The Doctors Will See You Now

It comes from a desire to have a high quality service for our fans, really stable and scalable and accessible and really fun, and make sure it's performing well. You have to build the infrastructure to support a certain size launch and we're also thinking really long term at Bioware EA for this, there's going to many many consumers coming to the game over time and we're going to be expanding it out. We want to make sure that the service is really high quality, that's the commitment we have to the launch of The Old Republic.

It's a little bit different to a regular game, like a regular console release, where you're connecting periodically, maybe there's a multiplayer match, but the only way to play SW:TOR is full time connected to the internet, connected to our servers, so we want to just ensure that we've got a nice smooth, reliable game, everyone can get in when they want. It really boils down to, like Ray said, the quality of the service so for the ones that get it it's really slick and really enjoyable. And we'll increase it over time, our anticipation of course is to keep selling after that.

And you know that demand is high too. It's the fastest pre-ordered in EA's history.

It's encouraging, and we're delighted to hear that kind of demand. And we're definitely planning for that too, we're anticipating a very high demand for the game, we just want to make sure that consumers who get it have a fantastic experience and at all points of the journey, because they're going to be with us for years and years.

Yeah, very much. It's one of our core values and in the time we've been at EA we've been very supported in that as well. The great thing is we have a strong culture and a strong vision and values as Bioware and we're part of a larger whole that has that strong vision and culture as well.

I don't think there's really been any surprises, but you learn stuff. Certainly the way people play can surprise us. One thing that's really funny is that people find interesting exploits, you hear about some tricks that people have found and just "wow, that's ingenious!"

One of the favourites when we opened the early test was that when the two factions were first in the same place we had these taxi guys right on the edge of this cliff. And so one guy got bored, he'd finished all the content and he just sat there waiting for people to arrive and then Force Pushed them off the cliff. He did that for like an hour. Everyone that showed up.

Or actually in the earlier builds you could take out the taxis' riders. The players would come back, they're waiting for their vendor and there's no taxi vendor.

Someone actually had to pop in and say stop...

We fixed it too.

Yeah and that's a good lesson. So as long as you're aware and cognisant and watching all these things you can make rules, make the taxi vendors unkillable, don't put things on the edge of a cliff, like all these little funny things.

And analytics and telemetry and the volume of content, to make sure that players actually have a lot of things to do for a very long time and to really accommodate all the different styles of play in a massively multiplayer online game, player versus players, player versus environment and small versions and big versions of that and crafting, the story, the innovations we bring to bear in the MMO, there's just so much to test and so much to do. But it's coming along very well, we're very pleased with it.