Darth Hater

Star Wars: The Old Republic News, Interviews, Media & Podcast

  • DevTracker Highlights For The Week of January 13, 2011

    BioWare went a little post crazy this past week on the official forums, flooding the DevTracker with a slew of responses to the community's concerns. Lead Writer Daniel Erickson talks about humor in SWTOR, and explains BioWare's process for working on the individual class stories. World Designer Kyle Garner chimed in with his opinion on story in SWTOR affecting gameplay, Principal Lead Combat Designer Georg Zoeller expounds on his recent interview with TOROCast and talks about the reasons behind BioWare's conservative release of information, and Senior Writer Rob Chestney talks about the Creative Services team's contributions to the timeline videos and how the Republic and Sith Empire are portrayed within.

  • Darth Hater @ GDC Online

    Darth Hater returns to Game Developers Conference again this week, but this time we head to Austin, TX. Below is a short list of the panels we'll attend to look for potential clues about Star Wars: The Old Republic:

    DH GDC Content




    External GDC Content




    How Online Gaming Has Adopted the Grind
    Speaker/s: Damion Schubert (BioWare Austin)
    Day / Time: Thursday 11:00-12:00
    Description: 'The grind' isn't just whacking rats in men-in-tights fantasy MMOs anymore. Like a plague, it has escaped that genre, and now infects other genres, ranging from Web and Facebook games all the way to triple-A XBox titles. This talk will explore the grind, why so many designers turn to it like a crutch, and in what situations grindy gameplay may actually improve your game.

    Lessons Learned Creating Team Cultures
    Speaker/s: Gordon Walton (BioWare Austin)
    Day / Time: Thursday 11:00-12:00
    Description: Every team has its own unique culture, and culture will have a material effect on the results your team produces. Environment and context combined with how you acculturate incoming people will affect how your team culture evolves. This roundtable is for sharing experiences in creating and shaping team cultures.

    Strategies for Successfully Running an MMO from Launch and Beyond
    Speaker/s: Rich Vogel (BioWare), Jeffrey Steefel (Turbine, Inc), Jeff Hickman (EA Mythic), Lorin Jameson (Sony Online Entertainment) and Nathan Richardsson (CCP)
    Day / Time: Friday 9:30-10:30
    Description: Launching MMOs is hard enough, much less keeping them viable after their first year. Acquisition and retention are the two most important levers that are used to keep an online game alive and viable. This panel will discuss strategies that help move these two levers. On the panel are people who have been running MMOs for more than five years. What are their secrets to successfully running and maintaining these MMOs for so long?

    You Studied Game Design, Now What?
    Speaker/s: Elizabeth Stringer (The Guildhall at SMU), Leigh Alexander (Gamasutra.com), Kyle Garner (BioWare), Jeremy Roden (Richland College, Game Technology) and Eric Weiss (Madison and Minneapolis Media Institutes)
    Day / Time: Friday 1:30- 2:30
    Track / Format: Game Career Seminar / Panel
    Description: A program of game design-related studies is only one piece of the puzzle when developing a career in games. A panel of design professors and professionals from Guildhall, Richland College, Bioware and Madison Media Institute will discuss what students need to know during and following their education to enter the game industry.

    It will be interesting to keep watching and see if Blizzard's World of Warcraft: Cataclysm release date of December 7, 2010 has any impact on Star Wars: The Old Republic's 4Q marketing or testing schedule. (thanks to TIIME for the head's up)

  • DevTracker Highlights

    Although the Star Wars: The Old Republic DevTracker was pretty quiet this week, BioWare Media Designer Robin Khamsi reminded us:

    Yes, we do read the forums. Sometimes we even post.

    Originally Posted by Redundant
    You ever wonder whether that members of Bioware come on the forums after they have released a update and check threads like these, just so they can revel in the torture of us crying to play this game. You know i think they have made a company activity out of it :P

    Anyway back to the Inhabitants section. I think its fantastic, giving us some background info and some of the creatures we will fight (and maybe befriend). Brings the whole thing too life.

    More from Daniel Erickson, Kyle Garner, Sean Dahlberg, and Charles Boyd after the jump.
Forums

Latest Topics

Go To Forums

Most Commented

Go to Articles

Tag Cloud

More