SWTOR’s single-player is “far, far bigger” than any game BioWare’s ever done

By Stephany Nunneley

BioWare has said that the single-player storyline in Star Wars: The Old Republic is going to be massive.

Just how massive? How does “far, far, far bigger” than any game it’s ever made grab you?

According to SWTOR’s writing director Daniel Erickson, each character choice for the game has full conversations, context, and choice – making for a rather huge storyline.

“One of the really interesting things about doing the game this way is – because we were pushing for replayability, pushing for people to be able to have very separate experiences – we got to do something we’ve never been able to do before, which is fully individualized stories,” he told VG247 at E3 this week.

“So if we’re talking about a Baldur’s Gate or any role-playing game, you have to do a kind of general story. We don’t know if you’re a mage or if you’re a warrior. We just kind of have to make it work. Now, with the backstories, we have a smuggler-specific RPG. You can roll a smuggler, and he’s got a crazy story. And it’s funny, and he’s got ridiculous lines, and he’s always in over his head, and everything’s always going wrong, and you can flirt with everything that moves. And then you go and roll a bounty hunter, and it’s much more serious. He’s sort of a gunslinger, and he’s one man with a gun making his way in the world.

“They’re like completely different RPGs that you would have never gotten to see. And the big one of course – that people are still trying to get their heads around – is that if you played that smuggler RPG, and you played that from the beginning all the way to the end, and then you decided ‘I want something new,’ and you played the bounty hunter all the way to the end, you would not see one piece of repeated content.

“But no quests, no quest-givers, no NPCs, and not one line of dialogue. It’s massively massive.

“One playthrough is far, far, far bigger than anything we’ve ever done before”.

Sounds huge, and Yoda knows there’s plenty of lore for BioWare and Lucasarts to play around with in terms of expansions and alternate storylines in the future.

You can get the full interview through the link.