A diversity of worlds in newest The Old Republic developer video

by Kyle Horner May 1st 2009 at 7:00PM

Filed under: Video, New titles, News items, Star Wars: The Old Republic

There are already many diverse worlds in Star Wars: The Old Republic, and so it's probably fitting that this newest developer dispatch video is named just that: Diverse Worlds. Tython is the ancient forgotten home of the Jedi, full of forests and mystery. Korriban is similarly the home of the Sith, but its lands are thematically angular, painful, deadly and dry. Hutta is a literal swamp of filth and decay, while Ord Mantell is almost a paradise in some places and yet a living volcanic hell in others.

And that's without getting into the story of each world and what choices can be made by the players.

With four planets revealed, we've begun to wonder how many more BioWare is keeping close to their chest. It's a big galaxy out there, so we wouldn't be surprised to find that less than half of the game's worlds have been touched upon. To see Star Wars: The Old Republic's developers get all chatty about their work, check out the video in its entirety after the break.

Tags: bioware, developer-diary, developer-dispatch, ea, electronic-arts, hutta, jedi, korriban, lucas-arts, ord-mantell, sith, star-wars, star-wars-the-old-republic, tython, video

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

Jack said on 7:13PM 5-01-2009

I tell you this if this game is bigger them all bioware games together, include free moving around unlike the limit moving arenas from Mass Effect. Got some kind of space combat to complete the star wars feeling! Its good by to all other MMOs for good!

MrGutts said on 7:26PM 5-01-2009

Interesting video and super cool video.

Anyone notice how the one environment artist kept saying "it was" fun to make that world or this world..

mysecretid said on 8:44PM 5-01-2009

Wow. Bioware sure knows how to do professional-quality work.

It occurred to me too that Bioware and Lucasarts may have also set a new standard with these developer videos, in terms of how MMORPG makers release news of their game.

The days when you could just fling out a forum-post interview and a few screenshots, and call that enough, may soon be a thing of the past.

Here's hoping this game lives up to its promise!

max said on 9:03PM 5-01-2009

i hope the developer videos, web comics, and everything else bioware have been putting out on this game aren't setting the standards for it impossibly high. although i fear that's whats happening, i'm still psyched, the game LOOKS great.

Venekor said on 10:36PM 5-01-2009

Looks ok but the character models are just horrible and I hope the Planets are Seamless cause I couldn't play an mmorpg if it's all loading screens like Kotor. Oh I hope the combat is real time aswel cause Kotor's combat put me off playing after an hour or so.

Venekor said on 10:36PM 5-01-2009

feed the world

Keen said on 10:40PM 5-01-2009

I hope that the planets/zones are not redundantly instanced like AoC or GuildWars. I'm hoping for big planets like SWG. These look amazing.

Venekor said on 11:27PM 5-01-2009

I liked SWG's design of the Planets and how you could place housing and player cities everywhere. However there wasn't enough content placed on them and I was hoping they'd fill the Planets out with lots of kool places like Jabbas palace, they didn't and the Planets ended up being mostly barren.

RogueJedi86 said on 6:50AM 5-02-2009

Granted that also left a flaw. With player housing everywhere, it made it hard for SOE to place content on planets. Want to place a new dungeon at X Y coordinates on Tatooine? Can't, you have a player city there on half the servers, and harvester farms on the other servers. I think LotRO's solved that though, with instanced neighorhoods.

ethereal.wolf said on 11:32PM 5-02-2009

yeah player housing definately needs to be instanced otherwise urban sprawl takes over. nothing more lame than seeing the dune sea covered in condos.

trafik said on 6:26AM 5-02-2009

That was a fantastic video! The one thing I have noticed about the entire SWTOR production to date is that they havent over hyped anything. They are possibly the most cool and collected looking devs I've ever seen. The arent trying to sell the game from using one over used line or feature like "Full RvR Combat" "ENDLESS profession choices" or "Oh hai I've got DirectX 10"... not pointing the finger though! This game speaks for itself (I hope)...

But I do have to agree with comment 1 by jack, I really do hope that its a "Free Roaming" world and not restricted like Mass Effect or worse yet, AoC. This is the biggest killer and complete opposite of the word "Immersion". If I want to go run up that mountain or jump off that cliff than I should be allowed to jump off that cliff... Gawd it reminds me of the old days of Doom where the guy could take on hundreds of thousands of blood thirsty demons, yet didn't have the mental or physical capacity to jump...

On finishing I do apologise for my rants.. I've been up for several days and SWTOR just sends me all soft and gooey inside..

Archipelagos said on 8:21AM 5-02-2009

We have obviously been watching different videos. I distinctly remember the video on how they're integrating storyline as being obnoxiously riddled with superlative language. You could probably find the article if you did a search.

Venekor said on 8:13AM 5-02-2009

Nah instanced player housing is lame, it needs to be seamlessly built into the world. It's quite a simple problem to fix with SWG cause what you could done is just packed up cities or housing and asked them to move and make some lore about it to shut the whining community up. There was so much unused space on them Planets that they could have made so much content and never really had to have done that. Don't forget also you could just create instanced dungeons to reduce the lag.

Archipelagos said on 9:40AM 5-02-2009

The developers in that video, by and large, sounded really harsh, as if they'd been working for days non-stop. I imagine the schedule is pretty punishing. Much better video than the last few, but please give them some time off!

Wjowski said on 3:55AM 5-03-2009

With plenty of unpaid overtime, knowing EA.

Then Gabe said on 5:50PM 5-02-2009

Don't Fire Eric!

Sean said on 7:20PM 5-03-2009

Is that the first glimpse of the player UI that we've seen (over the shoulder of the world environment artist)? Seems to be following MMO/action RPG conventions with what appears to be a red "health" orb, a blue "mana/energy" orb, and a hotbar of skills between them. Reminiscent of the Diablo III setup.