Ten Ton Hammer - Taking MMO Gamers to the Next Level!

Questions by Cody "Micajah" Bye and Media Group C

Answers by Jeff Dobson, Art Director, BioWare Austin

The announcement for Star Wars: The Old Republic has now been stewing for nearly a week. Since that time, fans that are anticipating the upcoming game have been scrutinizing every screenshot and piece of concept artwork available to them. Perhaps the most attention has been spent on the graphics, where players have commented on everything, but most notably the size of the lightsabers.

Thankfully, the Ten Ton Hammer staff is on your side, and we asked BioWare's Art Director, Jeff Dobson, about the oversized lightsabers while we were at the BioWare media day in San Francisco among other things. Interested in Dobson's answer? Check out our interview!

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BioWare's hoping to run SWTOR on a variety of machines.

You've talked about creating a game that can run on a wide variety of machines. Do you have a target specification that you're aiming for?

Somebody has a target in mind. That said, we're not quite ready to talk about that today. It's going to be very reasonable. We have a lot of very smart guys that have worked on MMOs before, so they're going to make smart decisions. But it is one of our goals to run on a wide variety of computers.

Will the game be able to scale up if you have a really kick ass computer?

Ideally, I want to scale up frame rate. If you have the biggest, baddest machine, you should be able to run at some pretty high frames per second. To me, however, it's much more important that I can play my MMO on my bad ass desktop machine and my old clunky machine and my laptop. I think that's really important, because gamers should be able to play on any of their computers.

People want to play wherever they're at, so if you're building a game to run just on those high end machines, you're shorting people. Personally, I don't think it's worth it to say that it *can* run on the laptop, but it'll look like garbage. That's not what I want to create. I want to create a game that has great visuals all the time. I'll actually take a step back to make sure that we're creating something that can run everywhere rather than just creating a game that looks perfect.

Star Wars is an immense IP. From an art standpoint, are there going to be a lot of options for players when we want to go and create a character? How are you going to achieve this - are you going to use sliders or options?

Customization is really key in an MMO, and if we don't have those character creation options we'd be shorting the players. Beyond that, we're trying to tell stories the BioWare way, and that includes the fact that if you see silly-looking people running around in your world that breaks the immersion. That said, it's a bullet point feature in any MMO and is very high on my personal list.

We're really trying to go for options that give us the most "bang for the buck". People are always talking about sliders that adjust your nose size or align your eyes in miniscule amounts, but - to us - it's much more about the silhouette.

How are you differentiating the look of the Jedi or Sith compared to someone that's a "Han Solo" type of character?

We spend a lot of time trying to capture what each of the classes are all about. Whether it be a Jedi or a Sith, we really design things so players can tell who a player is. It is really important that players look like what they expect to look like, simply because it breaks their immersion.

We ask questions like - would players be able to see weapons on their characters? Well, we just take a look at the movies and see that yes, players do have their weapons strapped in obvious view.

Are you going to be taking locations from any of the first two games and putting them in SWTOR?

Obviously Korriban is in the game already. In the previous game, the characters were just starting their digging on this world, and now all the equipment has been cleared away and buildings have been found. Of course the statues are still along the walls and all of the tombs are still there, but now there's a spaceport and a giant pyramid at the end of the valley.

So yes, there will be a lot of places from the other games in SWTOR. That's one of my jobs as Art Director, taking things that exist and putting our own spin on things; reinterpret the visual and put it back out there.

BioWare is going for more a "theme park" approach with SWTOR.

Creating one MMO world is a pretty daunting task, and Star Wars has dozens of worlds - if not hundreds or thousands. How do you make a game that's not overwhelming from a content standpoint, but still feels big from a player standpoint?

I think it's a fine line. We definitely have more of the "theme park" approach; we need to still make things big but at the same time making sure that players don't have to walk 15 minutes to get to where they want to go. When we world design, everything is first measured in footsteps you take. How long does it take to get from Point A to Point B - that's what drives our levels. There are a lot of things you can do to make the worlds look magnificent while still allowing players to move quickly between locations.

Are you trying to make the environments of the time period look "older" than what we see in the original trilogy? That was one of the big complaints from Episode I - III and we were wondering how you were going to approach that.

We definitely think that Star Wars is all about that "lived in" and "gritty" feeling that you get with the original trilogy. It's a dirty sci-fi; it's not a polished and clean sci-fi. It definitely draws people into the world.

Is that the kind of approach you're taking?

Definitely. We definitely want our worlds to feel lived in. We want that "Star Wars-y" feel. If we get a piece of art that doesn't look like it belongs in Star Wars, we give it back to the artist with some suggestions and make sure it's done right. For example, on Tatooine there may be a mud hut that someone lives in, but that mud hut will have a super high-tech panel on the wall.

That's what Star Wars is - practicality combined with the extreme high tech.

Lightsabers look REALLY big in the screenshots...

We're actually still tweaking that. That said, we do want the weapons to feel just a little bit oversized. We're always trying to think about that "show off" factor. We definitely don't want to make them too small and miss out on that show-off factor.

For those that are concerned about the screenshots, I think the lightsabers look bigger in those pictures than they actually are. But without a doubt we want to have that "oversized" weapon feel in the game for the guns and the lightsabers both. By making the weapons a little bit oversized, it makes you feel cool to have that giant gun in your hands.

However, I do think the size needs a bit of tweaking from what you see in the screenshots.

Both the lightsaber and the Force Choke will receive some tweaking before the game is ever released.

In one of the screenshots, it looked like a Sith Lord was choking a Jedi and the girl had a colorful animation ring around her neck. Is that something we're going to see on all the abilities? Typically in the movies you can't really see the Force being used....

I think we'll have to do some sort of animation effects, but I'm not entirely satisfied with that particular screenshot. This is one of the areas that we do want to innovate, because the Force shouldn't be "magic" but it can't be like the movies either, because it didn't really show anything... it was all about the action. We can't cut the camera and stuff like that.

What we do do with this, will be innovative and it will probably be different than what you see in the screenshot.

How are you going to create a bunch of different iterations on different items? It seems like you can't do that much with something like a lightsaber...

Sometimes the artists will just get together and have brainstorming sessions and we'll draw one thing for awhile. Different takes on an element like a lightsaber. If you look at the comics, they do a lot of cool things where items like a lightsaber will have a certain amount of novelty. There are definitely a lot of different things you can do.

Other than the movies, do you use pieces from the comic books and/or novels for inspiration?

One of our bigger inspirations is actually the original 2D Clone Wars mini series. We definitely drew a few things from there, including the clone trooper armor over the Jedi robe. You look like a Jedi, but you look intense at the same time, it was perfect.

Watching the Star Wars brand really evolve lately has given us a lot of confidence to push the envelope and try things. The cartoon was really over the top in some areas, and we want to do things like that and just have these "big" sort of elements as well.

Let's be big. Let's be loud. We're on a small screen, so let's make it bigger than life.

What's your pipeline like when you're creating a world?

The writer's write it, and then it goes to our world designers to plot things out. We then turn it over to our concept artists to "look it in" and give us a vision of what to work with. If we really want to take a look at an element, we'll get our writer, concept artist, and world designer together and we'll work out what this place is going to be and what the theme is going to be.

There's a lot of communication, and for the art team the storytelling is really important to us as well. What's going on in this place? Our writers love it when we come to them and ask "what are you trying to say?" It's like the immense shadow coming off the pyramid in Korriban. That's what we wanted to build around in that area - it's an oppressive regime that is casting a shadow across everything in its path. The shadow must fall across the valley.

It's elements like this where I put on the beret and say "this is art."

Companion characters will have customization options.

Will companion characters have the same sort of options and variants that are available for player characters?

There will be customization options, but we can't say too much about the companions at this point.

Are you working on the user interface?

Yes! We spend A LOT of time on the user interface. It's something that's really really important to us. We definitely want it to have the Star Wars look and feel. It's a challenge because we want players to just be able to sit down and play the game. We want it to be comfortable and intuitive and at the same time we want it to be as streamlined as possible. We're really happy with where we are right now with the UI. We think it's very very usable.

We test it out on people in the office who haven't played with the UI and most of them can sit down and figure it out fairly easily. That's really encouraging for us.

Will it be customizable?

Can't answer that yet.

What about real time cut scenes?

Can't answer that one either.

Finally, how are you going to make players feel "epic" without having equipment with enormous shoulder pads, floating bits, or giant swords?

Basically, we just have a whole wall of concept artwork that we have posted in the general order that we'd like players to find and equip these items. We'll continue to adjust the board as we put pieces in, and we definitely don't want players to look like "junk" when they start. We want players to look cool when they start, but we want 'em to look awesome when we get to the end.

If we miss the mark on an item, we just shift everything and move the scale around on what we think is appropriate.