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

Ten Ton Hammer: Can you talk about the UI at all? You showed it in the last movie...what were the little yellow segments on the lower left of the screen?

Dallas: We can't go into detail about the UI much...the combat UI we might be able to talk about specifics of sooner rather than later, but we're going to be able to playing with that for a long time.

MMOs are very complex, and I just can't guarantee that what I tell you is going to be 100% in at launch. So we can't talk about it.

Ten Ton Hammer: Can you discuss any of the scenes we saw in the movie regarding the kind of "choreographed combat" that you've talked about in earlier interviews? Maybe talk about how that might be influenced by the abilities / skills / powers that a player uses in the game?

Dallas: I don't think we're talking details about that yet, just because so much of that is also involved in the specifics of combat.

We really just wanted to emulate the cinematic, action-packed Star Wars combat. The decisions that Jeff [Dobson]'s combat team makes are based on those tenants - that it needs to be full of action and visceral. It needs to feel like it has an influence on the game, and it needs to be reactive in that the enemies are reacting to what you're doing.

Jeff Dobson: The combat animation team is really, really involved in what they're doing with the characters, and they're trying to raise the bar with what players are used to in MMOs.

We didn't want it to be the "combat dance" of standing in front of someone and simply swinging your sword back-and-forth. It's not believable, it's not fun, and it's been merely accepted as this sort of standard MMO convention. We want to change that.

Ten Ton Hammer: How do you go about picking the planets that go into the game? There are dozens of planets to choose from....how do you pick the right ones?

Alexander: We get a map and use some darts.

Hall: We use a giant fish bowl and pull 'em out one at a time.

Dallas: I mean, some of them are ones that people recognize simply because of their importance, and others are those that you recognize from Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, and others maybe just have an oblique reference somewhere in the extended universe.

Alexander: A good example of that would probably be Tython, because it really hadn't been explored much at all and people weren't really that familiar with it.

Dallas: It's a mixed bag, but I think the main component we take into picking is whether it fits into the story or not.

Hall: The idea was to find places where you could meet interesting characters, fight exciting creatures, and do amazing things.

Alexander: And there are other times where we wanted a specific role to be filled. I mean, think about Hutta... what's a Star Wars game without the Hutts and the underworld?

Dallas: More of that went on when we continued our development on the game  - we asked ourselves, "What are we missing here?" Or maybe we wanted to go to a place that we always wanted to explore.

Ten Ton Hammer: As the final question, where do you draw the line in the Star Wars universe? Obviously you can't have fan service to everything in the expanded universe that's been explored...

Jeff: In our development, I think we've tapped everything that really needs to be in the game. It's everything really cool that we can do. I mean, there are certain things that he had to do - and we had a list of those - and then it's just taking out those elements that don't fit perfectly into what we're trying to do.

Jake: The bounty hunter was a *perfect* example of something that we must have in the game. I mean, would we make this game and not have a bounty hunter class?

Dallas: This is another place where our partners at Lucas really helped us. We did have some ideas that were maybe "off the ranch" and we had to present those to the folks at Lucas to see what they thought and get their ideas.

Alexander: There wasn't anything in the game that was implemented just because "it fits." The bounty hunter needed to go in simply because it was a major part of the universe and was vital to almost every element of Star Wars.

That said, there are areas of the expanded universe that we could take and run with if they fit every part of our game. But we're not going to look at pieces and just include them in the game simply because they exist.

Ten Ton Hammer: Thank you guys for taking your time to talk to the Ten Ton Hammer readers, and I'm sure we'll chat again soon!