Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/57248
Special Gaming Section each confronting his own emperor in view of all other players." A traditional way to handle this type of situation is through instancing, whereby a new version of an area is created for each group that enters it. While instancing does a fine job of isolating the player and his or her group mate from the rest of the MMO population, it does too good of a job and makes it easy for the players, in an instance, to feel entirely disconnected from the rest of the MMO world, he adds. BioWare instead developed "phases," which are simply instances that do not re- quire a loading screen, so the player barely notices that he or she is entering or leaving one. This allows the developer to keep play- ers connected to the general population, while also allowing them to enjoy their own story moment without exterior interference. From the players' perspective, they just hap- pen to enter a room that seems quieter than the rest of the world. This is a case whereby technology allows the developer to bring the player's story to life, even in a crowded mul- tiplayer environment. The scale of aesthetics with gameplay. Technology Drives The Force According to Emmanuel Lusinchi, associate lead designer, there are two pieces of technol- ogy that really helps Star Wars: The Old Repub- lic come to life. The first is the studio's com- plete voice-over dialog system. "Fortunately, we've had plenty of experience with voice-over at BioWare, with games such as Mass Effect and Dragon Age, so we were able to rely on well-established processes and technologies [such as lip synching]," he says. More important, the group was able to realistically assess how much work this was going to entail—and how much money it was going to cost—before committing to this approach. "It is truly a monumental task dealing with a quantity of assets rarely seen in game de- velopment and with a very rigid production pipeline. You need to schedule around real actors, some of them in foreign countries," Lusinchi points out. "However—and here's the important part—this tech, even though it is not particularly new or particularly complex 28 February/March 2012 to code, really brings a sense of immersion to the game. Well, to a certain extent anyway, because what we've found, and what all play- ers know, is that an uninteresting dialog is still uninteresting with full voice-over. So that's a place where the technology is an enabler, but the creative part is still what really matters in the end." The second technology that drives the new game is more subtle, according to Lusinchi, and that's the phasing system. Star Wars: The Old Republic is both defined by its story and, since this is an MMO, by its multiplayer inter- actions. Unfortunately, story and multiplayer do not always play nice with each other, and it's sometimes a struggle to balance one with the other. "The example we used while developing the game was the confrontation between Luke and the emperor in Return of the Jedi," explains Lusinchi. "That particular experience would have been somewhat spoiled if the player was in a room full of other players, either queuing up and waiting for the emperor to respond, or universe, with its thousands of characters, required BioWare to balance Building an MMO Galaxy With its background in the PC and console gaming space, whereby a game is developed, followed by supplemental downloadable content and then sequels, adjusting to the MMO game space was quite a challenge for the studio. In fact, BioWare's Austin, Texas, facility had to rethink game design to accom- modate an always-evolving game story line and persistent world. "The sheer scale of Star Wars: The Old Re- public is what impacted the creative process the most," says Lusinchi. "In previous Bio- Ware titles, a designer would do many tasks. In The Old Republic, because of the amount of content that had to be created, we had to introduce a much more focused and special- ized workforce. So now we have designers who specialize in specific areas—PvP (player vs. player), for example." There's no question that developing this game has been a learning process for the stu- dio. Lusinchi says that his team dealt with the kind of technical challenges that every MMO developer must face, such as the limitations of the client/server architecture. He hopes that one day network latency will no longer be an issue; but until that time, BioWare still has to design aspects of the game that will be especially resilient to lag. Furthermore, to be sure that the game is playable for the widest audience, the Bio- Ware team had to develop for the lowest The Old R epublic