In the Game Design track, Persson will participate in a Q&A titled “A Fireside Chat with Markus ‘Notch’ Persson.” Hosted by Maxis veteran Chris Hecker, the “chat” will feature Persson discussing Minecraft, indie designs, and more, Question for the session will be solicited via Twitter through the official GDC Twitter feed. Be sure to follow it if you have a question to submit.

Over on the production side of things, BioWare Austin’s Richard Vogel and Dallas Dickinson will hold a postmortem session on Star Wars: The Old Republic called: “SWTOR – Creating A True Competitor in the AAA MMO Space”. Internal strategies used to prepare the game for launch will be the focus.

For more details of what to expect out of GDC 2012, visit our event hub.

GDC 2012 runs March 5 through March 9 in San Francisco, California.

Thanks, Gamasutra.

Here’s a excerpt from the broadcast, pulled by GamePolitics, via Opposing Views:

“In a new Star Wars game, the biggest threat to the empire may be homosexual activists! Hello, I’m Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council in Washington, D.C. In a galaxy not so far far away, Star Wars gamers have already gone to the dark side.

“The new video game, Star Wars: The Old Republic, has added a special feature: gay relationships. Bioware, the company that developed the game, said it’s launching a same-sex romance component to satisfy some complaints. That surprised a lot of gamers, since Bioware had made it clear in 2009 that “gay” and “lesbian” don’t exist in the Star Wars universe.

“Since the announcement, homosexuals have been celebrating the news, but parents sure aren’t. On the game’s website, there are more than 300 pages of comments–a lot of them expressing anger that their kids will be exposed to this Star Warped way of thinking.

“You can join them by logging on and speaking up. It’s time to show companies who the Force is really with!”

We’re unsure if Perkins also attacks the heterosexual love scenes in SWTOR, which as usual in a Bioware game, go to a black screen, because we’ve yet to listen to his session.

However, if you are in the mood to listen to such hate-spewing trash, by all mean do so by clicking here.

According to the piece, SWTOR’s artwork was outsourced to China, Estonia, and Russia; motion capture was filmed in LA and Vancouver; voice acting in English, French and German was recorded in London., New York and Paris; while quality assurance testing took place in Argentina, India and Romania.

Furthermore, the studio set up the game’s technical operations in Virginia and, as previously reported, the customer service center operates out of Galway.

For coordination purposes, there was and still is a shuttle which flies the Bioware Austin team to and from a EA’s headquarters in Redwood Shores, California as needed.

Elephants in tutus, indeed. We have a hard enough time coordinating our sock drawers around here – we couldn’t fathom trying to organize a project this massive.

Thanks Joystiq.

According to the site, SWTOR won out over the others due to being able to maintain said accessibility while “maintaining a fun environment for those who enjoy solo or group play.”

One of the “most unintentionally” accessible features was the game’s addition of companions, and the MMO was lauded for including “full subtitles, queueable actions, multiple action bars, area looting, auto looting, and built-in mouse sensitivity.”

Built-in features such as auto-facing enemies, maps being colorblind friendly, and having subtitles, were other features highlighted as providing more accessibility to the disabled.

“The developers do have room for improvement by adding features such as click to move, close captioning, and the inclusion of mods to allow things like UI movement, text size changes, and small changes deemed necessary by the player base,” said the site.

“However, with Star Wars enabling the ability to use on-screen keyboards, voice activation software, and mouse sensitivity settings, the game can be forgiven for a few shortcomings while hitting the major targets.”

This isn’t the first time a Bioware game has been acknowledged by the site, as Dragon Age: Origins on PC was awarded as Accessible Mainstream Game of the Year in 2009.

Thanks, Shack.

According to an official post on the matter, the exploit in Update 1.1 allowed users to spawn and thus camp around turrets on the PvP servers, and the update also caused an imbalance which game the Imperials a significant advantage.

“Our intended design for Ilum Open World PvP is that players are instantly killed when entering the enemy’s base safe area, just like in Warzones, and that the defending faction can take taxis to other points within the zone,” reads a post from PvP lead Gabe Amatangelo. “In Game Update 1.1, this is not working as intended. We have found the issue preventing this from happening under server load and will be publishing an Emergency Patch to address the issue.”

For those who used the exploit to their advantage in an extreme manner, Bioware’s associate community manager Joveth Gonzalez said the firm knows who you are, and repercussions may be forthcoming.

“I just wanted to be clear and let you all know that we’re definitely aware of individuals who took extreme advantage of this situation and we will be carefully evaluating and taking action as necessary,” he said.

Thanks, Shack.

Speaking in a design note on the game’s official website, Jame Ohlen said the update was just the first in a series of content, as the team has many plans in place as it continues “expanding and exploring the galaxy.”

“There’s much more to come,” he wrote. “We have another major update planned for March and future content arriving throughout 2012 and 2013. We plan to release new Operations, Flashpoints, Warzones, Space Missions, single player content, vehicles, and companion characters.

“We’ll always be improving our existing game with additions like guild banks, PVP ranked matches and interface customization. Our Legacy system expands in March, bringing more options and a new level of depth to the existing character classes.”

Ohlen said to also expect “a few surprises” between game updates, as “you never know when the Republic might strike Dromund Kaas, if a mysterious alien fleet could appear in the Core Worlds.”

“Changes are coming, and they’ll affect everyone,” he said. “We fully intend to support Star Wars: The Old Republic—and our players—for many years to come.”

You can read patch notes pertaining to the update through here.

Servers will be brought offline starting at 2.00am CST/12.00am PST/3.00am EST/8.00am GMT/9.00am CET, and are expected to be down for around 8 hours.

Earlier today, an official forum post, stated the planned update would be delayed due to problems brought to the developer’s attention by “diligent players” on the Public Test Server Forums. Originally scheduled for release today, Rise of the Rakghouls was then rescheduled for release “within the next few days.”

More information is available through here.

Speaking in an interview with Gamespot, the game’s director James Ohlen said the system was inspired by how important the family dynamic was in the Star Wars films.

“We wanted to have a system that encouraged players to create alts and to play the game through the different story paths,” he said. “So the legacy system is meant to do that. It essentially allows you to, instead of just having a bunch of alts that have no relation to each other, you can actually create a family tree where your alts can be related to your main character, either as, you know, a sibling, a son, a father, a family friend, or a husband and wife.

“You can actually choose the relationship your characters will have with each other. And then you gain legacy experience points and legacy levels, and with legacy experience points and levels, that gives you–that allows you to unlock abilities, perks, a whole slew of different advantages, essentially, that all the members of your legacy tree will be able to enjoy.”

Ohlen said Bioware hopes “to push [the system] towards players who enjoy the level-up game”, and it will contain abilities which will make leveling up more enjoyable by allowing players to customize the experience.

SWTOR’s Legacy System unlocks at the end of chapter one, which is around level 30.

Speaking with Eurogamer, Ohlen said if you look at other genres, such as shooters and strategy titles, the same mechanics used today are the same ones implemented 20-years ago.

“If you look at a Battlefield or a Call of Duty or a Gears of War or even a Half-Life – those games use the same tried and true interface and the same tried and true game mechanics of the first-person shooter genre that’s been around for 20 years,” he said.

“If you look at real-time strategy games, they kept the same tried and true interface and the same tried and true mechanics that existed for 20 years. Same with adventure games, same with platformers, same with fighting games, sports games.”

Ohlen said he doesn’t understand while other games can be considered genres, while MMORPG’s usually aren’t. He attributes this presupposition to the fact World of Warcraft has “dominated for so long that people just think of it as just a single game genre.”

“But it is a genre, and we wanted to appeal to fans of that genre – we don’t want to turn them away by making something that’s radically different,” he said. “And we wanted to take the lessons that have been developed in that genre over years and years and years and basically refine them, much like other companies do with other genres.

“So, I don’t know, it’s just the way it is, but I don’t see us as not being innovative. We’re actually a lot more innovative within the MMO space than comparable games in other spaces like the first-person genre, the action genre – games like that.”

Despite some of the comments to the contrary, the game has been doing well since it launched in December, and as Ohlen noted, maybe even “a little bit better” in the US than in Europe.

“Star Wars [the brand] is a little bit stronger in North America than in Europe,” Ohlen said. “The expectations on what the game was going to be for a lot of people was kind of different to what we were building. We were building essentially a classic MMO with BioWare storytelling set in the Star Wars universe. And there were a lot of people out there who wanted us to reinvent the universe and come up with a game system that had never been done before.

“And that was something we weren’t doing, so it was going to be disappointing for those people.”

What Boware did succeed with, offered Ohlen, was “creating a game that’s very fun and addictive,” which in the end, is “what’s going to make this successful.”

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Speaking with Eurogamer, Ohlen said while it’s a relief no one has finished all of the end-game content just yet, some are getting close, so Bioware is working hard to release more content for the game.

“It didn’t really surprise us [how fast people got to 50] because people were able to play from 1-50 in the beta, and some of the people just figured out what the absolute fastest way was to play through the game, so they kind of had their whole strategy set out,” he said.

“We had people that were playing for 72 hours straight. It’s hard to say whether that was one guy or one guy and a buddy. We don’t have that information sadly. I shouldn’t give the specific hours. I can say it was under 100, which is way below our average time. Our average time is much closer to 200 hours in terms of how long it takes a player to get to the endgame.”

Ohlen goes on to say Bioware isn’t worried about players reaching end-game so soon, as some developers “kind of take the wrong lesson from that.” Instead, the firm feels as long as the player’s experience from 1 to 50 “was really really good,” they will be willing to continue playing the game when the next round of content rolls out.

Speaking with Eurogamer, SWTOR director James Ohlen said most performance issues the development team have noticed are from bugs, so any issues with black screens or drops in frame rate can be attributed to the PC in use.

“For the most part, 95 percent – oh I can’t give you the exact percentage – most of our players aren’t really having performance concerns,” said Ohlen. “However, we know that it’s important that there is a smaller group of people usually with lower-end machines that are having problems in some areas.

“One of the most important [ways] for us to grow our service is to continue to bring in more players, including those players who only have low-end machines. So we have a client team, a team of programmers, whose entire job is to optimize the code, find out where some of the issues are, and then fix that up.

“Most of the performance issues are localized though. They’re things that we can track down. I would call them bugs.”

The development team as been on a bug and glitch fixing spree of late, and promises patching and updates of some sort “almost every week”. One such issue the firm is looking is the lack of improvement when switching between medium and high texture setting in the game. While players have noted the lack of change in character models, higher-resolution textures are noticeable only during conversations.

Furthermore, over on the public test server, the medium texture setting has disappeared with the only options now being low and high, with the later still looking no different to medium.

In response to the issue, senior online community manager Stephen Reid said the firm was aware of the issue, and the team was currently “tracking down the details with the development team.”

No word on when the patch will be implemented into the game just yet, but you can look over the notes over on the official website.

Speaking in a post on the official forums, Ohlen said to expect balance changes, and other minor fixes, as such issues are of “the highest priority.”

“They are reviewed by senior leadership on a daily basis. Bug fixes usually take longer than a week to get into the game because we need to fix the issue and then test the fix. Some bugs take longer than that because of the complexity of the issue,” he said.

“There are issues that we will fix immediately. These are rare and not every issue can be fixed in this manner. We usually reserve these ‘emergency fixes’ for bugs that are stopping players from playing the game or to exploits that could unbalance the entire game if not corrected.”

Ohlen said previously that Bioware will be adding “new game systems and content in future patches”.

A small patch with a few fixes was released yesterday. You can look over the patch notes here.

It has also fixed an issue which, under certain circumstances, kept Bounty Hunter’s from being able to complete their class story.

Other fixes are in the works as well, so consider the patch a small one. It will be applied when you fire the game up, obviously. You can look over the list of fixes on RipTen.

A current bug in the game that hasn’t been fixed just yet, is the ability for players to interrupt enemy and boss attacks by using the /getdown emote. While considered more of an exploit than a bug, note that Bioware is aware of the issue and is working on removing the ability to bust a move in combat situations.

The firm does not plan on banning anyone for dancing their way to victory at present, so try it at least once for fun – just don’t go overboard.

You can watch videos of the dance moves through here, courtesy of RPS.

The Ireland branch, which was announced in 2010 and officially opened for business in September 2011, currently employs around 400 people who focus on quality assurance, networking and localization.

According to Bioware co-founder Greg Zeschuk, the Ireland branch may “over time” take on more responsibility on the development end, as it’s provided “high quality service every step of the way” since SWTOR launched last month.

Thanks, Joystiq.