NEWS
by Mark Barley
BioWare To Be Aggressive With SW:tOR Post-Launch
BioWare co-founders Ray Muzyka and Greg Zeschuk have gone on record as stating that their firm's plans for the upcoming MMORPG Star Wars: The Old Republic post-launch will be "aggressive".
In a recent interview with GI.biz the founding fathers stated;
“It’s a long term commitment, that’s the way we’re looking at it,” said Muzyka. “It’s definitely not a fire and forget but more of a… we have a really aggressive plan post launch to build content and take the feedback to heart that we’re getting from players and what they want for continued expansions, and use that feedback to build new content, so we’re releasing regular content drops and regular expansions after launch, and really accommodating what the players are asking for, dependant on what they find most fun in the game.”
BioWare is aware that maintaining an MMO with new content consistently is a major commitment, but they're up to it and prepared for it. “We’ve surveyed users, know a lot about what they expect, and that’s actually one of their expectations,” said Zeschuk. “So the two really big expectations from users are one, that really good reliable service and number two, is constant content. So we’re asking for them to stay with us for years, so we reciprocate by giving them stuff to do for years, and that’s a fair trade and that’s very important.
“Like Ray said it’s ultimately driven by them, finding what they like the most. We may have plans right now but after we’ve launched for a few months we might go ‘whoah, we never expected that this would be so popular, we’ll make more of these and less of these.’
“It’s very fan driven. It’s not reactive, you watch what people are doing and you learn. One thing that we’ve done with the testing that’s really interesting also is that we’ve changed people’s behaviour. So you can test how often people are grouping, and you change the content and they group a different amount, based on what you’ve done. So you can actually adjust their behaviours based on what you give them to do in the world, so you can gently direct them where you want them to go but also see what they do a lot of.”
Star Wars: The Old Republic is out on December 20 in the US and December 22 in the UK exclusively on the PC.
“Like Ray said it’s ultimately driven by them, finding what they like the most. We may have plans right now but after we’ve launched for a few months we might go ‘whoah, we never expected that this would be so popular, we’ll make more of these and less of these.’
“It’s very fan driven. It’s not reactive, you watch what people are doing and you learn. One thing that we’ve done with the testing that’s really interesting also is that we’ve changed people’s behaviour. So you can test how often people are grouping, and you change the content and they group a different amount, based on what you’ve done. So you can actually adjust their behaviours based on what you give them to do in the world, so you can gently direct them where you want them to go but also see what they do a lot of.”