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At the begining of SW:TOR, when we were building it, coming up with the initial design,
we had to decide which planets we were going to put in that were from SW: KOTOR.
Taris would be a really cool planet to put in there, it was totally destroyed in the first game.
When we decided to destroy Taris in KOTOR, we did so because we felt we really needed
an impactful moment from the main villain of the game, so Malak had to come across
as someone despicable.
- We cannot risk her escaping Taris. Destroy the entire planet.
We thought the best way to do that was to give you this world that you had experienced
and discovered, and come to love, and then have him destroyed right in front of you.
We are bringing it back in SW:TOR, it's one of the major worlds in the game and
it hasn't been reconstructed, so it's still in ruins, and it's really cool
because you finally get to see what happened, hundreds of years after you left town.
When we first heard about Taris, it was definitely one of the coolest things we heard,
because, in my opinion, Taris is possibly the most iconic planet on the original KOTOR.
It's definitely most memorable, everybody remembers what happened there,
it doesn't end very well. How do we sell the fact that Taris was a city-planet and
all this thousands of years later, what does it looks like then?
We are kind of balancing city-planet destroyed along with swampy what would it look now.
This is not a bunch of ruins out there, is actually a city-planet people are familiar with.
The general story of Taris right now it's... it's been in ruins for hundreds of years,
the rakghoul, one of the big enemies in the sewers of the original Taris in KOTOR,
are ramping around the planet.
So, the rakghouls, they've evolved over the past 300 years, just in ways were they
had business, just the kind of attacks and kind of things they are going to do,
just seem that much more vicious. They're particularily challenging because
they team from what are humans, bipedal creatures, but because
they are encompassed with this disease, they sort of bend over and twisted,
and that was something that we had in the original KOTOR and we wanted
to bring back into TOR as well.
Where our animators really shine, is when they can use different references
to various different kinds of animals and creatures, so the rakghoul seems to stem
from apelike movements, almost like a big gorilla or something like that,
and how you mix that with a human and how it would move.
The story of Taris in TOR it's a very interesting one: it's a base simbolic world.
The Republic wants to rebuild it to show that, even with all the devastation by Malak and the Sith,
they can rebuild. They can survive. They can come back from this kind of thing.
Conversely, of course, the imperials don't want them to rebuild, they don't want to have this
evidence that the Republic is strong enough to come back from this kind of devastation.
The original plan for Taris was to have a giant swamp, but once we actually started blocking
Taris out, we really started to push what we could do with the vertical mess,
then everyone that saw it went: "Oh, my God! It looks great!", and we kept going and going
and more and more, and eventually we got to where everybody saw it and said "That is definitely Taris".
Taris is one of the more interesting worlds in TOR, not just because is one of the old worlds
from KOTOR, but also because is a type of world that hasn't been explored in videogames
very often, which is this huge Coruscant-like, metropolitan-like, city that has been completely
wiped out, so you have all this huge skyscrapers that have been destroyed and toppled
and you have all this incredible vistas and you've got this incredible unique areas
to explore... It's just a very unique looking planet. and I think people are gonna be impressed with it.
I know is one of our favourite planets here, on the team.
One of the great things about the original KOTOR games was that you were able to make an impact
on the Star Wars galaxy, were able to leave their mark on this wonderful setting.
And in the Old Republic MMO, we are trying to make sure we recapture that spirit,
that importance of the player, so whether you're republic faction or imperial player
you are going to get a chance to make a real difference. You get to determine what
is going to happen to this world and it will be reflected in what happens in the game.
Your choices actually make a difference.