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

Ten Ton Hammer: The one part of MMOs right now that I feel has pulled away from the story is the "meta-gaming" aspect of things. You finagle with stats and you finagle with gear, and that really pulls me out of the game. Is there some way that you're building the idea of stat / gear progression into the story?

Dallas: The one thing that we've talked about specifically - and what we can talk about at this point - is the idea of Light Side and Dark Side system. You're making decisions within a story and you're making decisions that are actually driving your character one way or another.

You have enough information to know that you're about to go tell someone to jump off a bridge - and that is a negative thing to do - and that will actually filter into your character. That's something that appeared in Knights of the Old Republic, and we want to make sure if you go very Dark Side within your story - and there's latitude within each story to go one way or the other - you'll have abilities that are available to you because you went really Dark Side or really Light Side.

All of these decisions are actually going to filter into not just your basic story, but your relationships with NPCs including your companion character and your character progression. It's going to change your entire experience with the class compared to someone else's experience with the class.

We both might be playing the smuggler, but we're very different characters based off our choices.

Ten Ton Hammer: Will that even filter into things like gear?

Dallas: I don't think there's a ton of detail on gear...

Jake: What we're trying to do with our progression is intertwine it with the story. Dallas alluded to it, and I think to pull that off will be extremely cool.

Ten Ton Hammer: Most MMO games don't seem to have a lot of "stickiness" right now except for the 800 pound gorilla standing in the corner known as World of Warcraft. The Star Wars IP will obviously help you a lot, but what areas are you really focusing and keying on that will make your game stickier than past releases?

Dallas: Again, I think it goes back to story. Obviously, that would be the simple answer. To lengthen that, we're just making sure that all of our MMO systems are the best versions of those systems that we can create. That said, the differentiator is the story.

We want players to understand that you're going to be getting a totally different experience if you play the smuggler all the way to the end, and then pick up the bounty hunter to play the next day. This isn't the type of experience where you just want to have the skills that you'll receive with a different maxed out character, but in order to do that you have to play through content that is going to be exactly the same.

That's not our game.

Our game is players saying, "I want to see what the bounty hunter is like!" And the story is compelling and I get to make cool choices throughout the experience. At the end, I'll have a character that is at the end game, but I may want to try *another* class on top of the first two simply because the story will be completely different.

I've played MMOs, and I usually dabble with a variety of classes until I find one or two that I level up and progress them as far as I can. I think our game is going to work differently, while it's certainly not proven, that's the experience that I've had so far.

The story these guys are writing are very cool and very unique. I can imagine myself playing three or four to the end game, There's really that much to the game, and that's where our stickiness will come from.

Hall Hood: It's a form of exploration in our game. As well as exploring the world, you're exploring a story...you're exploring new characters... finding new NPCs that you wouldn't meet otherwise.

Jake: Just to take it away from the story a little bit, if you want to talk about sheer playability...there are exciting new combat mechanics being put in the game. We're not talking in detail about any of this stuff, but rest assured that the action we're showing - which you might be able to pull out of some of the videos - we're trying to do that from beginning to end.

I mean, we haven't even shown anything to the public yet past level eight. We have really, really exciting character classes that each feel totally awesome. If you're a guy that just wants to power through a bunch of those and just have a really compelling combat experience at the top of the game, that's an option for you. We're already proving that to ourselves, and if folks just want to fight - and that's the pillar that they love - they're going to be very satisfied.