The latest Star Wars: The Old Republic blog, penned by Lead Systems Designer Damion Schubert, introduces players and fans to the Codex, the repository for all things story-related. The Bioware dev team took the best ideas from Dragon Age and Mass Effect and combined them with new features specific to SWTOR.
When we encounter design problems in The Old Republic, we like to first look at other BioWare games for a solution. In this case, we really appreciated the codex used in Dragon Age, which allows players to collect pieces of the story that eventually coalesce into a collected whole. We also looked at the codex in Mass Effect. The focus was slightly different, instead providing an encyclopedic view of the universe as a whole.
For The Old Republic, we took the best of both systems, using our codex to not only elaborate on the settings you fight in and the creatures you kill, but also to plant seeds of knowledge relating to key personages and concepts from your class story and long-lost lore meant to give more feedback at large. We sketched out what we wanted, and told the writers to get to work.
