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"Not content with creating with lengthy role-playing games like Mass Effect and Knights Of The Old Republic, BioWare is now turning its attention to the massively-multiplayer genre. With the huge demands behind the Star Wars franchise, we talk to creative director and lead designer James Ohlen about the plans and preparations for the ambitious project. You can read our preview of the game here. What additions will TOR be bringing to the MMO genre? &amp;quot;We\u2019re trying to bring storytelling and Star Wars combat to the MMO game space. And by that I mean with the story telling we&amp;#039;re going to have full voice acting, as you&amp;#039;d see in a game like Mass Effect, where your choices actually mean something that affect the outcome of the story. You have companion characters you care about, and moral choices that will affect your light side/dark side rating. From the combat standpoint, we&amp;#039;re going for faster-paced Star Wars combat, where you&amp;#039;re deflecting lightsabers and other blastables, taking cover - we&amp;#039;re really recreating what you&amp;#039;ve seen from the movies. You&amp;#039;ll be facing a whole bunch of enemies instead of a whole bunch of players facing one enemy.&amp;quot; What audience are you targeting with this game? &amp;quot;Well, we&amp;#039;re looking at fans of BioWare games and those who love story-driven RPGs, as well as the whole MMO group. I think on the whole, most MMO fans want really high-quality content in a world that immerses them, and that&amp;#039;s the kind of game we&amp;#039;re going to make. Plus Star Wars fans - those who have never played MMOs. It&amp;#039;s the biggest scoped Star Wars game ever. More planets, more locations - no Star Wars game has allowed you to play as every single role. We&amp;#039;ve basically allowed you to play as one single archetype in one single game, and then join together with the archetypes and play together.&amp;quot;  This is BioWare&amp;#039;s first MMO. What kind of preparations are you taking? &amp;quot;We&amp;#039;re gone through several stages. At the beginning, we made sure we got some MMO veterans - Rich Vogel, Gordon Walton - who are the studio GMs. Bill Dalton is our technical director, Jeff Dobson is our art director - all these guys are veterans of the MMO space. They&amp;#039;ve worked on Star Wars Galaxies, Ultima Online, and other games like that. They&amp;#039;ve gone through all the trials of building an MMO. We&amp;#039;ve also hired veterans such as Damion Schubert who worked on Meridian 59 - one of the very, very first MMOs - so even in the design group we had to make sure we had plenty of experience there. As well as BioWare&amp;#039;s purchase of EA, that&amp;#039;s given us monthly pockets - that&amp;#039;s one thing you need to build an MMO - and also allowed us to use Mythic to help us out, who has developed games such as the Warhammer franchise, Dark Age Of Camelot and so on.&amp;quot; How much does it cost to make an MMO? &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s a huge investment, money wise. I can&amp;#039;t talk [about a figure] but you have to be a big publisher if you&amp;#039;re going to compete against the likes of World Of Warcraft. And that&amp;#039;s another thing, we&amp;#039;re trying to build our own space, and people say that there can only be one big successful MMO at any one given time, but I don&amp;#039;t believe that. If you look at other genres - the first-person shooter, the RTS, sports games - you can have multiple games at the top, they just have to be differentiated from each other. They can&amp;#039;t be the same. So the fact that we have storytelling that has never been done before, and is so different from other MMOs, the same with combat, and the fact that we&amp;#039;re Star Wars, that&amp;#039;s going to allow us to basically have our own space, and hopefully have a success, or even approach the success of World Of Warcraft, which would be incredibly good.&amp;quot; What is the release schedule for the game?  &amp;quot;All I can say is that when we release the game, it&amp;#039;s high quality, very polished - that&amp;#039;s the key to MMO success and that&amp;#039;s why you see so many MMOs come out and stumble. So we&amp;#039;re going to take the time it takes to build that polish. We want to make sure that when people play the game, that people don&amp;#039;t run out of content, and on day one that it&amp;#039;s a good experience, a polished experience.&amp;quot;  A big part of MMOs is expansions. Do you have any plans already?  &amp;quot;We want to have a content release strategy that really keeps people&amp;#039;s interest in the game after launch, so yes we have been looking at all kinds of different post-release content strategies, whether it&amp;#039;s paid-for expansions or free content releases between expansions.&amp;quot; We imagine that&amp;#039;s the sort of thing you&amp;#039;ll have to wait until the game is out there, right?  &amp;quot;No, we kind of have to plan up front, because one of the things about doing an MMO where story is so important is there is a long lead time, because to get a fully localised, fully voice-overed game over there means you have to write the scripts much earlier in development, and those scripts have to be placed into the game, you have to test them, make sure they&amp;#039;re okay, they have to go through an editing process, then voice over for English, then localisation for French and German, and so on. It&amp;#039;s a long process, so we&amp;#039;re going to be probably working on any kind of expansion content before release - no, we will be for sure.&amp;quot; Finally, will there be any KOTOR references? &amp;quot;Oh yes, obviously it&amp;#039;s a BioWare game, and it&amp;#039;s based in the same era, just a few centuries afterwards, so there&amp;#039;s going to be factions and worlds you&amp;#039;ve seen in KOTOR that will appear in TOR. We also want to make sure the fans of KOTOR 1 and 2 don&amp;#039;t feel disappointed when they play the game, that they feel like this answers some questions from the original series that weren&amp;#039;t answered in those games. There might be some characters that also show up. It&amp;#039;s 300 years later, but droids can live for a long time, so can Wookies, Jedis can sometimes live a long time - Yoda lived 800 years - and there&amp;#039;s Jedi ghosts. So there are all kinds of ways that you can include cameos from the original KOTOR games.&amp;quot; Star Wars: The Old Republic will be released for PC in the near future.  &amp;gt; Click here to read our Star Wars: The Old Republic preview "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.digitalspy.com/gaming/interviews/a190437/james-ohlen-star-wars-the-old-republic/>