BioWare has revealed a little more about their ambitious designs and machinations for Star Wars The Old Republic; ”no story content exists on both sides.”
Game writer Daniel Erickson explains it doesn’t make sense to have Jedi and Sith pulling off the same quests, it’s ”about good and evil” after all. It would have been easier but the ”wrong choice”.
”Creating one batch of content for all players would have been half the cost, taken half the time and solved any number of organizational headaches but it was simply the wrong choice from a storytelling perspective,” blogged Erickson.
”Unique content for both sides was the only way to go - if a Player went all the way through the game playing a Jedi and then playing a Sith, he wouldn’t experience even one repeated piece of story content.”
This effectively rules out a Bounty Hunter with a heart of gold working under a Republic banner, well for now anyways. ”No class would exist in both factions – at least at first. Each class gets its own story; no story content exists on both sides,” explained the dev.
”If we did Bounty Hunters on both sides of the fence we’d have to write two different Bounty Hunter stories at the expense of a different class that was more iconic to the Republic.”
”Was the idea of a Republic Bounty Hunter cool? Absolutely. But far less iconic than the Imperial aligned one and we had other Republic classes we wanted to get in there instead. At least for now…”
Look out Blizzard, BioWare has some dangerously seductive ideas in the pipeline. Star Wars The Old Republic is being developed for PC with no release schedule in sight, which isn’t surprising after reading that developer blog.
”Core to the entire Bounty Hunter fantasy is this sense of independence. As a Bounty Hunter you are, and always will be, your own person… You work for your reasons, do things your way and can become a force of pure vengeance and destruction if crossed.”
Source: Eurogamer
