Interview with TOR Lead Concept Artist

[Tbone]

Full interview is here, but I thought I would piece out some interesting tidbits.

"We're really making this game for KoTOR fans, so someone who really enjoyed KoTOR will enjoy the heck out of this game as well."

"Can you elaborate and explain the wearables board we saw today in the panel?

Arnie: We have all the boards divided into class groups, and there are subgroups... let's take the Smuggler. This is the Smuggler progressing (level) 1 through 50. And we have all the different lines broken out: levels 1 to 5, 5 to 10, 10 to 15, 15 to 20, and all that. When we were initially planning all the different wearables for any class, we came up with sort of the hero pieces for each one -- about seven or eight different looks for each class. For the Smuggler: this is the Han Solo sort of Scoundrel, to the Lando Calrissian "bling," over to the "Space Cowboy," moves into the "Firefly" but hey, that is what Star Wars is. We developed more than that, but we paired it back to seven or eight different looks for each class... throwing out looks, adding to this, adding to that until every single class had its own unique looks. And enough given so throughout your play of your character, you're really going to progress through not just wearable 1, wearable 2, wearable 3 -- but totally different looks.

What is interesting about it is that still to this date, we're still looking at those boards, re-balancing, moving stuff around, saying "this looks higher level than this" and moving it around. Believe it or not, we're still adding to the world a couple of new wearables right now because there are some deficiencies. We're still messing with all of that. Even if I snuck you out photos of all of these right now, it would be helpful and wouldn't be exact because we'll be balancing this thing until it ships.

I'm first an artist, but secondary a game player, and I'm really into MMOs. I wasn't joking when I said at the panel today that "I'm really about phat loot." We really went to extremes to make sure each class looks like its class but really gets badass as you get higher and higher into progression. Let's say you missed the first couple of months and you log in as some newb, you go to Coruscant, and see the higher levels run by... you're going to go "hooooooooly crap!" There will be a lot of that."

"Arnie: We actually have a completely different loot process than WoW does. Our drops are different, our wearables are designed far different than WoW's are. This is coming from a guy who loves WoW, and I don't want to take anything away from that because if you have 11 million users, then you are doing something right. But in our game, when you are a Smuggler, you will in one form or another look like a Smuggler all the way through your game unless you purposely mismatch or go off the beaten track. You can do that in our game: you can play a Trooper and not look very Trooper-ish, but you really have to say "I really don't want to look very Trooper-ish."

For the most part, we have so many wearables that we designed now... it is like a joke when people walk into our office and say "holy cow!" We said upfront we need so many wearables because we have so many different classes and 1 through 50, this class has these wearables. We don't put this one on the Smuggler -- this is Trooper. There is plenty of gear, we can be the same level and look totally different, but we're both Troopers. That was very important to myself and the Art Director early on. We're going to try not to make that mistake if possible. I do understand why WoW did it; they make really good decisions on their team. But as a player, this bugged me and we tried to remedy it."

"It is funny how things change over the course of a game, so here is something that probably a lot of people wouldn't know: things change. A lot. And what happened in Star Wars: The Old Republic is that we did all of these creatures, then we all started playing the game, looked at each other and said "wait a minute... we're not trying to build WoW or DAoC." Being in the Star Wars universe isn't about rolling through the countryside killing creatures. So we revamped and moved that around a lot; rebalanced the planets -- adjusting away from creatures as much as possible sometimes. So right now, what we got currently is a Star Wars-y feel of enough creatures to feel like a real planet, but not too many that you feel like you aren't playing Star Wars anymore."

[Tbone]

And some bonus comments from another interview of another concept artist:

"I gave the world designers a painting and three weeks later, I walked by their desks and thought to myself, "interesting. He has my painting up as his wallpaper." And it was the actual world itself. They nailed it so perfectly that I mistook it for my own art.

They keep polishing it past that. We're still in polish for worlds that the general public would consider done a year ago. So we're really taking the time to give players the best looking Star Wars environment ever. We're really taking the time to do it especially because this is an MMO, and it keeps getting better and better. These world builders are top notch, and every time I look at their screens, I am blown away."

"But given that we're Star Wars: The Old Republic, it is one of the things where I really enjoy the ornate-ness of it. It is finding out a way to make that costume and that look very high level without taking it to the ridiculous level. Obviously we didn't want to go the WoW route, or the Mad Max shoulderpads as we like to call it. But we want to give the player the bling. That is what Arnie always calls it. We really take lessons from the actual films themselves, but we take them to the 100th degree... especially with the style of the conceptual artists of the films like Doug Chang and his ornate designs."

[Anamodiel]

I really, really like this.