In this edition of SWTOR Weekly, I’m going to take a look back at one of the most amazing moments I’ve had related to The Old Republic: the 2011 Fansite Summit at BioWare Austin.
While it may not be exactly five years to the day, it’s certainly five years to the holiday since Zach Brown and I flew from Indianapolis to Austin, TX. The lead up to it was actually very quick and I definitely wasn’t prepared for the awesome time that awaited me.
Leading up to the first ever SWTOR fansite summit, Zach’s co-showrunner Brooks Guthrie had just been hired by BioWare-Austin to work in their sound design department. While that was amazing for Brooks, Zach was left with an open chair for the Mos Eisley Radio podcast. We’d only known each other a short time, but with a shared love of Star Wars it was easy to get started. We really only had time to record and publish one new episode before we left for Austin. This was to help ensure that there’d be no issues with me coming along. Basically, I needed to be officially a part of the team, and not just a friend. That very first episode was the second time MER had done a Bracket Buster episode to coincide with March Madness. Yes, as I’ve said before, we were doing Star Wars brackets long before www.starwars.com was.
For some reason, who knows why, they decided that Easter Sunday was the day for everyone to fly down to Austin. Granted, this allowed us to get up early Monday for all the events that were to come, but both Zach and I had church to attend that morning. We did manage to get away immediately thereafter and quickly got through Indy airport. We arrived uneventfully at the Austin airport and caught a ride to our hotel.
If you’ve never been to Austin, it’s quite the place. I only got to see a small fraction of it, but it really seems amazing. There is such a melding of old and new, of punk and posh, and of high tech with old school. The area in which we stayed, ate, and were dazzled was one of the more newly developed areas which even included a then-hard-to-find Fiat dealership. Some of the finer details escape me five years out, but we had a particularly nice hotel, with a bar, and, after checking in, we made our way to the restaurant, Magianno’s. We were immediately brought into the group and I made friends I didn’t even know I had yet. It was really great!
After a good evening of food and drinks, we headed back to the hotel, but not to sleep just yet. We had work to do. We had to make sure that we had all our gear ready for the next day. We had to have video cameras, photo cameras, recording equipment, notepads, and plenty of writing utensils. Between that and all the excitement, there really wasn’t much sleep to be had.
The next day was non-stop fun. After a great breakfast at the hotel, we just had to cross the street to get to the BioWare-Austin offices. It is, or, at least, was, a very non-descript-looking building, but as soon as we got in the front doors, we knew we were in for quite the time. First things first, though, we had to all sign NDA’s and we also got a complimentary BioWare-branded bottle of hand sanitizer. After all, they didn’t want programmers getting sick and delaying the game, right? One of the very first things that struck us as we walked in was the incredible amount of beautiful preliminary artwork hanging on the walls. I think we even asked if there were prints of those pieces that we could take home. Pretty sure we got told no.
Once they got us to our holding area, we got the rundown on our itinerary and schedules. David Bass and Stephen Reid, the two main PR contacts, were our primary handlers for the entire event, and they did everything to get us both excited and comfortable being there. After the looking at the schedule and hearing what we would and would not be getting over those couple of days, we got down to business!
Splitting into two groups, one group got the grand tour while the other group actually got to play the game! You have to remember, at this point in time, MMO’s were still at their height and the prospect of paying a monthly fee was still just something that you did. We were, every one of us, pumped like you wouldn’t believe to get to play the game! If memory serves, though, I was just as thrilled to get to see the day-to-day life of the game designers.
We got a tour of some of the various teams’ offices, the video department, the sound department, the design department, which was wall-to-wall sketches and random ideas, and, of course, the story department. I should note, as you’ve probably already noticed by this point, most of my pictures came out fuzzy. No, I was not so excited that I couldn’t even hold the camera steady. I’m not sure what the problem was, but I was still getting pictures while a proper tourist.
Before switching from tour to playing, they brought in a huge boat-load of food for everyone! So, to recap, they paid to fly us down there, put us up in a swank hotel, showered us in the game, and then fed us till we couldn’t eat any more. Did they want us to love them? Certainly. Did they need to do all that? Certainly not. Good PR doesn’t really have a price and they certainly followed that philosophy. Even if the game wasn’t up to snuff we wouldn’t be able to say anything untoward about how they treat their community.
Following the tour and food, Zach and I finally got our hands on the game! Granted, most of these folks, but not all, had already gotten to play through the Black Talon Flashpoint, also known then as “kill the captain,” at PAX East or another recent convention. This time, however, we got our first taste of the starting zones, or, rather, here called the origin worlds, since the game is divided up by planet rather than by just a different zip code on the same continent. As there were two people from each fansite, we played in pairs, one taking the Imperial Agent and one taking the Bounty Hunter. Both these classes begin on the planet Nal Hutta. I got the Bounty Hunter.
We played for a good solid two to three hours, and that was, up to that point, the best MMO experience I’d ever had. All the things I liked about BioWare’s traditional RPG’s and all my favorite parts of World of WarCraft were mashed together in one giant chocolate peanut butter sandwich. We got to play just long enough to reach about level 10, group up, and go on the Black Talon Flashpoint together.
Once our time was up on the origin world, we had more work to do. Our scheduled interview was with Damien Schubert and we got to pick his brain on the development of Flashpoints, the small-group version of Operations, basically, Dungeons, as opposed to Raids, in World of WarCraft. Zach got to ask the Flashpoint questions, then I followed up with my questions on the crafting system, which, to this day, is still my favorite crafting system in any game, MMO or otherwise.
While we did wind up waiting for a little while for other folks to finish their interviews, we did get to have just some sit-down quality time with some of the devs, like Daniel Erickson, as well as the other podcasters, many of whom knew each other previously from hanging out at the aforementioned PAX East 2011.
Once we all finished for the day, it was time for, of course, more food and drinks! This time they took us over to the local Dave and Busters, at which they also furnished us with enough game credits to last pretty much the whole night. While the food and everything else at the restaurant was great, the best part was finally getting to meet our friend and forum moderator Alan Naumann. He drove a long ways, along with his friend Erik, to meet up with us. He’d been such a presence on the forums, that neither Zach nor Brooks had to actually spend much time moderating and were able to leave it to him, who had once been just another registered forum member. Alan later went on to become the host of his own SWTOR show, Alan Shot First, and was a regular third-chair for MER. I didn’t let myself play TOO much there because we still had work to do later on that night!
My mission, which I chose to accept, was to schedule time with the other podcasters for another giant cross-show event, featuring the folks from Corellian Run Radio, TOROCast, Darth Hater, TOR Syndicate, TOR Wars, and many others. We had attempted to have the show just in one of our hotel rooms, but it pretty clearly wasn’t to going work with so many people getting excited in the middle of the night. The hotel employees were nice enough to let us use one of their conference rooms without having to book any time previously. It worked out very well, and, once again, we got pretty much no sleep.
90 seconds w/Alan :: ep1 :: the fan site summit from Alan ShotFirst on Vimeo.
The next day, our last day, was tough. Primarily because it’d been such a magical, amazing time. It was the kind of experience that just left you wanting more. Not “wanting more” in any sort of disappointed way, but just the way in which you enjoy something so thoroughly that lasts for such a short amount of time. Of course, that’s the best way to end an event, rather than having it drag on for so long that you just want to get home. We did get more game time in before our departure, thankfully. This time, we didn’t get to experience any more class story origins, but rather we got to try a mid-level Warzone, a Player Vs Player arena.
I had certainly tried PvP in WoW, and it was alright, but as I wrote in an article from immediately afterwards, those PvP experiences were very lackluster compared to what we got to try in SWTOR that morning. We played the Alderaan Warzone, which is still my favorite, as the objectives are clear and every can contribute evenly. I think we MIGHT have won some matches, but, regardless, it was a ton of fun. That was also my very first time getting to try out the Trooper-Commando: Medic, which apparently really stuck with me since that has been my main character since launch.
On our way out the door, we were loaded up with swag and shirts (which I still regret getting the smaller size of), but it was, undeniably, the people that were a part of the larger community that made the event so great. As time went on, many of those folks have moved on to other projects, or been hired by BioWare as community managers, like Eric Musco. The months between the Summit and launch were a pure hype train of excitement and our community just continued to grow. It was a pretty amazing time and I’d be doing that time of my life a great disservice by not giving a lot of the credit of this show to those events and those people.
This was really more of a walk down memory lane for myself and those that were there than any sort of SWTOR news article, but with paid subscription MMO’s declining in popularity and this game in particular being seen by some as not having lived up to its potential, I wanted to try to jog people’s short memories of what the state of gaming and SWTOR was like in the lead-up to the game. I wish we could bottle that magic and let a little bit out every so often. The state the game is in now is, in my opinion, the best it’s ever been. Lots of people long for original World of WarCraft (“Vanilla WoW”), but with SWTOR, I think the game is currently at its best, but we wouldn’t have gotten to this point without having gone through all those prior iterations and improvements. As always, I want to encourage folks to give this game another shot, even if you just try a one month subscription, I think you’ll find yourself feeling like it’s 2011 again.
Oh, and I got to meet Drew Karpyshyn, writer for KOTOR, SWTOR, Mass Effect, and the author of the Darth Bane trilogy. So, that was also amazing.
