Features

At GDC 08, we sat down with LucasArts Producer Jake Neri and others from Star Wars Galaxies to discuss the game's direction in 2008. They spoke of a new development plan to bring more updates to their fans and incorporate more of their feedback.

In Update #2 they plan to focus on the Entertainer and Medic, not with a full overhaul, but with an assortment of changes and additions that have been highly requested from those segments of the community. This Update is due out in the next couple weeks.

Chapter 9 follows later this month and is headlined by a new heroic instance and epic villain from Star Wars lore: Exar Kun. Heroic instances are top-end dungeons, and this is their first new one since Chapter 7. In tune with their desire to be more reactive to the community, Exar Kun was chosen from a list of epic villains that the development team polled the community on during the planning phase of this Chapter.

Read more after the jump.

Former SWG WarCry staffer and current SOE programmer Matt "AdeptStrain" Boudreaux gives us an inside look at the animation system within SWG in this latest developer diary:

Once the artists have created the various bone animations, we need a way to assign those assets to objects in our world. This is where our designers come in. Our designers actually have a great toolset to decide which animation should be played, depending on the type of weapon the player is using, the skill they are using, and many other factors.

Click below to read the rest.

SWG System Designer Thomas "Hanse" Eidson checked in with another Dev Diary, this time giving us an inside look at some of the unique challenges the team encountered while building new spaceships for Chapter 8:

The space system introduced with Jump to Lightspeed has been tweaked and fixed in small ways in the last few years. New ships were added to the system later, but the designers who added those ships are no longer with the company and their methods for adding them were not documented. I volunteered to add the new ships as I have fixed space issues previously and had the most experience with the systems involved. Since then, much of the design team has worked on space and many of us are now very knowledgeable of those systems.

Click below to read the rest.

The period on December referred to as the "holidays" has come to mean many things and in this article, Robert Cox looks at what people can expect in some of the major MMORPGs. How do these virtual worlds celebrate this time of the year when so many have the time off work to peek inside?

If there's one thing the Horde and Alliance can agree on, it's a party. All across Azeroth and Outland, festive decorations adorn towns and cities as both sides begin their annual celebration of the Feast of Winter Veil.

Read more after the click.

It's the holiday season and Chapter 8 is on the horizon. As an early Life Day gift, SWG Lead Developer Thomas "Blixtev" Blair gave WarCry an early preview:

Space is big. Really big. And, at least in the Star Wars: Galaxies universe, it just got a bit bigger.

Fresh on the heels of one of the largest updates since the NGE, the SWG development team is in the final testing stages on Chapter 8, which was scheduled to be added to the Test Center servers today.

Click below to read the rest and check out some exclusive screenshots.

Chapter 7 has launched and now we do our usual post-chapter State of the Game update. Lead Designer Thomas Blair and Producer Jake Neri drop in to pen a complete update on where Star Wars Galaxies sits today and where it's headed.

The Collections system allows players to get three primary kinds of collections: click collections, inventory collections, and kill collections. Click collections involve clicking an object in the world to "collect" it. Inventory collections are something you loot from the corpse of a creature. And kill collections involve killing a specific creature. Each kill collection will have a counter, with some requiring that you kill hundreds of creatures. Even more challenging is when we make collections out of other collections. There are multiple ways to find a collection, and we even built a system so players can track who was the first on each server to finish a collection. . "Server firsts," or the person on each server to finish a collection, are not only tracked on the SWG website, but also in the collection journal interface. Any player can open their journal, mouse over a particular collection, and see who finished it first.

Read more after the jump.

John Smedley is the President and CEO of Sony Online Entertainment. We had a chance to talk to him by phone last week about his company, the games they make and where they're going. Here's a sample:

"We are very focused on taking the grind out of our next round of games," he said simply. "Our next generation is not trying to do what we did in this generation." He cited The Agency, with its more mature theme, FPS elements and cinematic-storytelling as an example.

It's been a turbulent path for Smedley and SOE. The online game division of Sony began when the company purchased Verant, the studio behind EverQuest of which Smedley was a co-founder. That blossomed into "The Station", a game hub that has since been the model for the entire industry. It included EQ and a host of smaller games, like Tanarus, an online tank-combat game, whose mechanics were a forerunner to games like Battlefield.

Read more after the jump.

At AGDC, WarCry's Rob "Sabrehawk" Cox spoke to the Star Wars Galaxies team about their IP-driven MMO. For quite some time, SWG has been among the most controversial of games and at the conference in Austin, the team addressed the past, present and future. SOE Austin studio head John Blakey and Senior Brand Manager Debysue Wolfcale featured prominently in the discussion.

"What we're doing is, like the Beastmaster compared to the Creature Handler," said John Blakely, SOE-Austin's vice president of development. "The Beastmaster is a lot more deep, a lot more integrated into the gameplay, a lot more supportive of the other professions, and things like that.

"You know, being fans of the game ourselves, we wanted to get those things back in. but it's not just a revisit; it's an improvement. I mean if you look at the players who have returned during this housing pack up event, what you get is a lot of people saying, 'Wow, this is a lot better than CH.'

Read more on the next page.

In Part 3 of SWG WarCry's interview series from SOE Fan Faire 2007 in Las Vegas, we talk with SOE Producer Lorin "DeadMeat" Jameson and SWG Lead Designer Thomas "Blixtev" Blair about the state of SWG, it's future and what makes the current development team tick. Be sure to check out Blixtev's shoes ... they're hawt.

Click the video link to the right to check it out, and don't forget to take a look at all our Fan Faire coverage, plus a few extras.

 
Part 1: SOE Director of Community Relations Alan "Brenlo" Crosby

Part 2: SWG Systems Designer Mark "Tunso" Halash and SWG Events Manager Jason "Pex" Ryan.

In Part 2 of SWG WarCry's interview series from SOE's Fan Faire 2007 in Las Vegas, we sit down with SWG Systems Designer Mark "Tunso" Halash and SOE Events Manager Jason "Pex" Ryan, and find out a little more about the Storyteller system, the idea behind it, what's in store for the future (space?) and what effect it's had on the game.

Click the video link to the right to check it out and click here to view all our Fan Faire coverage, including our interview with SOE Director of Community Relations Alan "Brenlo" Crosby.

Next up: SWG WarCry interviews SOE Producer Lorin "DeadMeat" Jameson and SWG Lead Designer Thomas "Blixtev" Blair