Going to a convention for a game you are following is always a magical time, especially if it is Star Wars The Old Republic MMO by Bioware! Join me, SwtorCrafter,  as I get ready to go to E3 in Los Angeles on the 6th!

Bring the awesome Bioware, I double dog dare you!  😛

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Su cuy’gar, ner vode.  Ibi’tuur copaani miit’gaanar be kebi meg vut’yc par ni, bal balyc par an beroyase – Mando’ade bal val joha, Mando’a.  Still with me?  Fret not, for it shall all be made clear momentarily!

Class is most definitely in session...

Those of you familiar with Karen Traviss’  “Republic Commando” series may have already had some exposure to the Mandalorian language, Mando’a.  Originally, I planned on merely crafting a lengthy treatise about Mando’a and its grammar, but in the end I thought this would be a great opportunity instead to speak with a member of the larger Star Wars community whom I have followed for awhile, Natasha Morea, AKA “Mandalorian Girl.”  I recently had the great pleasure of sitting down with her at a dusty cantina, where she graciously allowed me to ask all manner of questions.  Below is an excerpt from our conversation.

Read on for more!

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”

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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 it is finally the 18th in my time zone, I can now officially announce that representation from   www.swtor-life.com will be going to Bioware headquarters in Austin, Texas to take part in an on site, fan site event held by Bioware. The event will start on the 24^th and last through the 26^th of April and Bioware has graciously offered to bring us there for this grand time.

Me, Derek “Swtorcrafter” Green and my partner in this grand adventure,  Serge “Swtorlife” Stanarevic will do our very best, to bring you, the fans of the Old Republic, the best coverage and information we can. Our goal is to bring you all as close to the action as we are allowed to. We have interviews planned, live picture blogs of our journey through this adventure via Twitter, and of course you can count on our witty and informative articles to satiate your appetite for Star Wars The Old Republic information!

Although we are probably going to have to hide from Daniel Erickson cause we know he wants to kick our butts for our portrayal of him in gungan attire,

and we might just have to hide from Blaine Christine as well so he doesn’t try to drag us into a LARP game!

Be sure to stay tuned to this site and also through Twitter for all the action from the fan sites and the Developers using the hashtag #SWTOUR (great name!  -credit to @rockjaw -aka- Stephen Reid, Senior Community Manager for Bioware)

You can follow the Swtor-Life team through Twitter at the following accounts, @SwtorLife, @SWTORCRAFTER, @MrWarlock_, @Grant__D, @ForceMeridian and @BorukBH

We hope that you will follow us and join us in this grand adventure!

I would like to make a personal thank you to Bioware for this opportunity!  They have done much more for me and my partner Serge than provide a way for us to enjoy what is to be one of the most awesome events in SWTOR pre-release history, they have given friends the opportunity to meet in real life.

Some of you that know us here, may know that I am located in the Central United States and Serge is located In Serbia.  While we are fully committed to making this fan site one of the best in the community for SWTOR, we never actually thought we would get the chance to meet in real life because of obvious distance issues.  Bioware, thank you, you have made our dream of one day meeting a reality, we will never forget this!

WOOT LET’s GET READY TO PARTY!

BIOWARE,

WE R IN UR BASE!

(almost 😛 )

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.      🙂

From the last blog post I did we looked at the developer blog “closer look at crew skills” by Patrick Mallot.  It was this piece of it that inspired this blog post and a lot of personal joy from me.

These are my personal opinions anyway.    🙂

“It’s worth noting that players will definitely need to be directly involved in the process when learning rare schematics”

That tells us that there will be such a thing as rare schematics, and that we as a player will have to be directly involved in the learning process.  Learning the schematic won’t be something that the player can pass on to the companion because the schematic will need to inscribe itself into the players learned items database so that the player can access the recipe later when he wants to craft that item from that certain crafting skill.

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If you ever wanted to find out who is behind these article and this site you have a chance to find out more by listening to the interview Vall from Tor Syndicate did with yours truly. I apologize up front for the nasty accent and all the language errors, but my speaking English is a bit rusty. I would like to thank the Tor Syndicate for this extraordinary experience and for all of their work in bringing the TOR community together. You can listen to the entire Tor Syndicate podcast that contains the interview by clicking here.

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.

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: