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One of our greatest improvements was moving cameras. There was no cutscene originally assigned to the quest, so the designer approached me, and asked “Instead of playing this out in gameplay, could we make a short cutscene when the crane blows up?” My eyes went wide as I asked, “Can I make it a ‘cool guys don’t look at explosions’ moment?” The resulting scene might be my most screenshotted scene I’ve ever created for SWTOR, and I was absolutely delighted that the community enjoyed it as much as I enjoyed making it.Īfter launch, the cinematics team stretched beyond standard stages and into new styles of cinematic presentation. One of my favorite memories from launch was a moment on Quesh, when one of our world designers was scripting a quest about blowing up a crane at a venom refinery. For the launch of the game, the cinematics team delivered 8 class stories, as well as cutscenes for side quests, world quests, companion stories, romances, and a few special cinematic moments. Every camera is then edited by a cinematic designer to frame your unique character for the greatest dramatic effect.įew games have hundreds of hours of hand-scripted cutscene content, especially starring fully-voiced customizable player characters. Our tallest male character is much taller than our shortest female character, so that’s a big difference in camera framing! We use a camera system called “redirects” that programmatically uses different cameras based on a character’s body type and group size. To make scenes custom to your story, we create conditional cameras that accommodate varying character sizes. When combined with dialogue and characters, this pipeline has given us the ability to create new stories for years.
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So we use timeline tools, camera editors, and extensive libraries of animations, audio, visual effects, and music. The volume and variability of our cutscenes means we can’t create custom animations for every scene. Our conversations are constructed like many alternate realities stacked on top of one another, with conditional settings that play the scene in different directions, but always return you to the main story. One of the features of SWTOR’s choice-based cutscenes is that they can play differently if you’re a Sith or a smuggler, if you romanced this character or exiled that one. We also work closely with art, visual effects, and audio teams to polish the final look of our scenes. We set stages, place actors, decide where the action starts and stops, and create acting performances from a library of animations. We take recorded scripts from our narrative team and create them visually. For SWTOR, a Cinematic Designer is like a director, actor, and editor rolled into one. “ “Cinematic Designer” is a unique role in games, and the responsibilities vary by project. We’re very excited to be celebrating SWTOR’s 10th anniversary this year, and I’m here to give a nostalgic retrospective on the world of SWTOR cinematics: a little behind-the-scenes about how we create, where we’ve been, and where we hope to go in the future.
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Hello SWTOR community! My name is Ashley Ruhl, and I’m the Lead Cinematic Designer on Star Wars: The Old Republic. The guys over at BioWare Austin postet a lengthy blogpost explaining how the kick ass cinematics the game is known for is made.