Here are a few cherry picked questions, rewritten to be answerable by me.

“How is working for SOE for a developer ?”

Kick ass actually.

I worked there for almost 6 years and got to work with some of the best people I have ever worked with A great experience.

I left, not because of anything they did, but because I had been working with the same people for a long time.

Figure >10 years with the Austin crowd. Mix in the time at SOE and I felt too complacent, too comfortable.

A complacent designer is a scary thing. So, I left and moved overseas, looking for a new challenge.

“Is it hard to develop a game such SWG with so much interferences from Lucasarts? ”

Lucasarts was the most pleasant IP owner I have ever worked with. Professional, fast, concise, and willing to bend over backwards to make sure we could do what we wanted to do.

Plus, all of the liason’s we had on their end went out of their way to streamline the process.

Very positive relationship all-around.

“Why was there such a rush to release the NGE?”

Holiday Season.

“Who is to blame? We want Names!”

That’s not how it works.

I am proud of the work I and everyone else has done over the years since Galaxies started development.

Even though I’m not at SOE anymore I respect the work they do every single day. Some of the best game developers I have ever worked with are still at SOE.

Every day the game continues to run, every day that that SWG has someone playing  is something I view as a great accomplishment, and one I’m proud to have been a part of.

So, if you want someone to blame, blame me. This isn’t about finger pointing or passing a buck.

“Why CU?”

I don’t remember specifics actually. I think it was reasonable, but we were trending down.

If you think about playstyle variances as a pendulum and use the extremes of the arc to represent playstyle differences, you can get a feel for how stagnant an area of play is at any given moment.

We saw this with UO, where one day, everyone was an archer, and the next, a mage. The less the overall oscillations, the more static everyone’s playstyle is.

With a player driven experience, playstyle monocultures are bad. Look at Ogame to see how it horks up an experience. So, CU was an attempt to whack that pendulum and get some more variance into the game.

Plus, it cleaned out a lot of the crufty bits we had put in pre-launch and made it more maintainable. “Why introduce loot and ruin crafting?”

This is an interesting design discussion. We had a curious problem where the economy was so inflationary, and so controleld by the crafters, that new players were simply unable to actually get into the game.

The items they needed were too expensive to purchase, and no manner of starting income could have fixed this.

Basically, the crafters did what they wanted, which was to control the economy.

When you’re looking for a large amount of new players coming into the game, this kind of lockdown is a problem.

We can debate the value of the change, but that was the impetus.

The decision was to comply supplant the player-driven economy, but merely to support it in parallel.  The reality, well..we can talk about that later.

Once the backlash of the community, and consumers, were made known and articles in the New York Times were published how much explaining or defending did you have to do with your friends and or family who were familar with your work – how tough was it?

I go hot and cold on this one. On one hand, I’ve had to develop callouses about external exposure of my work since UO days.

I get inured to commentary about how I should be “Put into a sack and kicked to death” on the forums.

On the other hand, it can still be tough. Nobody wants to work on a game nobody likes. Nobody wants to work on a game that makes some little kid cry when he gets it for christmas.

I find it helps to be introspective on the whole thing, to see what we did wrong, what we did right, and think about how to improve future things.

It comes down to personal growth as a developer, and using mistakes we made to prevent mistakes in the future.

Do you feel that your work on SWG during the “nge” fiasco has impacted your ability to be employed in the game industry?

I’ve spoken quite frankly about these bits during interviews, so I’m not sure it’s had much of an impact.

I’m less interested in stock MMO’s, so that shift might have helped as well. So let’s go with Maybe.

Which version of the game do you personally prefer?

Jump to Lightspeed.