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Epic in scope: SWTOR's James Ohlen explains plans for the future
As the Star Wars: The Old Republic guild leaders lined up to get a taste of the Lost Island flashpoint, I was at BioWare studios getting my hands dirty with deeper PvE and PvP content as well as speaking with developers like Combat Designer Georg Zoeller, Lead Writer Daniel Erickson, Art Director Jeff Dobson, and Lead Designer Emmanuel Lusinchi. However, the best part was at the end of the day when I was able to speak one-on-one with Creative Director James Ohlen. Ohlen touches nearly every aspect of the game's development. It was important to me to find out why this game is as popular as it is and what BioWare was going to do to retain its current playerbase. The first stop was the latest game update, which should hit test servers really soon.
That palette is fully operational: Jeff Dobson opens up about SWTOR's artistic side
Story may get all the press when it comes to Star Wars: The Old Republic, but the truth is that the final product was a team collaboration between many departments -- including the artists. Art Director Jeff Dobson sat down with Republic Trooper to talk about the process of shaping each of the game's many worlds and locales with BioWare's signature flair. It might astound you to realize just how many different type of artists work on MMOs such as SWTOR. Dobson said the team has "concept artists, character artists, environment artists, VFX artists, GUI artists, animators, and technical artists. The world design team is worth a mention here as well, because they participate a lot in the initial visual development of an area." And that doesn't include the separate teams that did the cinematic cutscenes or pre-rendered cinematics! Dobson said that the biggest challenge for the art team was the scale of the project. "The Old Republic has too many assets to even really take stock of how much there is. It is a lot of work to simply track this many assets as they go through the creation pipeline," he said.
