MMORPG.com: What are your plans for SWTOR’s 4th anniversary?
Debbie Sue: We have a lot of cool things kicking off December 8th. And it runs all the way through January 4th. You’ll be able to get two strongholds for the special four year anniversary pricing of four credits and it’s Dromund Kaas and Coruscant. And then we also have two stronghold decorations, which are both very cool, and in theme with everything we’re doing. Number one is a statue of HK-51 and you’ll get him as a very large, very cool statue to put in your stronghold. You’ll also be able to get a sculpture of the Ebon Hawk, which is the ship from KoTOR. We’ll be giving that away. And as part of this whole theme of HK, we’re going to give all players a really cool, customized rest and recharge animation, where you’ll be playing at flying the Ebon Hawk. So, it’s an Ebon Hawk rest and recharge animation, where it looks like you have a controller in your hand and you’re literally flying the Ebon Hawk. All of that stuff is coming.
We’re also running three events, one of them per week, through the last week of December. And we have our infamous double EXP week, which starts December 18.
We also have a cool promotion starting December 15th and running through January 15th with our friends at NVIDIA, where players who are playing can share video clips of building an alliance, and I believe it’s #buildyouralliance. NVIDIA will be posting those and in January, we’ll be giving away two customized SWTOR NVIDIA PC systems. Ten high-end graphics cards courtesy of NVIDIA, and we’re supplementing those rewards with fun in-game items, Cartel Coins, and bonuses, as well. It’s a fun way for players to share their love of building an alliance with everyone else and earn cool prizes.
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Ben Irving: We also have an initiative for former players who haven’t yet played Knights of the Fallen Empire. I think December 15, we’re going to do a program where people can come and play Chapter I for free.
Debbie Sue: We do have some people who left the game right before the expansion came out and we want to offer them a chance to take a walk, get a chance to jump into the Eternal Empire for themselves, so we’ll give them the chance to play through Chapter I on a trial basis, which we think will be a lot of fun for people during the holidays.
MMORPG.com: How will SWTOR now fit into the fabric and mythos of Star Wars going forward with all the films and offshoots and all that. Are you guys able to draw from the new stuff coming out or tie into it in any way?
Bruce Maclean: Yes and no. No in that we can’t have Darth Vader teleport back in time thousands of years. Specific characters and events that are part of the movies, they don’t belong in The Old Republic era. We wouldn’t put them in there. But yes in that Star Wars has a style, Star Wars is a type of story, and it is an iconic setting. There are things that make Star Wars Star Wars, and we have those things already, a lot of them, but we’ll continue to have those things. And as Star Wars, as an intellectual property, as a universe, as a galaxy, continues to expand, we will look at, like if one of the upcoming movies adds something that hasn’t been part of regular part of regular Star Wars lore, but is now, we would absolutely look at adopting that, but not specific characters and events.
Charles Boyd: Nothing that would be inappropriate for our time period.
Bruce Maclean: Like if there’s a new planet introduced in one of the movies, we might consider adding that location as a planet, because the planet hasn’t gone anywhere in the last couple thousand years.
Charles Boyd: Yeah, that kind of thing, definitely.
Debbie Sue: We have a lot of things yet to explore in our own time frame, that are all Star Wars iconic, to planets, to ships, to races, to classes, that often players are asking, and those are always things on our list, that are super obviously Star Wars iconic and fun that people recognize.
Bruce Maclean: That’s actually one of the strengths of The Old Republic. It allows us the freedom to really tell big stories. Like, the Eternal Throne is conquering the entire galaxy. Of course, this is thousands of years before the movies. It doesn’t violate any other stories. So, it gives us freedom to tell great Star Wars stories, so we really being in the BioWare Old Republic era, and it’s a great place to be. Lucasfilm has been a fantastic partner. They love it. They love our stories and they love our era as well. It’s good feels all around from that perspective.
