SWG Vault Exclusive Interview - February 22, 2005
By Gordon Walton

02-22-2005 -

There have been a LOT of changes going in to Star Wars Galaxies over the past few weeks, and some new changes about to hit. We're not talking little changes, we're talking BIG changes. A complete overhaul to the Galactic Civil War. The removal of the TEF system. The previous publish read like someone's wishlist of changes. What's going on over there? SWG Vault decided to find out, and managed to get Gordon Walton, Head of the SOE Austin studio, to take time out of his busy schedule and answer some questions for us.

SWG Vault: Wow! Amazing stuff going on over the past few weeks, everyone is really excited about the upcoming changes. It looks like the new devs are finding their feet quite nicely.. can we expect changes to keep coming out at the rate they are currently being released?

Gordon Walton: Yes, at least for the next couple of months you should expect more of the same!

SWG Vault: So.. you have a bunch of new devs on staff and we have seen the list of new "teams". Can you tell us approximately how many people are devoted to each team, especially the Combat Upgrade Team, and what each "team" is working on right now?

Gordon Walton: Rather than lay out our entire org chart, I will say that Combat Upgrade has the largest internal team structure, and some of the other teams, particularly Live, Infrastructure and GUI are regularly taking on tasks to help the Combat Upgrade team out. After keeping the Live service up and running well, Combat Upgrade is our highest priority.

SWG Vault: With the added Dev Staff, will we see a return of a "Story Arc" to the game, and if so, do you have an idea of where that addition fits into the development timeline?

Gordon Walton: We don't have a plan for any uber story arcs at this time. You will start to see story arcs within sets of the new quests we are putting into the game in the coming publishes. Think of them as short stories more than epic novels for now. 🙂

SWG Vault: While we do understand that things change and dates change, do you have an estimated date/timetable for the CU to go into beta? Live?

Gordon Walton: When it's ready. Seriously, with a change this radical and momentous, it is really not possible to accurately predict a date particularly when we are going to be incorporating the Alpha tester and Beta tester feedback. We are working now to get it complete enough to blow our Alpha testers away with the initial test, which we project will start in a few weeks.

SWG Vault: Do you see populations increasing since the recent announcements? A little or a lot?

Gordon Walton: Yes, we have seen a renewed interest expressed in playtime and subscriber levels based on our recent publishes and announcements. We’ve also been tracking some very positive discussions on not only our own forums, but also other gaming related sites. We’re very happy with the community reaction that we’ve seen!

SWG Vault: The new planned player event additions are a great idea, giving us the tools we need to create our own content. Do you have anything more of this type of thing planned?

Gordon Walton: Absolutely! We think that giving players tools like this is a big part of our future and are working on adding more player event tools.

SWG Vault: What are your plans to make the player cities more useful? Currently, most cities are centralized guild storage rather than active communities. Is there something you'd *like* to do?

Gordon Walton: There are dozens of things we like to do and many of these ideas have come out of feedback from our players. While this is not a current concentration for our development effort, almost every publish will see incremental enhancements to our cities and player associations.

SWG Vault: There have been hints of the next expansion, can you give us any details? Hints? Teasers?

Gordon Walton: This is not in my purview, I'll leave the announcements of expansions to our partners at LucasArts. P.S. It will be very, very cool though, and demonstrate where we are taking the SWG experience!

SWG Vault: What are your ultimate goals for the Galactic Civil War? We've seen some of it with the removal of TEFs and PVE/PVP Factional bases. What else would you like to see happen?

Gordon Walton: I would like to see it be what it is in the movies. The GCW conflict both provides a backdrop and drives the action within Star Wars. It should do that for our experience too. We will be taking the GCW to more planets and extending it to cover more professions. Everyone should have the opportunity to participate and in fact, everyone should be motivated to participate. It's exciting to us to give players a way to affect the actual worlds they live in.

We'd like to give the devs our thanks for taking the time to talk with us, we're really looking forward to the upcoming changes in the game!

MMM ben erg benieuwd !