SWTOR Storytelling Part 2

In other games, every time you try and play an "evil" character, you eventually seem to do things that are quasi-good. Is that going to happen in The Old Republic?

Daniel: Let's talk about Vader. In the context of Vader's emperor and empire, does he do heroic things? He faces down the largest threat to the entire galaxy from his perspective. Now imagine if you're Vader and a random Imperial ran up to you and said, "There's a fire on the aft deck! Come, help us, Vader!" They're probably going to get killed. You do big, epic things. The first thing Vader does when someone's trying to blow up the Death Star is grab two guys, jump in a TIE fighter, and try to kill that little kid. He doesn't sit back; he goes after them personally. So yes, you can do heroic and epic things that are in no way "good" or "nice."

How do you transition a focus on personal storytelling into a game that a lot of different people play together?

Daniel: One of the things we've really had to do is 1) look at how people play the games. From the academic studies we know that as much as people say they play one way, we know that about 40% or so of people play almost exclusively by themselves. And then you get another whole group of people that always play in a group and always with the same group.

So we had to make sure that the game supports all of that. The example given during the unveiling of "running around on the Millennium Falcon" was actually a really good one. Han's got a story that's going on, Luke's got a story that's going on, Leia's got a story that's going on (mainly her planet blew up, so I guess most of her quest content is gone at this point). Then you're all getting together and participating in a big story. That's why we talk about the context of it. The giant war that's coming between the Sith and the Republic. That's everybody's story.

When you guys are getting together, you're really interacting with this larger over-story, but even within that story – I realize this will be frustratingly vague – the things you get to see are going to be dependent on who you're travelling with. If Han had never hooked up with Luke, he would never had a perspective on The Force. He would never have said, "May The Force be with you" to anyone. He would never have thought about Jedi, he would never have thought about any of this. He would have been a man who lived in a world of smuggling and evil Hutts and crime and trying to make a buck.