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Category Archives: SWTOR team interviews

SWTOR Vanity Pets Q&A with Damion Schubert

20 Friday Jan 2012

Posted by anexxia in legacy system, pets, SWTOR team interviews

≈ 18 Comments

Tags

minipets, Star Wars: The Old Republic, SWTOR, SWTOR pets, SWTOR vanity pets, vanity pets

As a serial MMO vanity pet collector, I’m thrilled to have gotten a few minutes of lead systems designer Damion Schubert’s time to talk about SWTOR’s adorable mechanical vanity pets. Read on for some details on upcoming additional ways to obtain vanity pets beyond purchasing from a vendor, pet improvements we can expect to see in the next major content patch, and find out which of the current pets is his favorite.

IR: Vanity or companion pets were added to the game pretty close to the end after a significant amount of forum speculation as to whether or not they would be in-game. Were they always on the road map for inclusion?

DS: They were always on the road map for inclusion!  One of the things about project development of a massive MMO is that you have to prioritize features in the best way to ensure the project gets done.  Tops are features that have high content requirements (such as story) and/or have major impacts on testing the core gameplay and world flow (such as combat and worldbuilding), so features that impacted those elements were built first.  Features that were more auxiliary to that, such as vanity pets and the dressing room, were less central – not having them in wasn’t going to make the beta substantially worse or prevent other devs from doing their jobs — and so those features were prioritized downwards.  But we knew we wanted them in.

IR: Right now, the pets we are seeing are all purchasable, some with light/dark side alignment requirements. Any intentions of having some that are drops in the future?

DS: Absolutely!  In fact, some of these should show up in our next major patch!  I don’t want to give out too big a hint, but they smell kinda bad on the outside.

IR: Do any of the currently discovered pets interact with their environment? i.e. in reply to locations/activities or emotes?

DS: Not at this time.  It’s something we’d like to add, but there are higher code priority features in queue right now.

IR: Is there going to be any way for characters to obtain opposite-faction pets?

DS: We currently have LS/DS pets, not opposite faction pets.  That’s not to say this won’t change.  One of the things we want to do a lot more of is adding items that take a bit of communal exploration to discover – we’re well aware of how popular Datacrons and the Magenta Lightsaber crystal is – and minipets is one place where we’ve identified adding fun things like that could really pay off.

IR: Are there plans to add in more pets? I’ve seen some pretty swanky robots out there I’d love to have miniaturized and following me along on my journeys.

DS: We plan to add a steady stream of new vanity pets to most major patches.  Note: I didn’t say ‘all’, but we’re making a concerted effort to do this frequently.

IR: Will social level and eventually legacy level be key items pet collectors will want to focus on for access to more pets? Or do you think you will be finding additional ways such as random drops to spread around the pets?

DS: Yes, and yes!  We want to use the pets to reward as many kinds of gameplay as we can.

IR: Which is your favorite vanity pet in game currently and why?

DS: I gotta say, the little sandcrawler just cracks me up every time I see it.

IR: Any other improvements we can count on?

DS: Yep!  The abilities page just got restructured to improve usability, and one of the things that fell out of that was a dedicated ‘Pets’ section.  This will come in the next major patch.

A big THANK YOU! to Damion for taking the time to talk minipets with us!

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Highlights from Stephen Reid’s reddit chat

29 Thursday Dec 2011

Posted by anexxia in community, SWTOR team interviews

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

reddit interview with Stephen Reid, Star Wars: The Old Republic, SWTOR, SWTOR community

In case you weren’t already aware that Stephen Reid, SWTOR’s Senior Community Manager, has the patience of a Saint, you should see how many questions he fielded yesterday in his reddit chat. 954 comments –amazing!

Here were some of the tidbits I found to be most interesting.

On guild banks and guild housing…

Guild banks and guild ‘housing’ (of some type; ships are most popular as people know) are both on the list for future development. As always it’s a question of priorities and so on, but they’re definitely discussed. I will say that guild banks are higher priority.

Guild banks… pretty soon, but my definition of soon is probably different from yours. I’ll say before E3 or PAX East, that seems fair.

On the guild housing/ship thing, I’ve had this conversation a few times with folk in person – the thing is the basic idea seems simple, but the actual reality of doing it can be hugely complex.

For example – and this is entirely me, personally, making stuff up: it’s possible guild capital ships could be just open spaces for people to hang out in. Cool, but likely ‘not enough’ for many people. So then you add on, say, the ability to customize that space. Then maybe you want to move those ships around – maybe put them in orbit over planets, or go fight with other guild capital ships. Woah, did we just add a space combat game? You can see how it easily gets bigger.

The short version: something like guild capital ships sounds super cool and the development team likes the idea. There’s a big distance between ‘likes the idea’ and ‘is fully developed and in the game’.

On the lack of neutral gear…

As I understand it neutral gear was harder to implement than first thought, and was unfortunately moved out of the launch window. It’s not ‘dead’, and James Ohlen brings it up as something he’s a fan of quite often, so.. chances are pretty good it’ll make it in someday.

On the constant pleas for UI customization…

UI customization is coming for sure. 🙂

On the requests for Advance Class Respec’ing…

Currently AC respeccing is not ‘on the table’ – ie, it’s not seen as being a feature we’ll be adding in soon. It’s back at the philosophical discussion stage, AFAIK.

Even if you’d need to reroll, having been through the story once (and I’ve been through Ord Mantell a few times myself!) you’ll go through a lot faster. Experiment with different moral choices, I enjoy it myself. 🙂

For the whole 900+ comments, read the thread on reddit.

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