Our visit to this year’s GamesCom gaming convention has been crowned by a very special meeting that we didn’t even hope for. We had the pleasure and honor to sit down with Mr. James Ohlen, Creative Director and Lead Designer for Star Wars: The Old Republic, and ask him a few questions. The short chat we had about the game was focused around space combat, player ships and advanced classes.

The spaceships are going to be used for a type of housing. They are a kind of a community feature. They are used for traveling and for space combat. There are many features incorporated into the player ships.

James Ohlen: That’s correct. We felt that in the movies, that is what you see them used as. It’s kind of a home base for some of the main characters, (especially the Millenium Falcon in the whole original trilogy), than it’s used, obviously, to travel from planet to planet (that is its main use), but also, you have space combats that are famous from the movies, like the one from the Return of the Jedi, or the asteroid one in the Empire Strikes Back.

Swtor Station, German fansite, reported that there were Zabrak troopers available for play during GamesCom hands on event. We were going over our footage of the first two days. Guess what? We have some images for you:

Released with the press kit are the following concept art images of the Space Combat feature of The Old Republic. Epic Star Wars feeling? I’d say so :).

By popular request, we bring you another video from Gamescom 2010 hands on experience. It shows some gameplay from the trooper and smuggler as well as a cutscene of the Sith Inquisitor. There is a brief glimpse of very cool feature where the map goes transparent when you move your character. Hope you enjoy it.

In a thread we started on the official forums before GamesCom, we collected some question from the SWTOR community. There was an overwhelming number of questions and although we would like to be able to ask all of them we were happy to get answers to at least a few. The focus of GamesCom is Space Combat and advanced classes and in accordance to that we got to ask the following questions:

Will there be guild capital ships
Talked a lot among the design team. At launch NO, but popular feature with designers including Daniel Erickson (James Ohlen pointed at Daniel at that moment and Daniel gave a little smirk :))

Will there be interactive features in our ships besides the galactic map
Here’s word for word answer. You will get the whole answer on this question later on from our James Ohlen interview but as the most important answer of this question:
Crafting and workbenches will be inside the ship.

Will friends be able to travel from planet to planet with you in your own ship, or will they have to use their own?
No details right now. They can’t talk about it because it is not done or implemented. It’s a dream and something they would like to see go into the game, but there are technical difficulties in this feature they have to surpass first.

The motivations behind some of the restrictions in space.
They think that this is the best way to deliver a genuine star wars experience this way (a well guided single player experience).

We’ll try and get additional answers to other community questions from other areas of the game but we can’t promise anything (goes off to stalk the swtor booth).

Above video shows what was happening at the Star Wars The Old republic booth at this year’s GamesCom. This is the first time the general public was able to get some hands on with the game. We were able to capture some of the atmosphere there during the press only day (that is why there are not that many people). You can also see some of the people still playing, and then there is a change of gamers (every 15 minutes a new group was showed in). We will be releasing more of these in the coming days.

Character customization in SWTOR is also made possible through a concept called advanced classes. It is a specialization of your primary class into one of two paths.

Today at GamesCom 2010 the working titles of all 16 advanced classes were revealed. They are:

• Scoundrel (Stealth/Medicine; Burst ranged damage or healing)
• Gunslinger (Dual pistols, Quick draw, Ranged DPS)

• Sorcerer (Single saber; ranged damage class; Healing; Think of someone that just loves using lightning; Think Palpatine; They even heal with lighning (joke, but they do heal))
• Assassin (Double bladed light sabers, a lot of melee damage, When you think about the Assassin think about Darth Maul and Zabrak and tattoos. That’s the general vibe they are going for)

• Sentinel (dual saber (not double), melee DPS; Think young Anakin)
• Guardian (tank, party buffs, Think Obi Wan leading the attack with the troops

• Commando (ranged tank)
• Vanguard

• Operative (blaster rifle, burst ranged damage, stealth)
• Sniper (dps)

• Powertech
• Mercenary

• Shadow (double-bladed lightsaber)
• Wizard (healing; single lightsaber)

During our talk with James Ohlen, he said that they wanted to have 4 healing capable classes so that out of 16 available advanced classes, 25% can heal and when you translate that to a group of 4 there will always be one class capable of doing some heals. (If they spec for healing option of course)

Update: The full list and details of all the advanced classes has been released by Bioware and can be found in our news article here.

You will be able to get some hands on gameplay with The Old Republic this year at the GamesCom convention in Cologne, Germany. The whole experience is divided into sections where you are taken through three introductory 15 minute videos, where you are given general information about the game and shown the Hope trailer. The last 15 minute section describes how to play the game and than you are taken into the open area with various characters already setup for you to play with.

Jedi Knight and Consular are still not available. There are the Republic table and the Sith table so there is some competition going on.

We’ll give you our impressions on the gameplay later on, for now here are the images we took at the booth.

We just got a hold of the computer after the most exciting few hours ever! Advanced classes have been revealed! We got to play the game along with other members of the general public. We have gameplay videos. And we had a special treat. We met a lot of people from Bioware and even have an interview with mr. James Ohlen, Creative Director and Lead Designer of SWTOR . We are in SWTOR heaven!

First up some HQ screenshots of space combat:

Electonic Arts is having their pre Gamescom conference streamed live at http://live-event.ea.com/gamescom/live/

The host just said that Bioware will have two big announcements during this conference. We’re watching the live stream and will keep you updated as things happen.

• First look at space combat.
• Video of space combat available at swtor.com

Trailer is available at
http://www.swtor.com/media/trailers/space-combat