devtrackers.gg
Has Dennis even been on this subreddit in the past few months?
Every few days there's been a Poe/Hux request/concept thread, and I've seen them on wishlists since before the game came out.
I visit every morning, 5 times a week. I don't participate as often as I should.
It is such an honor to continue to develop new characters and worlds for this wonderful IP, in particular for this community. I love the passion you have for what you want to see in the game. I think in most cases, what we deliver are things that you've asked for, whether it's improvements to the game systems or new content. Sometimes we allow ourselves to add things that we feel inspired to do. For example, Geonosis was a highly requested planet to add as were the heroes and villains with it, while Felucia was not (but we REALLY wanted to build it). When it came to the sequel era, the most requested things had already been added (Rey, Kylo, Phasma, Finn, Crait) so we took the opportunity to add something that really inspire us and would open up some really cool new gameplay opportunities with the droids. Yes, BB-8 was the main guy while BB-9E was more opportunistic given we're developing the roll-tech anyway. The droids inspire us, they're awesome and we think you will love them. We love Poe too, but since he's already in the game as a Starfighter Pilot, we hoped you would forgive us for prioritizing the droids over turning him into a blaster hero as well.
Most of the time we hope to deliver upon highly requested things, sometimes we want to surprise and delight. We think this is one of those times and hope you'll reserve judgement until you get to play them (Remember Nien-Nunb and Dengar from SWBF1? They were awesome to play, but unexpected additions for sure).
The droids are support characters. Neither is very likely to defeat another hero or villain in a straight-up 1v1 (although if you're playing a low-health Kylo, watch out for a BB-8 rush!). We can't wait for you to try them, I think you'll love them.
Thanks again for all the comments and discussions, I love reading them all (as long as you stay away from the personal insults, please).
unexpected additions for sure
Unexpected to you guys too, right? Ran out of development time so just reused assets from the Sullustan and Rodian infantry.
Neither is very likely to defeat another hero or villain in a straight-up 1v1
Sounds balanced
Dengar is not Rodian, but I presume you mean Greedo for the Outer Rim DLC? That's actually a somewhat cool story.
Yes, we re-used the heads for Greedo and Nien Nunb, but built the rest of their bodies. The reason for that was because we had already used their heads for trooper customizations. Looking back, we probably should have made the trooper heads slightly different than Nien and Greedo, but they were made many months before the launch of SWBF1 and long before we started thinking about DLCs for the game.
The real restriction we were working under was localizing VO. Some countries require you to localize any English language in the game to the local language (German, for example). The localization process is a long one and usually gets done after you've recorded the English actor. We would not have been able to deliver the DLC in time had we done Heroes and Villains that speak English, where as Alien speech does not need to be translated and localized. So the restriction was to pick Alien Heroes and Villains for the first DLC, and since we were quite excited to explore more of Sullust that we had developed for SWBF1 (as well as build Jabba's Palace) we picked those two characters. :)
Dengar is not Rodian, but I presume you mean Greedo for the Outer Rim DLC? That's actually a somewhat cool story.
Yes, apologies, I meant Greedo since he was the accompanying hero to Nein Nunb. Thanks for writing out the story behind it again, I’ve seen you talk about it in some livestream beforehand but it’s good to get a refresher.
Happy to share as much as I can. I guess we did save about a few weeks of 3D art on the heads, which allowed us to build a few more props in Jabba's Palace instead. But that time-saver was certainly not a reason for the selections. And in game-dev, if you can save time in places that's usually a great thing, as it means you can spend more time in other places!
It's really cool to see you excited to do stuff that you want to do. Sometimes communities forget that devs are people too, and it's not just things we want, but things you want to do. Keep it up, this game has a shiny road ahead of it!
It is a dream come true to get to work on Star Wars, for sure. And I'm far from the only one on the team to feel that way. I'll admit that many of us had a hard time stepping away from the Clone Wars to work on sequel stuff (it's what we grew up with after all) so it's been good to find nuggets like the droids to really inspire you to do your best work for this community.
I truly hope you participate more on here in the future. You being active a lot on Twitter today was nice, although I disagreed thoroughly with something's you said. The droids are a nice edition, I can admit, although I personally think the chance to have new weapons added for Troopers would have been better. But I'm game for new things. I know you can't always tell us things, but being more transparent about things such as decisions like today is something I wish would happen. Would it cease the anger from some fans? Probably not. But I think it would help with the overall vision you guys have and what we hope to come. (Still very hopeful about weapons for Troopers. Please don't let us down about that.)
Disagreeing is totally cool, and I appreciate that you're allowing me to have an opinion about this game too. Far from all gaming communities provide a safe space for devs to state their thoughts on what is right for a game that we both care deeply for. And it's Star Wars, I think we're supposed to disagree on a few things here and there. ;)
With that being said, it poses the question of why you didn’t save time in the hero creation process by making the last two ST main characters, that are blaster heroes, allowing you to spend more time in other places.
I just worry we’ll never get the last two pieces of the ST puzzle to really make it feel complete.
Thanks for speaking so candidly.
Poe/Hux would not have been time savers at all. In fact, I think we would have struggled to even make them a lot of fun to play in Battlefront in time for this release (maybe the new movie will show us something that completely blows our minds? Time will tell)
I get what you're saying on completing the puzzle, but I also disagree in that Hux belongs in a perceived trinity more than Rose, or more than BB-8. I don't think the Trinity exists in the same way as say Original Trilogy.
One thing that really scared me though was the notion of doing Rose and Hux as blaster heroes, considering neither seems overly popular with this community. I feared that would have triggered "some evil exec somewhere is forcing them to do this rather than " that would have overshadowed the rest of the announcements. While I expected the droids to trigger some (not a lot of requests for BB-9E as some rightly points out) at least I felt comfortable that their gameplay would convince any doubters. :)
This is the type of stuff I like knowing. I wish you/the dev team would share details like this more. We don’t need a full explanation of every last decision made but when the community asks “why did you go with these weird choices” and we hear nothing; that’s how rumors are made and ran with. I always thought those hero choices were made because it was easy to re-use the heads and tweak the abilities from existing assets.
I don't remember the exact details on this one, but I remember at one point we tried to get Chewbacca into SWBF1 a lot sooner than we did (he was on the list for Alien heroes for Outer Rim obviously). But that damn fur took forever to get working right, and you still didn't like his appearance much in the first game!
As you have probably realized by now, Wookiee fur is difficult to get right :)