In our latest interview with BioWare, we spoke with Design Producer Shawn Ketcherside to talk about everything Star Wars: The Old Republic.

When it comes to recently launched MMORPGs, while up-front content and balance is very important, it is often how a development team continues to support their product that really indicates if this is a title worth committing to. In BioWare's Star Wars: The Old Republic, for example, many players were worried that there wasn't enough endgame content to keep them satisfied beyond their first month of subscription. BioWare's response was to push for the launch of Patch 1.1: Rise of the Rakghouls within a month of the game launching, adding a new operation and a challenging flashpoint for players to try out.

Now players have their eyes firmly fixed on BioWare's next big update: Patch 1.2 to see if BioWare can continue to deliver the content that fans want: more content, more Warzones, a fix to faction imbalanced open-world PvP, legacy system additions, more guild support, and more. I decided to catch up with SWTOR's Design Producer Shawn Ketcherside to see if I could glean any new patch 1.2 information, as well as get some clarification on what BioWare really wants from open world PvP. Interview below!

ZAM: Hi Shawn! I'll start with a general question here; I'm curious if the team is happy with how players are progressing through the content of Star Wars: The Old Republic? I'm just wondering if the team is happy with where the general player population is, and if they'll have enough content to keep them entertained until March?

Shawn: Yeah, actually! We're one of the fastest selling subscription MMOs around, so where we're sitting is really good. The whole team is super excited seeing all these people going through our content. As far as content coming up, it's something we're always keeping our eye on, but from the reception we've gotten, people are really excited about the different levels of difficulty we have on the raids and it's providing a really good challenge for a lot of people. It's keeping the guilds busy as we're going.

ZAM: In my guild, we just finished hard mode Eternity Vault and we're planning to get into hard mode Karagga's Palace soon, which was just expanded upon in the Kaon Under Siege patch. After that, I suppose we'll look into the more difficult Nightmare modes going toward 1.2. I know you've noted that March is when we'll see the big update coming; do you have any smaller content pieces leading up to it?

Shawn: No. What we're really doing is focusing on all of the awesome stuff we learned from launch and 1.1 in order to make sure that update 1.2 is just awesome coming out the gate. That's where our attention is focused right now. Of course, this in addition to the normal exploit fixes and bug fixes we've been looking at week to week. Those have been holding a lot of our attention because we want to make sure we listen to our fans and we're really reacting to the feedback we're getting.

ZAM: And on that note, how much of your patch content from patch 1.1 to 1.2 was planned content that was on the drawing board from the very beginning, and how much was content created in response to player demand? Any examples?

Shawn: I'm trying to think of one off the top of my head, but it's definitely a general mix. We look at all of the feedback we're getting, and we'll have ideas in our minds, where we'll say "oh the fans need this or this." But there are also things that we know just aren't working so well, so we're making sure we're addressing that and fixing that. You just have to balance it all out.

ZAM: How do you feel about the feedback you're getting from players?

Shawn: People are passionate, which is really exciting. Sometimes you'll get people who want things or don't want things, and it's up to us to analyze that. One of the things that we really have going for us is that, in addition to the great feedback we get from the forums, we have a lot of really good metrics that we use to compare the anecdotal evidence we're getting on the forums with actual in-game behavior. So we can correlate those two things together to figure out the best way to go.

ZAM: Going off of your metrics comment; one of the big updates from 1.1, aside from new content, was the big change to Ilum's open-world PvP. That was probably the first time I really felt the faction imbalance on my server, aside from getting about a million games of Imperial versus Imperial Huttball in Warzone PvP. Do you have any ideas how BioWare wants open world PvP to play out in Star Wars, especially faction imbalances, and if you want to incorporate that in some way?

Shawn: We're really looking into that. We have some of the best PvP designers in the world really looking at how to take that open-world PvP scenario into the next level. We're still looking at how to make open-world PvP fun and how to make it work.

Continue to Page 2 for Open World PvP and BioWare's Design Vision for 1.2 >