During Massively’s coverage of this year’s Game Developer’s Conference in Austin, Texas, the staff published some interesting thoughts on a panel held by Damion Schubert, one of the original developers of Star Wars: The Old Republic. During the panel, Schubert discusses some of the difficulties in meshing together the elements of an MMO with pure story-driven elements– those most familiar to the BioWare team during SWTOR’s development. His presentation was quite frank, it seems, and he admitted that the team made a few mistakes in trying to accomplish their goal of creating a well-balanced, story-driven MMO:

If you have ever play any BioWare single-player game, then you know that the questlines can and will take you all over a given setting. Knights of the Old Republic had you visiting planets like Taris, Korriban, and Kashyyyk, finding bits of Star Map. Mass Effect allowed you to travel from one end of the Milky Way galaxy to the other attempting thwart Sovereign’s indoctrination of all known life. As Schubert pointed out in his presentation, in a single-player game, it doesn’t matter which of these planets you visit first because the NPCs scale based on your character’s level. However, he argued, “That’s not as easy to do in an open world, where different people of different levels are sharing the same space.” Consequently, BioWare “ended up kind of backing up that scale and going to a branching story.”

Schubert went on to discuss the sustainability of SWTOR, which is a subject that many of us understandably worry about. Schubert believes the current SWTOR team is on a better track now, and realizes where the game’s sustainability lies. Interestingly enough, he cites the game’s Legacy feature as a solid example of sustainable content, which might be true, but I think most SWTOR players would argue that the Legacy system isn’t actual content, and that content is king when it comes to sustaining any type of playerbase.

Check out Massively’s full take on the subject and the GDC panel here.

Earlier this week, Massively got a chance to interview Gabe Amatangelo, SWTOR’s Principal Lead PvP Designer. During the interview, Game Update 1.4 as well as the game’s fall move to free to play were discussed. Here are his thoughts on the model switch, which follow the original questions in bold:

I’m excited for the opportunity to see what a free-to-play model will do for TOR. However, there have been some mixed reactions regarding F2P in general. What is your take on F2P, and what do you believe it will add to the player’s experience in the game?

It will make galactic trade market entrepreneurs happy. Free-to-play members can buy but can’t list, meaning more customers with less competition. Who wouldn’t like that? My take is that what happened to the music industry is happening to online games. Free-to-play options are the future of most, if not all, online games. There are all types of players out there, and the ability to subscribe to a game — or multiple games — is a dividing characteristic. This will open the game up to more types of players to try or retry the game, which will be good for all players.

The bit about the Galactic Trade Network restrictions is interesting. It isn’t entirely surprising to see economy-based restrictions in general, but it is somewhat surprising to find out that F2P players won’t be able to list items whatsoever. SWTOR’s player-based economy could definitely use a boost, however, and part of me wonders if this is perhaps BioWare’s partial intention here.

Massively posted a two-part specific class guide to Huttball that offers tips and discuses strategies individual classes often use to succeed while playing a match in the Warzone. Players might think their particular class isn’t very useful in Huttball, but in reality, every class has a niche of sorts. Here is what the author says:

Admittedly, certain classes do have more utilities that make them a better fit for the game, but I believe every class has its role in this particular arena. And more importantly, I believe that every class can have fun and feel useful. However, some players need a bit of training.

The article goes on to explain specific strategies and abilities that players of various specs can think about using. It also describes the areas where each class will excel at in a Huttball match. In all likelihood, this advice is probably more suited toward newer players, but even experienced Huttball fans may learn a thing or two.

The MMO community has had a lot to say about Tuesday’s announcement since it went live. Many opinions are negative, many are encouragingly positive, and many lie somewhere in between. Most of us, I think, knew in the back of our minds that this may very well happen– the warning signs were there, after all– but the news nevertheless stung for many fans.

Star Wars: The Old Republic was a massive idea with a universe of awesome material to work with. BioWare started out strong, boasting a large budget and staff, and gave marketing plenty of attention. “It’s Star Wars. How can it go wrong?” many people rationalized. Sometimes a strong IP isn’t enough, and even the best of intentions and marketing tools can do nothing to stop a ship in need of repairs from hurtling toward the nearest docking bay. Does this mean SWTOR won’t be able to recover? Of course not. On the contrary– many fans think this is just what SWTOR needs– a totally new game plan.

Updated 7/23 with some Twitter feedback

Internet rumors can be strange, sometimes. At first glance, the following rumor seemed absurd and ridiculous to me, yet after it traveled around the world wide web for a few days and people still had things to say about it, well, you got me– I caved in and decided it was worth covering. Now, that’s not to say I believe any part of it, but it’s an interesting course of events to follow, at any rate.

Here’s the scoop– Massively covered the BioWare layoff rumors and Rich Vogel’s departure news a few days ago. In one of the comments, an anonymous poster left an interesting, uh, story, if you will. Read on to find out more.

The news keeps coming today as the press publishes more articles on crafting. Today we get Massively’s take on crafting. The article hits three major points in Missions, Crafting and Gathering.

Crafting in TOR can be done anywhere, and each companion can have a queue of five pieces in the cooker at a time. With five different companions, you can possibly have 25 pieces going at one time. So in comparison to other MMOs, it’s a bit of a wash. Even though you have to craft at a station in many similar MMOs, the items are completed nearly instantaneously. In TOR, you may craft from anywhere, but there is a longer timer on the item creation

The article is overall praising about the different systems but does point out that there are few things that remain to be balanced.

In the last few weeks, Massively had two different staff members playing through Star Wars: The Old Republic preparing for the lifting of the media embargo. They had plenty of time to get to play the game in the comfort of their own home and not in a staged press demo. The two writers are Jef Reahard and Larry Everett. The links given go straight to their impressions.

Jef’s opinion is much to be expected from someone who likes sandbox games. He spent half the article discussing the distaste for a static storyline and themepark style gameplay. He really did enjoy the visuals and the over all gameplay, however his bias was pretty evident (and he admits that at the onset of the article). The article really discusses the overall feeling of the game and doesn’t go into too much detail.

Larry’s article had more detail in it. He went over his initial impressions of crew skills, leveling and included some of the plot-lines for the Smuggler and Jedi Consular (Spoiler Alerts in the article!). He really enjoyed the Smuggler storyline and did not quite enjoy the Consular one. He also promises further detail in his own column on Massively.

Overall, this first article in the now lifted media embargo tells us that we have much more to look forward too. Hopefully we can get some great details in the day to come.