UPDATE - 14th. May 2010 (Advanced Classes & Creating Worlds)

Advanced Classes are ...

Advanced Classes are specialized careers that your characters can choose in Star Wars: The Old Republic. As your character becomes more seasoned through adventure, you will be given the opportunity to undertake one of two Advanced Classes. This decision is equally as important as when you originally created your character. This is because your choice will not only make your character more distinct and powerful, but it will also help further define the role you wish to play in The Old Republic.

In addition to your Class-specific Skills and Abilities, your chosen Advanced Class will grant you access to role-defining Abilities that represent additional areas of expertise and some may even grant new weapon and armor types. Additionally, each Advanced Class will also have three sets of Skills available to further customize your character.



The chart above is not representative of any of the current Advanced Class Skill Sets, nor does it show exactly how many Skills you may potentially access. It is included to provide an example of how a character, in this case a Sith Warrior, may look as he progresses through one Advanced Class (note that the other Advanced Class Skill Sets are disabled and cannot be trained).

As mentioned above, each Advanced Class opens up three Skill Sets with a variety of Skills in each. Unlike selecting an Advanced Class, these Skill Sets are less restrictive and your character can obtain Skills from any set or from all of them!


Shared Skill Set:

While the first two Skill Sets include Skills entirely unique to the chosen Advanced Classes, the third Skill Set consists of a shared set of Skills which expand upon the core Skills of the Class itself.

One thing to note is that you use the same pool of points when training your Advanced Classes Skills, so spend your points wisely!


The main goal of the Advanced Class System is to allow you to customize your characters according to your play style. For example, some Sith Warrior players will want to charge into the fight and take the full heat of the enemies’ aggression. Others will want to execute their maneuvers more strategically, focused on channeling all their rage to destroy their enemies as quickly as possible. The Advanced Class System gives you these kinds of choices and more.


Creating Worlds....

Quote :

Principal Lead Writer Daniel Erickson talks about creating the world of Voss in Star Wars: The Old Republic!


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Taken from swtor.com:

"They're a meditative people. They're communal, not individualistic, and they’d create symbolic art--pattern-based and preferably monochromatic to contrast with their amazingly colorful skin."

“For skin colors and patterns, poison dart frogs as a starting point. Something that jumps against the background of the planet. These people don’t blend or quite belong on their world.”

"The Gormak are running down a tech path unseen in the galaxy. It's important that we see the ship that they're creating and it jumps out as foreign, wrong for Star Wars. Anything we see that is Gormak should be slick, impressive and create a sense of wrongness in Players."

"The Voss must at all times feel isolated. Voss-Ka is high above the rest of the planet but it's an island in a sea of Gormak. Every other outpost is overrun or threatened. The Republic and Empire see the Voss as standing on the roof of their last building in a losing war but the Voss never reach out for help. They are not looking to be rescued."


Welcome to the amazing job of creating worlds. Above are some of the notes I made before discussing Voss with our gifted concept artists and our ambitious world designers. These talented folks enable us to communicate in ideas, themes and feelings as much as in size, directions and numbers. This is the secret of creating real worlds instead of simply play spaces. Most Players will never notice, for instance, that on Korriban statues of non-Sith are always in supplication, literally supporting the Empire on their worn backs. Few people will stop and trace the path of Jedi resettlement of the wilderness on Tython, try to understand exactly where which war stopped in Balmorra or make sense of the twisted politics that have left some parts of Coruscant abandoned and in misery while others bounced back shortly after the invasion. They will, however, hopefully feel the layers of planning and vision that went into the worlds and because of that, subconsciously believe in the reality of the galaxy they are travelling through.

But we're ahead of ourselves. Handing over a world to concept and world design is obviously one of the later steps the writing department has in the birthing process. Let's start at the beginning, using Voss as a touchstone for the general path all worlds must take. Time travel is a big no-no in The Old Republic but just this once, I’ll allow it. Let’s go back and see the first moments of Voss and the galaxy.

Interestingly, the Mystics have been around as long at the Old Republic has--though the culture and people who would become the Voss came much later. In the first days we wanted to bring something completely new to our class offerings and a group who looked at the Force in a fundamentally different way was intriguing. The Mystics would be grey and dangerous to the eyes of the Jedi, able to see through the lies of the Sith and beholden and interested in neither. They would enable us to explore themes of religion (every culture sees gods but interprets them differently), culture (believing themselves to be the chosen people) and politics (due to the infallibility of their visions, they are happily totalitarian). We had numerous different ideas for how they would look, be thought of by the greater galaxy and behave. For a while we had a running joke of Mystic converts standing in spaceports asking weary travelers, “Have you been to Voss?”


Two problems quickly made themselves apparent. First and foremost, a BioWare story doesn’t work if you don’t understand the shoes you’re standing in. Roleplaying games are about exploration and discovery but you have to have a basic place to work from. Something as alien as the Mystic culture (its express purpose is to be strange to the Star Wars galaxy) is the exact opposite of where we’d want to start a Player. “Never introduce the exception before you teach the rule” is one of the fundamental tenants of strong RPG writing and obviously the rule was the Jedi, the Republic, the Sith, the Empire. There was more than enough content we’d have to catch Players up on without introducing some completely alien idea. Secondly, we realized we had far more Jedi and Sith fantasies than were going to fit into two classes both for story and gameplay. When it became apparent we were going to have four fundamental Force-using classes the chances of a fifth was immediately taken off the table. The Imperial Agent would be our chance to explore new territory while still introducing Players to a core part of the galaxy.

So the Mystics were set aside but we were all fairly sure they’d be coming back for the big show. The stories we’d already begun to invent in our heads were too interesting and them being removed as class candidates enabled us to make them far more alien.

When we first sat down to figure out planets we had four distinct classifications we wanted to fill: Iconic movie worlds, IP favorite worlds, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic worlds and brand new additions to the lore. Iconic movie worlds are fairly self explanatory. Was it awesome in the movies? Do you always dream about running around and adventuring there? Does it lend itself easily to MMO gameplay? Let’s do it and let’s make it look more amazing and detailed than anyone has ever dreamed. IP favorite worlds are places like Alderaan and Ord Mantell. We feel like we know these worlds even though we’ve barely seen them and they never showed up (with a tragic cameo exception) in the movies. We have an impression of them, they have a place in our mythos and in the extended universe books, comics, etc. Worlds from the original two Knights of the Old Republic were important for continuity, to answer questions and make sure the game was firmly established as the same timeline.


Finally there were brand new additions to the lore and that’s where the Mystics came back to the top of the list. Now to be clear, the first thing we do when we decide to add a “new” world to the vast Star Wars mythology is to do our research and see if there is a world that already exists and will fit our needs. Is it the right type of climate? The right place in the galaxy? Does it have next to nothing written about it? Awesome, it’s ours. Over the years hundreds of writers have tossed out names of worlds with a sentence or less to describe them. Why create more clutter when we can add to the depth of what’s there?

Looking at the holocron (Lucasarts’ extensive guide to all things canon and beyond) we find Voss. It says three thousand years after our timeline a starship pilot will hail from Voss and apparently several mothers throughout history named their kids after the planet. Okay, we can live with that. People name their kids “Dakota” and “Paris” right? Otherwise, it’s ours. Open for creativity. Let’s create a planet for our mystics.

First of all we’ve got a group of people who are, on the surface, extremely powerful. They can see the future. That’s big. So we need to temper that. There cannot be very many of them and these visions cannot come at will. One man with perfect clarity of the future’s events would be a powerhouse, a whole culture would be unstoppable. So all of a sudden I can see the Voss a bit more clearly. They are not all Mystics. So what is it like to live in a culture where there are people who can see the future but cannot control when they do so? Okay, it makes sense these visions are going to be seen as important. Clearly if they only happen occasionally, they must be for a reason, right? Now these visions are always right, what’s that like? To have infallible leaders? Well now we have a totalitarian people but a happy totalitarian people. A Mystic’s vision is always right so arguments around it are meaningless. Okay, that’s even more interesting. So what happens if a Mystic’s vision tells the Voss to do something terrible to outsiders? What about something terrible to themselves? Great, we’ve got story hooks coming out the Voss-Ka.

So now we want to sell independent (they have the answers), chosen (they are the only ones with visions) but small and isolated (they're rare in our setting, unlike Jedi and Sith). We also want to see their power. They need an enemy. That enemy must be an overwhelming threat to show the Voss resilience and power and must contrast sharply with the Voss. What is the flip side of mysticism and faith? Technology and progress without soul-searching. Enter the Gormak--tech geniuses with a very basic tribal cultural system, a love of warfare and competition and an utter hatred for the Voss who they will never understand. So let’s see, occasionally seeing the future is good for outflanking your enemies but isn’t going to defend against a hundred million blaster cannons. We’ll need to give the Voss some amazingly well placed defenses. Okay, up the mountain they go. And in come the Voss Commandos. After all, if there aren’t very many Voss then every warm body who isn’t off having or interpreting visions is going to learn to shoot back.


But of course the Voss didn’t start up that mountain so we need to trace the history of the people and their development. Voss ruins overrun by Gormak, destroyed wilderness mined and stripped bare by the Gormak war machine, ancient spaces where other cultures may have visited the planet thousands of years in the past. Ruins of both Sith and Jedi varieties in the far flung corners of the world. That will raise some questions. Oh, and the Nightmare Lands. Forbidden space even Gormak don’t dare to tread. The less said about that scary place the better.

This is, of course, a very high-level flyby look at the development process. Writer Jessica Ilko had to put together a three page document that covered nothing but how the Voss speak and how it contrasts with the Gormak. Then there are documents that are explorations of Voss art (monochromatic and symbolic), marriage practices (don’t physically sexually develop until their marriage rituals are performed), funereal rites (usually a Voss speaks as little as possible but they are extremely publicly emotional and wail at funerals and other times of hardship) and all of the other details that makes a people real and enables a writer to see them in a way necessary to write stories that feel true.

It is only after all this work is done that we take a distilled version of all of this information (only the writers are forced to read the thousand plus page fiction guide for TOR or nobody would ever get their jobs done) and pass it to our aforementioned amazing concept artists. They get together with the world designers and then the magic really starts to happen. Of course that's just one planet. Then we move onto the next.

Daniel Erickson
Principal Lead Writer

- Apologies for missing this update first time around - LW