.

While there may not be a direct mention of performance issues on high-end machines, it should at least ease tensions as BioWare optimizes the code. To read the interview in full, visit Eurogamer.

Game Director James Ohlen posted a new blog on the official Star Wars: The Old Republic site discussing BioWare's priorities for the first few weeks after launch. He also mentions weekly patches will address bug fixes, balance changes, and exploits. Ohlen states that some bugs are minor and are easy to fix, while others may take more time and attention from the development team.

James Ohlen

In my last two posts, I talked about how we will be adding new game systems and content in future patches. I also mentioned that we will be continuing to put effort toward bug fixing, balance changes and exploit proofing. But I didn't give too much information on what we're doing in that regard. So here are some more details on the topic.

Almost every week we will be releasing a new patch. These weekly patches are almost entirely focused on bug fixes, minor balance changes and fixing any exploits in the game. These issues are the highest priority items at the studio. They are reviewed by senior leadership on a daily basis. Bug fixes usually take longer than a week to get into the game because we need to fix the issue and then test the fix. Some bugs take longer than that because of the complexity of the issue.

There are issues that we will fix immediately. These are rare and not every issue can be fixed in this manner. We usually reserve these "emergency fixes" for bugs that are stopping players from playing the game or to exploits that could unbalance the entire game if not corrected.

Any game as big and as complex as The Old Republic will have bugs. We’re working as hard as we can to find, fix, test and patch the game to eliminate as many of them as possible.

James Ohlen
Game Director

 Feel free to join the discussion on the official forum if you wish to chime in directly.

As part of today’s launch festivities James Ohlen, Creative Director for The Old Republic, took the time to lay out the broad plan for the game’s future. Touching on nearly every major concern most players had had during pre-launch testing, the outline is well worth the read. 

James Ohlen

Many of you helped make the game what it is today by participating in our testing programs. You’ve watched the game grow over the past year and have been very vocal about things you’d like to see in the game in the future.

A team is never finished building a massively multiplayer game, so we’d like to take this opportunity to reveal a little information on what the team is working on for patches coming in the near future. Our priorities have been, and will continue to be, based off of the feedback we receive from our players.

For the full post, read past the jump.