As it is implemented currently, the Legacy System in Star Wars: The Old Republic simply provides characters with the option for a surname, and an extra experience bar which doesn’t have any benefits. However the system as it is now is a building block for a much more robust feature set. One of the things the legacy system is designed to do is to allow players to build a family tree among their characters. So players can determine what relationships their characters on the same server share, such as father and son. Read the full quote below from an interview with GameSpot.

Starting your own guild is easy, but recruiting members and keeping that guild going strong into a game’s launch is certainly not. Guild management can seem like a full time job, but it doesn’t have to be. There are certain things guild leaders can do to make all the tasks surrounding running a guild more manageable, so we sat down with questioned Dillinger, the leader of one of the premier pre-launch guilds for The Old Republic, Space Blasters, to find out how they do it and how they plan to keep it up post-launch. Read more»

As many of you undoubtedly know this past weekend was BioWare’s largest Testing Weekend yet, and tens of thousands of gamers and Star Wars fans everywhere logged out of the real world and logged in to The Old Republic. Surely several of you participated in the festivities unknowingly contributing to quite the staggering statistic. As revealed by the BioWare doctors in an interview with Eurogamer at last night’s BAFTA in London, over 1 million hours were logged in last weekend’s beta testing alone.

An impressive number to say the least, but probably not unexpected to those who participated and waited through some very long queues. It sounds like we can expect more of these “server stress tests” in the near future so if you haven’t had a chance to test the game, don’t give up yet!

Read the entire interview at Eurogamer.com

Another blog focused on an individual class, RepublicTrooper.com, had some questions about the Trooper’s combat abilities, and who better to ask than Principal Lead Combat Designer Georg Zoeller? Zoeller outlined how they went about designing the class to be a ranged tank, Trooper stats and abilities, and what each spec focuses on.

One especially interesting bit learned is that all-Trooper Flashpoints and Operations are viable in the game.

Read the entire interview at RepublicTrooper.com.

Recently the blog The Sith Inquirer was able to get some answers out of Lead Writer Daniel Erickson about the storyline for the Sith Inquisitor. While the Inquisitor’s story was written by former BioWare employee Rebecca Harwick, Erickson was the one to help flesh out all the loose ends. Topics Erickson covers include inspirations for the Inquisitor’s story, companions, and even revealing the voice actors for the class: Euan Morton and Xanthe Elbrick for male and female characters, respectively. Check out an excerpt below.

Check out the entire interview at The Sith Inquirer.

In an interview with Gamasutra, James Ohlen, Project Lead for The Old Republic, discusses the difficulties of developing a MMO and talks about the final phases of the game’s development. He goes on to divulge a bit about the uses of beta testing and the focus on polish as well as planning for future content.  While the interview doesn’t reveal anything really new it does give us a bit of perspective about the process that the developers are going through in order to bring a high quality experience at launch.  According to Ohlen it looks like they are expecting to have a very large launch crowd and are determined to make sure it runs smoothly.

That’s the main thrust from BioWare’s co-founder Dr. Greg Zeschuk, in an interview with Eurogamer at last week’s Gamescom. Zeschuk also went on to explain that it was vital that The Old Republic was “available, reliable” and “really solid”.

When asked about the release, Zeschuk said that it will be “one of the biggest launches ever in the history of gaming”.

This year’s E3 is all wrapped up, officially ending this past Thursday, and we’ve all had some time to absorb and reflect upon what we saw and heard about The Old Republic, both on the show floor and through developer interviews and comments. So I thought now would be the perfect time to gather feedback from our fans and members over on our forums.  A survey with a handful of questions mostly pertaining to this year’s E3 show was sent out to a few of our more active members and this is what they had to say… Read more»

This year’s Electronic Entertainment Expo is just around the corner and in its third year of attendance the folks behind Star Wars: The Old Republic are primed to give us more new details then ever before. GameSpot is jump starting the festivities a little early with an exclusive interview with a few of the BioWare developers that are working on the game. Daniel Erickson/Writing Director, Gabe Amantangelo/Lead Flashpoint/Raid/PvP Designer, and Damion Schubert/Lead Systems Designer took some time out of their undoubtedly busy schedules to give us a sneak peek at what will be revealed at E3. We can look forward to hearing more about high-level content, player mounts, crafting, space gameplay and the far reaching effects of “world arcs” in the days to come.

Since the announcement of the game BioWare has been intensely keen on pointing out that story is a major focus of the game and one of the ways that they intend to differentiate TOR from its competitors. The discussion of “world arcs” brings to light how BioWare plans to bring their trademark choice and consequence story structure to fruition in a MMO environment.

Gamepot: BioWare has already experimented with “world arcs” in games like Mass Effect and Dragon Age, where the events that took place in one story affect the situation in the next. How will world arc stories come into play in Star Wars: The Old Republic? How will the game let players change the situations of key characters or worlds while still remaining a massively multiplayer game in which other players may choose differently? Will instancing play a significant role here, for instance, generating one version of the universe for a player who chooses to spare Alderaan and another version for a player who chooses to destroy it? Give us a specific example.

Daniel Erickson: World arc events and choices will absolutely be reflected in later stories as the player goes forward, and instancing helps us achieve those classic role-playing game moments. That said, it’s important to us that we never disconnect the players from each other. So you’ll never have a point where you’re standing in the same place as your friend but can’t see each other or discover you’re seeing the world two radically different ways.

Gabe Amantangelo briefs us on how raids, or as BioWare calls them “Operations,” will work in TOR. Describing them as large scale engagements which try to recreate the thrills and excitement of the most memorable movie set pieces like the Rebellion’s escape from Hoth, or the Battle of Endor. Gabe also discusses how PvP will work on both PvP and PvE servers, as well as in war zones, which sound like a sort of Battlefront team death-match type of set-up. Damion Schubert tells us a little bit about player mounts and why they chose to use vehicles now, but hopes to add animals post-launch, personally I want my own Varactyl. The folks at Gamespot also pressed him for more details on space combat, but unfortunately he had nothing more to reveal, we’ll have to keep our eyes and ears open during E3.

For more details head on over to the Gamespot interview…

Talking to Gamasutra, BioWare’s leaders Ray Muzyka and Greg Zeschuk speak about their expectations for The Old Republic, preparing for launch, and how they are handling comparisons to the biggest MMO on the market. The interview is quite lengthy and also includes talk about BioWare’s other IPs, Dragon Age and Mass Effect.

There are quite a few topics covered just on TOR, but there are a few key points. Talking about what is required to launch an MMO of this scale, the doctors admit that they do not have experience in this area. Luckily there are many members of their team who have launched an MMO before, with BioWare Mythic having launched multiple MMOs in the past. They also talk about the difference between a traditional boxed game launch, and The Old Republic as a service launch. BioWare has had problems in the past already with digital game launches, with users unable to connect and authenticate their games online such as Mass Effect 2, so they are sure to take extra preparations for such a large launch.

The Old Republic has constantly been compared to Blizzard’s World of Warcraft, and while no game can match up to WoW’s success, Zeschuk says it’s “inevitable” that the games be compared. But whether TOR can overtake WoW or not, BioWare are confident. “[Once] you’ve tried it, you just can’t go back,” says Muzyka.