James Ohlen on SWTOR Development Challenges

In a recent interview with IGN, Game Director James Ohlen went over some of the challenges that were faced during the making of the 200 million dollar baby.

One of the more interesting responses in the article was a question regarding how the industry has shifted more towards free to play during the games development, and if it had affected the outcome at all.

 

IGN: While you were developing your MMO, the game industry was shifting to a free-to-play model. What impact, if any, did that have on your team as you were developing this subscription-based game? 

Ohlen: It didn't really impact us. We felt, and we still feel, that there is a place for subscription-based games and if you're going to build a subscription-based game it's got to be huge in scope. People have to feel that it's worth paying a subscription fee every month, so the scope of the game has to be much bigger than the free-to-play games. The quality, the polish has to be very, very high, and then you need to have a plan to continue to deliver free content on a regular basis. If you do those things, I think you can succeed as a subscription-based game. Obviously, there can only be a few subscription-based games. There is a limited MMO audience and not a ton of that audience is playing more than one MMO, but I still think there's room for more than just one really successful online game. I think Star Wars: The Old Republic can coexist with World of Warcraft and other successful games like Rift. You can have multiple MMOs with a subscription being successful as long as those games fulfill the requirements of high quality, good polish, lots of content, and continuing to do high value updates on a regular basis. 

What are your thoughts on the free to play model? Do you think The Old Republic will ever make the switch in a future not so far away?

You can check out the full article Here.