It’s lunchtime during the first of two Star Wars: The Old Republic immersion days at the EA Redwood Shores campus, and the game designers leading the event are panicking: Everyone is talking about Portal 2. Instead of discussing the three exclusive hours of SWTOR we just played, most of the writers are chatting about the Portal 2 release and single-player campaign, which everyone feels pales in comparison to its co-op.

Eventually one writer prompts another with, “So, what do you think of TOR?” (All the BioWare representatives refer to it as TOR.) And the reactions are positive: The voice acting is great, gameplay is fun, and maybe the trash planet Hutta doesn’t make for the most impressive starting area, but there are few complaints beyond game balance tweaks.

SWTOR has seen a lot of hype since it was announced in 2008. Everyone from Knights of the Old Republic fans to disillusioned World of Warcraft players has been anticipating its release, and so far, all the gameplay snippets the press have been afforded have lived up to the high expectations, if not exceeded them.

But SWTOR has been just out of reach for a little too long now. As a story-driven MMORPG, we can only connect to it so well with pieces of plot and teases of the innovative concepts that litter the game. Spending hours at a time with the game is a little better, but to dig any deeper emotionally, beyond the blushes of fanboyism we get with every trailer, we need the thing in our hands, we need a character that’s ours. Fortunately, BioWare recently confirmed the game will be out before this year is over, so we won’t wait much longer.

That’s not to say that there has been anything but consistent effort from the team behind the game. SWTOR’s story, which takes place 3,500 years before Star Wars IV: A New Hope, has been in development at least since 2006. According to Daniel Erickson, SWTOR’s lead writer, the writing team has generated 16 novels’ worth of written content for the game, one for each class specialization.

And that’s in development of the role-playing part of the game that plays to BioWare’s strengths. Creating their MMO, and then weaving the stories into its persistent landscape, has proved to be the most challenging part. The team has relied heavily on its members’ experience in developing past MMOs, aping off their solutions to common MMO problems, like how to place resurrection areas or distribute enemies and quest goals, and customizing them to fit BioWare’s style and various plots.

“They are sort of our canaries in the coal mine,” Erickson said of SWTOR’s designers and developers. Without them, he said, “you might start going down a path that someone already tried in an MMO and failed miserably.” The team has brought knowledge of many other non-MMO games as well, even looking to console-based sports games as inspiration for reward systems.

But Erickson notes too that editing is an important aspect of development, as it’s easy for MMOs to become overextended with mechanics and concepts that ultimately go unused. Of the game mechanics selection, Erickson noted that they needed to make sure “the ones you use are right for your specific game.”

One of BioWare’s biggest concerns is how MMO players, notorious for valuing cold minimization of effort for maximum results above everything else, will respond to their MMO interpretation, where story is supposed to be the main attraction. “MMO players will do whatever is the most efficient, even if it is the most boring,” said Emmanuel Lusinchi, an associate lead designer.

Because of this, the team has paid special attention to mechanics that will drive players back to the story, such as a holo-communication system that makes dialog with NPCs easier for groups, and have tried to make the storylines as compelling as possible. “It’s always story versus gameplay versus immersion,” Erickson said, and changing one will always affect the other two.

While we couldn’t fully attach to our characters over the two days we were allotted with the game, we were given free reign to get as far as possible in the PvE campaign, talk to any NPCs, take on any quests, and run any flashpoints we could find (but no one got more than one). And the game is looking great — expansive, immersive, even a little moving in parts.

There are still portions of the game BioWare won’t discuss, indicating it still has a long way to go before the launch this year. But the gamemakers have accomplished the meshing of online play and RPG better than any of their predecessors.

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