Creating Worlds: Voss
"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."
Community: The Third Element
"Massively multiplayer games are not new. The first true massively multiplayer game was a text-only virtual world called MUD, put together by Richard Bartle and Roy Trubshaw in 1978. This little window of dizzying text descriptions was a far cry visually from the seductively lush 3D virtual worlds of today, but it was enough. Enough to get the genre started, and enough to get armchair designers across the world to imagine the possibilities, and debate philosophical matters of game design. One of these questions, still asked today, is whether or not massively multiplayer environments should strive to be games or to be worlds."
Finding Balance in the Force
"My favorite Star Wars™ film has always been The Empire Strikes Back™. But while the battle of Hoth will keep me glued to the screen for that second when the AT-ATs appear out of the snow, the film’s defining moments are on Dagobah, while Luke struggles and trains with Master Yoda."
The Sith Inquisitor
“Through victory, my chains are broken. The Force shall free me.”
"How to explain the Sith Inquisitor? I could tell you that the Sith Inquisitor is the Emperor Palpatine to the Sith Warrior’s Darth Vader, but that sells it short. The archetype is just inspiration. It’s not the destination, or the road we take to get there, but the guide. The Sith Inquisitor is Raistlin. The Sith Inquisitor is Lucifer. The Sith Inquisitor is Julius Caesar. The Sith Inquisitor is what you make him."
