After the flood of info from San Diego Comic Con came in I decided to have some fun with it and ponder just what was my top ten info releases for me personally. I start with number ten and work my way to the one I felt to be personally the coolest. I wonder if your interests are similar to mine, or if you have even seen all this stuff yet?
One of the things I have really liked about crafting systems in past games I have played was the ability to break items down into raw resources or the ability to “Deconstruct” them. Sure the ability usually was present to just go gather myself and gain the resources I needed that way. Also I could just go to the auction house and buy them, but sometimes it wasn’t practical to do either or economical with crazy server prices and it was just easier to deconstruct stuff I had lying around for the few ingots of a certain type of metal or wooden grips, etc, I needed at the time.
From the interview that me and Serge had with Damion Schubert and the Developer Q&A we attended with him, I got wind of something that has my ears perked for sure. The mention or hinting at a new mechanic on the horizon for crew skills in SWTOR.
I was hit by the realization of what I think I understand them to be planning immediately. In the Q&A with Damion Schubert when the first question of the session was asked to him, he replied with a response that included this little gem about a mystery “research system”
As part of our Fan Site Summit experience at Bioware offices in Austin, Texas, we got a chance to participate in two Q&A sessions that were organized with Damion Schubert, Lead Systems Designer, Daniel Erickson, Lead writer and Blaine Christine, Live Producer for Star Wars: The Old Republic. We managed to ask one question to each of them and I am providing you with a transcripts of these questions and answers along with complete audio recording of the Q&A sessions so you can hear what other sites asked and got answers for.
I would also like to mention that the impression you get when asking these developers questions is that they are really smart and approachable. I thought that the Imperial Agent question (that we actually got asked by one of the community members on the official forums) was going to catch them off-guard, but they had an answer right off the bat. They want to tell you everything about the game that they have been building for so long and it always take an effort for them to constrain themselves to not spilling the beans on not-yet-released information.
Click here to read and listen to the questions and answers we got
I was recently given the opportunity to play the Bounty Hunter class in an origin world experience at the first ever Bioware Fan Site Summit. It was a fun time indeed and I am thankful for the opportunity. It has answered a lot of questions for me personally about more than just the class, but on a broader level of having to do with my views on the game.
Crafters!
We are representing for you!
Swtor-Life.com has been given the honor of interviewing Damion Schubert, the Lead Systems Designer for Bioware, as part of the Fan Site Summit 2011. We gathered the majority of questions for the interview from the community and we thank you for making your voice heard.
Join us now as we dive right into just who Damion is for the company and what he has been involved with in the past, and the goodies we have to look forward to in the Crew Skills system! There are exclusive reveals about the yet unannounced aspects of the Crew Skills system to be found in this interview and we will be providing a transcript shortly.
A big thank you to all who posted questions in this thread on the official forums where we asked the community for their choice of questions to go to Damion, some of you got the answers I hope you were looking for.
Join me in my next Swtorcrafter crafting article where I discuss this information in depth, there is a ton of it to wring out of this interview!
As part of the upcoming Fansite event Bioware is hosting at their offices in Austin, Texas, we will be interviewing developers during the day. Having a crafting expert among our ranks dictates that we get as much information about Crew Skills as they’ll let us have. This, in turn, pointed us in a direction of a person that can also answer about Flashpoints as a game mechanic so our questions will gravitate towards those two topics. We have such luck that one of our writers, Mr. Warlock is also attending the show, on behalf of his own fansite, and he will focus mainly on PvP. Being in the offices with the devs will also result in being able to throw random questions their way, so I suppose questions of a general type will get answers as well.
Click here to read about how you can get your questions answered
Something I have been wondering about for quite some time is the level of item one can expect to craft after a “crafting crit” takes place during item creation. Will the created item be on par with raid loot drops, PVP drops, or other drops or rewards from missions?
Read on!
My question to you today is:
Based on your normal play style how do you see yourself acquiring the materials you need to craft in SWTOR?
Will you use the auction house mechanic relying on other players to provide the auctions for you to buy, or will you rely on yourself and your companions to gather what you need via the gathering mechanics and the missions?
Read on!
In their latest interview from the PAX East convention of 2011, Darth Hater sat down with Bioware’s creative director, James Ohlen.
Darth Hater: “We also heard that in your dialogue system, you are tracking metrics on when people are pausing to see how long they’re taking to make decisions and things like that to really work on the dialogue. So you are getting ton of information from the testers?”
James Ohlen: “We keep on getting more and more information as the testing groups get larger. We had two groups of a thousand players on a shard and that got us a lot of information because it was a lot more people playing together. We were able to see a population that was not indicative of the final game, but it was closer to it because the populations were so much bigger than just a couple hundred. We’re able to use that to make a lot of adjustments; it also validated a lot design decisions we made months earlier. The game really gets a lot better every single month. It is pretty impressive. The developer teams are getting faster at making changes and making adjustments to feedback. Two years ago it would take so long to see a change in the game, but now you see changes every month.”
From what I remember in the past, we have never really gotten a definitive number from a developer about just how many people are involved in “game testing”. If I remember correctly the only estimations of a number came from the statement of “more than I could fit in my office” or something to that effect. (the actual quote escapes me at the moment but it was very similar to that statement)
When they tell me that they have two groups of a thousand players on a shard that gives me a better idea as to how far they are along in the numbers of people that they have allowed in at this point. I figure it is more than two thousand at this point, but at least I now have a baseline reference.
The comment that they were “on a shard” also makes me wonder if they also have the ability of running more than one shard at this time with their current server structure. I am thinking they do and that they may be currently operating several shards at this point in time. Maybe a private in house version for the developers only that showcases the latest builds, maybe a couple for outside the office testers, and etc. I may be way off base, as this is just speculation on my part.
In the end though, with this developer interaction I feel better about the testing process going on at Bioware. One of my fears from the past was that they didn’t have the amount of people testing their game that they needed to find out all that was necessary. That a small minority of people testing would sway the design decisions in directions I as a MMO veteran did not approve of for my gaming time.
With a number of at the very least two thousand testing the game, I feel much better that a wider view of MMO mechanic and game play design is being addressed.
Now if I could just get my hands on it and test out the “Crew skills system” I could die a happy man. 🙂
