ZAM Editor-in-Chief Chris "Pwyff" Tom spoke to SWTOR Game Director James Ohlen about launch day preparations, legacy system updates, SWTOR's short-term development plans, and much more!

ZAM: Back on that legacy system. I won't pry too much here, but there wasn't much content during closed beta testing with the legacy system. We just built up levels and got that legacy name. Can you share any of your legacy system plans? Maybe... account-wide items?

Ohlen: So what we have at launch is the legacy system experience point system. We wanted to let players unlock their legacy early so they could gain legacy experience points from the very beginning. The second stage of the legacy system is when those experience points and legacy levels will give you something. We're already well on the way to producing that stuff. I can't say too much here, but the legacy system will be granting things like new abilities and powers, new privileges, bind-on-legacy items, and things that will benefit all of your characters across your legacy. 

The original inspiration for that was because Star Wars has a lot of family in it, so we wanted to do something with it. It's going to be pretty cool. I don't want to spoil anything, but if you see a character who has a high level legacy running by, he's going to be able to do things where you'll say, "Holy crap, what did he just do there? I want to be able to do that!" So I think people will be pretty excited about the legacy system once it comes online.

ZAM: I forget to check this during the testing, but legacies are cross-faction between Empire and Republic?

Ohlen: Yep! That's the Star Wars thing! Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker!

ZAM: Oh right! That's the iconic legacy of the Star Wars franchise! I can't believe I forgot... 

Moving on, I just wanted to talk about consequences in SWTOR and how it has been for you in trying to get players invested in their characters and their decisions, while not making the focus of the game all about researching "ideal" choices. I know that much earlier in development, you allowed players the opportunity to lose their companions permanently, but then some players would get rid of all their companions and the complaints would pour in. How has it been balancing consequence versus player choice freedom?

Ohlen: It hasn't been too bad. We're very similar to BioWare single-player games, like Mass Effect and Dragon Age. Even in those games, when you're designing a decision tree and you're trying to settle on the impact that player decisions will have, what you try to do - just to make the budget of the game plausible - is you don't want to have every choice have a huge impact on the game. You need to pick very specific choices that will impact the player the most, and often those most important choices will have the greatest impact near the end of the game. I guess this is more of a production concern, because if you allow players to make decisions that entirely change their experience throughout the rest of the game, you would have to build a one billion dollar game! [laughs]

We've done the same thing [as Mass Effect and Dragon Age] in giving players lots of choices while showing the players the impact of their choices. I don't know if you noticed during the beta, but we actually added a system where players who you saved, helped, or even hurt will message you afterwards (sometimes days after) giving you a bit of story closure. Sometimes they'll send you a reward if you helped them.

ZAM: If you choose to betray a character, they might send you an email cursing you for what you've done.

Ohlen: Exactly. And on bigger decisions, we like to keep the impact of those decisions close to the end of the chapters. So you'll see the consequences of your actions at the end of chapter one, chapter two, chapter three, etc. We've had a lot of experience with BioWare games in telling players, "Hey, your actions are actually having an impact!" without breaking the bank. So we've essentially been following the same strategy as previous games.

ZAM: I don't want to keep you pinned down for too long here, so last two questions. The first would be a question on actual gameplay impact versus stated reward. When I was playing a Bounty Hunter, I decided to go straight for the maximum reward and the most credits. One thing that struck me, however, was that when I played a Jedi Sage going along a standard light-side path, I was actually making more money than my Bounty Hunter! And I found that throughout my Bounty Hunter missions, I'd notice that NPCs would promise me huge rewards and enormous bounties, but when it came time for a payout, the actual rewards weren't reflective of their hype. Has it been difficult trying to meld SWTOR's creative fiction with MMO gameplay balance? Has this new element of balancing for online gameplay been detrimental to creating a convincing story experience?

Ohlen: That's something we always want to think of. When we're creating the classes, crafting the stories, and building those items, we definitely want those to be evocative of the class. For example, the Bounty Hunter is all about hunting down bounties. Honestly, all of the classes don't need to be perfectly balanced in terms of rewards, but you bring up a good point with the Bounty Hunter! After launch we might decide that the Bounty Hunter should get better rewards, credit-wise, than the other classes, since it does make fictional sense. We could actually do that without unbalancing the economy too much. Good feedback! [laugh] I'm marking that down right now!

ZAM: The only drawback I can see would be that players would soon start to create Bounty Hunter "money making" alternate characters rather than trying to make money on their main character.

Ohlen: There are ways to do it. If the Bounty Hunter makes more money than the other classes in the "level-up" game, it's not as big a deal as if he was making more money at level 50. Sometimes in the level-up game, we can err on the side of being a little bit unbalanced, as long as we bring the balance back in the elder game.

ZAM: OK, last question! How do you go about establishing any sort of storyline canon? For all the classes, at the end of their story missions, there are momentous decisions to be made that have a huge impact on the overarching SWTOR story. How do you move forward from a tangled web like that?

Ohlen: Oh, you're wondering what actually happens with the rest of the Star Wars galaxy (novels, comics, books) and how player's choices affect those?

ZAM: Yeah.

Ohlen: The fact is, we haven't put too much thought into it. We didn't put too much thought into it with Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic either. We had a good and evil ending, but it was only years later that we decided that the good ending and Revan being a man was the official ruling on canon. I think we'll probably have something similar. Or maybe not! It's just something we aren't focusing on right now.

ZAM: Alright, and that's it! Thank you so much; it's been a great interview!

Ohlen: We're kind of in a lull right now leading up to launch, so I had some time. It's been fun talking to you! Thank you very much!

Christopher "Pwyff" Tom, Editor-in-Chief.

Want more SWTOR reading while you wait for Early Game Access? Check out ZAM's two-part SWTOR Preview! In Part One, we cover gameplay and SWTOR's MMO world, and in Part Two, we cover SWTOR's unique features and give some overall thoughts!

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