Gophn.com: Because a number of Xbox 360 and PS3 people are hoping for it and I don’t know if you’re confirming or not, but if you guys are saying just PC well then that’s it. PC only. Can we know the system requirements for it?

GW: No, they’re not published yet.

Gophn.com: Not published yet?

GW: We are definitely not intending it to be extremely high.

Gophn.com: That’s great.  I would like to be able to play it on my 3 year old gaming notebook.

GW: It’s going to more modest to let more people into the game because not every gamer changes out their machine for super hardcore machines.

Korriban Exterior concept art.

Gophn.com: Awesome.

GW: And our art style kind of reflects that too. Yeah, we’ve gone with a more stylized art style to not only give us more accessibility, but also to give us a more unique look so people can, when they see us reach out, they’ll know it’s our game and not some other game.

Jedi Temple concept art.

Gophn.com: Okay. When you start the game, what are you going to run into, what are you going to have to learn, or what character classes will be available?

GW: Well, we will have 8 character classes. We’ve only announced 3 plus the fact that we will have Jedi and Sith. So we’ve announced the Trooper, we’ve announced the Smuggler, and we’ve announced the Bounty Hunter. And so there’s more classes to come, but this is a time period when there’s lots of Jedi and lots of Sith so there’s no problem being a Jedi or Sith just like you would have been in Knights of the Old Republic.

Concept art for the “Jedi Class” and the “Sith Class”.

Gophn.com: Great. Well, some people always think about an MMO as lots of grinding and such. How long or how much will players have to grind in this game? What’s the max level? And so on. I just really want to know what kind of grinding we’re going to have to see them do or how do you level up in this game?

GW: So can you define “Grind” for me?

Gophn.com: Grinding [to me] is when you just go out and just fight monsters over and over to gain experience or finish little mini quests if you can or just go out there to do little missions here and there.

GW: So I define “grind” as knowing you’re going to have to do something you’ve already done to get somewhere.

Gophn.com: Over and over and over.

“Smugglers” class screenshots… do you want to be Han Solo?

GW: So our goal is not to have people grind. Our goal is to have discovery elements. Part of the reason we’re doing a story for every class is so that every time you play there’s the opportunity to uncover something you haven’t done before, to get an ability you haven’t gotten before. ‘Cause in my mind a grind means that there is no discovery; means that you just need to do this X amount of times to get to Y place.

Gophn.com: Yeah, I understand that, and find it a bit annoying as well.

GW: Well, there’s a group of MMO players that find a lot of comfort in that kind of activity because it’s predictable and they understand it. But everyone who doesn’t like that doesn’t play MMOs, right? And that’s one of the reasons that they go it’s stupid to grind in their worldview, right?…We think that you can have the best of both worlds. You can do a lot of stuff as long as there’s new elements to uncover while you’re doing it and it won’t feel like a grind if you don’t actually know everything that’s going to happen all of the time. So that’s one of the reasons behind doing a really story based game. And every class has it’s own unique story, several hundred hours of game play for every class.

“Bounty Hunter” class screenshots… gotta love that flamethrower.

Gophn.com: Wow. That’s quite a bit, several hundred [hours]. So my follow-up question was how big is this universe of Old Republic here that we’re talking about?

GW: The way we have calculated it is more content than every BioWare game ever done including the ones that will ship before us.

Gophn.com: Wow, really? That’s massive.

GW: By a lot. So when really, when you think about KoToR and KoToR 2… um, we’re KoToR 3 through KoToR (some high number)… so if you think about it you don’t spend more than a hundred hours playing all of the classes [in the KoToR 1 & 2]

Gophn.com: No, it wasn’t.

“Trooper” class screenshots… yay you’re not a clone yet.

GW: And we are several hundred hours for each class. And those classes are unique stories. They are not change the name and play the same stuff. Yeah, on some of them you might be on the same planet, you are going to merge with other classes on certain planets and play some of the same content, but your content is going to be for your class. And in fact, the decisions you make for your class will change that story so you and I can play the exact same story…

Gophn.com: So it is really like KoToR online.

GW: Yeah, and we can end up taking our characters into very different directions which means we’ll experience very different content. So we have a very large handcrafted game.

Gophn.com: That sounds amazing. Another thing we wanted to go over is teams or people. How would they interact in the game? If they were going to be in parties or guilds as one would say it, what are the max numbers? Or give us an idea of how epic a group of people traveling together can be.

GW: Well, we do have multiplayer storytelling. We have parties, we have guilds, we haven’t really talked about the mechanics or the limits yet. We’ll probably have upper high level raid type things for the game, but again we haven’t really worked all that out yet so we don’t really like to talk about it [at the moment].  We don’t want to hype something when we can’t give you the real details.

Jedi and Sith raids are going to be fun.

Gophn.com: Oh that’s fine…Well, what stage is it at? Is it pretty much at the end of the beta stage where it’s ready to go live?

GW: Oh no, we have a ways to go on the game.

Gophn.com: Because it looks polished when I saw some of the game play.

GW: Well, we have a lot of the game done, but not all of it’s polished to the level of the thing [gameplay footage] that you probably saw. So polish takes time. Tuning and polish takes time. We have a ways to go. I mean this is a huge game… we’ve done a big part of the game, but we still have a ways to go.

Gophn.com: Well, another thing we were wondering was when you get to beta stage, are you going to be having a certain amount of groups doing beta to test how it handles on the servers?

GW: Well, it’s a long time until we do that.

Gophn.com: Oh, I understand.

GW: We are close to beta though. Close to beta we are running through our own community. We have people signed up. We have about a quarter million people signed up. And we understand what their system specs are. So you know we’ll start with a lot of small testing and we’ll move on from there. Again, we’ve done a lot of in-house testing with outside people already. We do a lot of focus testing. We do a lot of version builds testing along the way because you can’t really make games without consumer feedback.

Gophn.com: No doubt.

GW: Anybody who makes games without consumer feedback is deranged…

Gotta love the force lightning.

Gophn.com: I’ll say I’ve run into a good amount of them too on the floor, a few of them. But it sounds great. You guys know what you’re doing. I have no doubts about that. The hype is not just hype. I know this game is probably going to live up to it. I’m excited and I’m afraid to get into an MMO because it’s going to kill a lot of time.

GW: I am too. You know, our content you can snag an hour or two hours a day. You don’t have to spend a massive amount of time. Yeah, we’re not trying to make a big grindy [game]…

Gophn.com: Yeah, exactly or we’re afraid that we’ll fall behind.

GW: I do that right now. I mean I play an hour or two hours a night. That’s what I do.

Gophn.com: That sounds good if it’s like that. I’m afraid I’m just going to sit there for like 8 hours.

GW: Some like that though.

Gophn.com: You don’t want to stop sometimes.

GW: I don’t have the time for it though, so I have to do what I can, but I actually enjoy what I do…

Gophn.com: Well, thank you very much. We appreciate your time and hope you guys will continue to strive forward to make this perfect product because I think it’s epic.

GW: You’ll see more stuff coming up over the next few weeks and months.

To be continued…..

____________________________________
Conclusions gained from this interview:

• did he say “CLOSE TO BETA” ….. hellz yeah.
• Going to be driven by story, like the KoToR series
• Has 8 classes, 5 of which are known (Smuggler, Trooper, Bounty Hunter, Sith, and Jedi)
• Going to be on the PC only (sorry console owners)
• One can easily kill a hundred hours on a single class in this game
• System Requirements should be modest and not too extreme
• Looks like this MMO won’t force you to “grind” too much … yay!
• will have more content than any BioWare games to date.  Wow.