Tag Archives: jeff hickman

Star Wars: The Old Republic has gained 2 million new accounts since going free-to-play, according to the latest State of the Game letter from executive producer Jeff Hickman. He also said that “thousands of new players jumping in every single day,” and the MMO’s “high capacity servers are teeming with people.” This spring, the game’s Rise of the Hutt Cartel expansion will launch, and a new customization feature giving players more options to change their character’s appearance using Cartel Coins will be released for the MMO sometime this summer. You can read the entire blog entry through the link.

SWTOR executive producer Jeff Hickman has revealed his latest State of the Game report that same-gender romance between players and NPCs on Makeb will be added to the MMO with the Rise of the Hutt Cartel expansion, slated for spring. More SGR options will be added “in the future.” The expansion also adds several new systems, five new levels, a large new planet, new storylines, new skills and new abilities. Hickman also noted that the game has seen an increase in player numbers since going free-to-play, and changes to “a special PvP area,” are slated for Update 1.7, and more endgame content and the ability to copy characters to the test server are all on the way. More information can be found through the link.

BioWare has acknowledged complaints of lengthy queues to access Star Wars: The Old Republic, briefly outlining some of the challenges the team is facing.

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Not much this week that didn’t hit the front page, but head on through the break and you will find out all sorts of stuff.

Information on the upcoming Warhammer patch, Martial Arts for City of Heroes, and a Beta weekend for Global Agenda.

Go on and hit the button.

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During his keynote at GDC Austin, Warhammer Online executive producer Jeff Hickman spoke to attendees about three of the major mistakes Mythic made with the MMO.

These mistakes being challenging play, the lack of economy, and the fact that the game was so easy that social tools were made irrelevant.

“There’s a big difference between easy play and ease of use,” he said. “One of the lessons that we thought we learned from ourselves and other games, was that it’s important to have ease of use, and it’s also important to hit the right balance between easy gameplay, challenging gameplay, and too difficult. We thought we hit that, but Warhammer, in PVE, in the beginning, is too easy. It doesn’t make you thrilled to do it.

[As for] our economy… we just missed the mark. If you look at the reasoning behind the economy, you’ll see things like, ‘Hey, we’re not going to let gold farmers in our game.’ ‘We’re going to try to make sure we have controlled inflation.’ We had all the best reasons in our game, but what it caused us to do was build a game where economy is not important enough.

“Economy brings people together.”

There’s loads more from his talk over on Gamasutra.

Mythic and Electronic Arts announced that there will be celebration activities for the one year  of Warhammer Online.

Kicking off on August 31 and going through the month of September, there will be weekend-only scenarios, a month long 20 percent experience and renown bonus, special in-game items for all players, veteran rewards, and The Wild Hunt live-event.

“This anniversary marks a major milestone for WAR, the Mythic development team, and our fantastic community of players,” said Mythic’s Jeff Hickman.

“We could think of no better way of marking this occasion than by celebrating our success with our fans for the entire month of September. We’ve got new content to share with the Wild Hunt live event, special versions of popular scenarios, fireworks, Halfling pies, and exploding stout!

“Now that is a party Warhammer style!”

Loads more information is included in the press release past the break.

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