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Star Wars: The Old Republic Q&A talks story, balance, and species experimentation
Another installment of BioWare's weekly ritual of enlightening the masses is up! The first question of this week's community Q&A touched on the selection of races available in Star Wars: The Old Republic. If the future introduction of the Cathar is successful, the team would like to introduce a broader spectrum of species for player characters, balancing things out by adding "clear positives and negatives" for playable species. On the story side of things, lead writer Alex Freed addressed a question about the timing of storylines. Class stories have roughly the same timing across the board, but aren't completely in-step, while world stories are split up by faction and can have much more significant time differences. For the most part, it's best not to worry too much about ordering individual world events unless they actively reference one another--and if they contradict one another, you can assume that we won't be writing future stories that depend on one faction's participation at the exclusion of the other. Senior designer Austin Peckenpaugh tackled some class and skill questions. Recent patches have made some fairly substantial changes to the Marksmanship and Sharpshooter trees; Peckenpaugh says these tweaks are intended to bring the specs closer to the team's original vision and encourage playstyles better fit to the peculiarities of those trees. He also talked about the delicate balance of player control and kiting and anti-kiting in the game. He says that "given the amount of skills and abilities that break and cleanse roots and snares at the moment," the team is not "very concerned" about the possibility of chainable roots.
Backstabbing galore: Daniel Erickson talks about the Sith Inquisitor's story
The blog Sith Inquirer wrote in to BioWare to, well, inquire about Star Wars: The Old Republic's Sith Inquisitor class story and received a response from none other than head writer Daniel Erickson. In the interview, Erickson said that the story for the Sith Inquisitor was entirely written by Rebecca Harwick, who drew inspiration from Emperor Palpatine as well as Alex Freed's Blood of the Empire series. Inquisitor players will begin their saga by investigating "forgotten regions" on different worlds as they look for the secret of ancient Sith power. The team had a few issues writing around Purebloods being portrayed as slaves, although this was ironed out as BioWare placed a priority on allowing players to pick the race they wished. the class is being voiced by Euan Morton (male) and Xanthe Elbrick (female). Will there be plenty of backstabbing, political or otherwise, as part of the storyline? "More than you can possibly imagine," Erickson replies. When it comes to the Sith Inquisitor's companions, Erickson tantalized fans by saying, "Khem has one of the most amazing storyline developments for a companion and the (as yet unseen) Inquisitor romances are not your normal fare at all."
