Clarification on SWTOR's Development

Hi folks, 

I wanted to hop in here and clear up some of the misconceptions that we’ve seen in the forums and in other spaces players frequent. Some of this is based on folks misinterpreting what I've communicated in the past along with a limited knowledge on how our game development process works. 

Since we began The Legacy of the Sith, we had planned for a number of updates to tell the entire story while also bringing in a variety of gameplay, events, adjustments, and even new features, like the recent Venture System.  So, it is fair to say that before we transitioned to Broadsword, a large part of our design direction was made while the team was at BioWare/EA.  

But, everything we are doing now and have been doing for some time is completely new and developed here at Broadsword. There seems to be some perception that what is currently being developed is somehow different from what we've done in the past.

When we work on an expansion and the on-going updates related to it, we have a firm understanding of the direction we want to take the game. As a live service, we are in a constant flow of creation and production. The shortest and simplest way to think of this is we plan, we scope, we develop, and then we deploy. 

A more detailed way of understanding this flow is that we are always in pre-production, production, and retrospective all at the same time across multiple Game Updates. We have outlines for future content and then bring relevant plans for the next update into sharp focus, detailing out what is needed and what is involved with said content. And of course, player feedback is another important factor that plays a part in SWTOR’s development and allows us opportunities to reassess plans or make adjustments.   

In reality, the same folks who developed SWTOR in the past, most of whom have been here for 5-10+ years, are still here and working hard to deliver, to expand and wrap up our current storylines, adding new Cartel Market items, new ways to interact with the game, and much more.

I also understand that there has been feedback about the story content in the last couple of updates, and I want to give the floor to Ashley so she can address said feedback. 

-Keith

Hi there,

To reiterate what Keith said, the team working on SWTOR at Broadsword is largely the same team that was at BioWare. Same folks, different banner. This includes the narrative team, who have been authors in this story arc since the beginning. The "Legacy of the Sith" narrative has a high-level roadmap that has not changed. But as we put each chapter into active development, we must be agile enough to accommodate big changes (like our move to Broadsword).

As our team size has changed, so has our development. We pivot, we scope, and we strategize to bring players the highest quality content that our current team can produce. To that end, starting in Game Update 7.3, we adjusted our delivery of narrative content, particularly cinematics, in the main story. As we've established a rhythm over the last few updates, I want to give context as to why we vary our cinematic scene style in crit path story content, and where you can expect it.

Currently in SWTOR story content, we have two main scene types. Our "Standard" scene type has voiced lines for the player character and the NPC characters in the scene, and dialogue choices are limited to 3 choices. The staging, animation, and camera work is more complex, requiring a lot more time from our cinematic team to build complex choreography. These are our highest effort scenes, so we reserve them for the biggest impact moments, like action scenes, romances, and important choices.

Our second scene type is "KOTOR" style. These scenes have voiced lines for the NPCs, but player lines are unvoiced and only appear as dialogue choices. The dialogue choices in these scenes are expanded beyond the 3 choices in a Standard scene, giving the player more response options. The staging and cameras are simplified, which puts less pressure on our cinematic team, and means scenes can potentially be longer/more branchy since they reuse much of the staging setup. This means KOTOR scenes can have MORE conversational depth than if they were built as Standard scenes. We use KOTOR scenes when we have conversational interactions, and we leverage this design to include additional player lines specific to the player's class, romance, and previous choices.

The mix of Standard and KOTOR scenes ensures that we can produce enough story content for the scale of each update, while also not overloading our current narrative team. It's extremely important to me, and the rest of the leadership team, that our content plans fit within our team's scope, and maintain a healthy work/life balance. While I know this is a different style than previous game updates, we are still enthusiastic about building a story that feels emotionally impactful, dynamic, and personal to as many player stories as possible.
 

Hey folks,

First off, as always thank you for the feedback and discourse in the thread. I wanted to pop back in and cover a few different things that I am seeing as I have been following along with the conversation. In order, communication around KOTOR scenes, how we are using them, and your feedback in this thread. Let’s jump in.

Communication

There are a couple of different points related to communication that I have seen in this thread that I wanted to touch on. The first is just a general point around moderation or silencing discussion. This is mostly me relaying from Jackie (but I know I stated this plenty of times in the past as well), the removal of posts in this thread came entirely from one of three places:

1. People being very unconstructive or downright awful towards each other or staff members. Disagreement is fine, personal insults or threats are not.
2. Discussion of moderation – you all know this. If you talk about moderation action being taken, your post gets removed.
3. And mostly as a knock-on effect to the two above, but as a part of cleaning up quoted conversations or references to one of the offending posts from bullet 1 or 2, sometimes numerous posts can be removed even if they themselves don’t have anything wrong in them, but they are referencing ones that do. This is done to keep the conversation cleaner and on topic.

One thing I did see talked about in this thread was a greater desire that we had “told you in advance it was going to work this way” so I wanted to address that a bit more directly. The reason we didn’t is that it has worked this way in some fashion for a number of game updates now. We have especially used this variety of tools throughout the 7.0 era. Let me be a bit more on the nose with it if I can.

When we go into crit path planning we take a look at the story we want to tell and our capacity to tell it across our disciplines. Note that this in no way just means cinematics. We take everything into account across writing, cinematics, VO budget, world and encounter design, environment and character art, and more. Quite literally every game update has an entirely different balance of well… everything. From KOTOR scenes (the topic of this thread) to how many bosses appear, the rewards you can earn, etc. And as I will cover in the last section of this post, I am not saying this to invalidate any of the feedback you are sharing on KOTOR scenes, that’s all valid! 

All that said I totally understand there was concern about KOTOR scenes used specifically in 7.5 and you feel we were slow to respond.

How and Where - KOTOR Scenes

If you've read the thread, you can see that there are a lot of different (and sometimes opposing) takes on when and if KOTOR scenes make sense, from “never use a KOTOR scene in crit path” to “what was in 7.5 is fine” to “the scenes are fine but only use them this way” or “the scenes are fine but only use them that way”.

That’s where things get tricky. What we are going to do, always, is try to tell the best story possible with all of our tools and resources. This includes everything I listed above, even KOTOR scenes. Sometimes you might disagree with how we use them, and that’s okay, and you can and should voice that (respectfully and constructively) so that we can continue to improve. Which segues nicely into…

Your Feedback and What’s Next

Alright so with some additional context in place (beyond what Keith and Ashley already stated in the beginning), the part that becomes most important to you is what we can do with all of this. Right now, I am going to take all of the feedback we’ve been collecting from this thread and take it back to the team to see what, if anything, we might be able to adjust. Just to hit some of the high nails of things I have seen (not comprehensive) with some general thoughts.

• My character isn’t voiced in KOTOR scenes - Understood on this feedback but this also isn’t a simple change as this is fundamentally how these scenes were designed (without the PC speaking). Still, feedback heard.
• The UI pulls me out of the experience/immersion - This is another one that we’ll discuss as it was definitely a prominent feedback point, but I want to offer a couple of discussion points.
  • The initial inspiration for these (as they were named) was obviously KOTOR and so it goes without saying, but I will point it out anyway. If we change these, there will inevitably be some folks who get upset that it no longer looks that way.
  • Some of that “pulls me out” is a little intentional. Since the experience of KOTOR scenes is different (more dialog, no PC voice, etc) we want it to be pretty clear when you enter one of those scenes that something is different so you aren’t expecting it to be the same. But as your feedback has noted, maybe it’s too strong, or it goes back to the “how and when” of above.

Ok, I know I typed a lot of words as I tend to do in these posts so thank you if you made it this far and as always thank you for your feedback – so keep it coming. I wanted you to know that we’ve already been reading through this thread and having discussions internally, and there are more to come. As always, as soon as we have more info to share on this front we will.

-eric