Summary: James Ohlen, Game Director of Star Wars: The Old Republic, took a few minutes to talk to us at PAX East. We touch on guilds, how designers must now listen to playtesting feedback, and the balancing act of expectation vs. innovation. James also takes our Sith or Jedi test, The Test of the Elevator Door.<br> <br> The brief silence after the one-minute mark denotes the ninety-seconds of questions about guilds that James couldn’t discuss.<br> <br> Transcript of interview after the jump.<br> <br> CRR: A couple days ago they released a lot of information about guilds, which was very exciting to a lot of people. Can you tell us a little bit about the pre-launch? You have guilds that are registering ahead of time, is that right?<br> <br> James Ohlen: Yeah, so we know that one of the key points to having a successful Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game is by having a game that really encourages social play and encourages people to find online friends, joining guilds. That’s the glue that keeps players coming back to play your game over and over again. So we want to make sure that our guilds are very successful. So one of our plans was to have this early launch of the guild program so players could form their guilds way before the game launches, and therefore, they can have their groups together and they’ll already be ready. It’s something that other companies haven’t done yet and we felt, “Hey it’s just a little innovation in guilds.”<br> <br> [We talked a little about certain aspects of the guild pre-launch. James wasn’t able to elaborate on specific details such as how BioWare will address some guilds’ concerns about caps on number of members per guild, or how guilds will react to having their server chosen for them by BioWare, etc.]<br> <br> CRR: Anytime you try to take control away from the player, their first reaction is to say, “Wait a minute!”<br> <br> JO: One thing that we think is really important is to take feedback from our fanbase and make sure that we use that feedback to make the game that they want to play, so if we get a lot of feedback on certain aspects of the game we’re going to make modifications. If people don’t like something we’re not going to say, “Hey, we’re designers, we know best.”<br> <br> CRR: That brings me to something wonderful I heard yesterday. Daniel Erickson quoted you, he said, “This is what James Ohlen tells us. The whole end part of the product is just polish. Everything that you have for a philosophy, and everything that you think as a designer that you think is right, is now wrong. The players are the ones that are right.” Can you explain what you meant by that?<br> <br> JO: When you’re at the home stretch, you have to make a lot of painful decisions. You don’t have unlimited resources. You don’t have unlimited time. You have to make adjustments if you’re going to make the game better. So you have to put aside your ego and you have to just use the feedback from the data you’re getting to use the limited resources and time you have to make the best changes in the game you can. I have the most power over decisions on the game on the project, but I try to limit myself as much as I can because I know that if I make some decision that I care about, I’m taking away resources that we could, for example, use to make adjustments that a huge percentage of our fans would think would make the game better. So that’s really what it’s about, it’s about making sure that you’re making adjustments to the game that the fans and the players are going to see have the biggest impact and make the game better for them.<br> <br> CRR: This past summer a lot of the talk was about how choice matters and you make these decisions in flashpoints and things change and don’t stay the same. Now we’re talking about repeatability. Is that one of the things that maybe changed a little bit from your original idea?<br> <br>
