BioWare's Erickson talks about creating MMO story
Story is on everyone's mind when it comes to discussing Star Wars: The Old Republic, and who better to talk to than one of the devs primarily responsible for creating it. PC Gamer does just that in a new interview with BioWare writer Daniel Erickson. The development process is quite complex, and it's also one that takes some time given the hundreds of hours of dialogue required, not to mention the interplay between quest NPCs and players.
Erickson says that the world-building team uses "greybox" placeholders to connect story quests together while the technical and narrative details are ironed out, and there's a lot less room for error than there is in a typical single-player RPG.
"You can teleport people around in a normal RPG, you can fake things, you can make it look like you went from one place to another because there's a secret room hidden in the wall – you can do all sorts of chicanery that, if you tried to do in an MMO somebody's gonna find that room, somebody's gonna teleport out. We have to cheat a lot less, and that takes more time," Erickson explains.
