daniel erickson

Drew Karpyshyn joines two other SWTOR writers

As we told you a few days ago, Drew Karpyshyn is leaving BioWare for the second time. In his blog post, he mentioned that he was joining Fogbank Games, that has been launched by FoxNext Games, a division of 21st Century Fox. Now it turns out that a few of his old colleagues is also joining the studio, as Daniel Erickson will act as studio director. Daniel Erickson was the lead writer on Star Wars: The Old Republic and also worked on Dragon Age: Origins before leaving Bioware in 2012. He’s since held a number of roles, most recently at Kabam, as mobile game designer, were he hold a key role in the development of Star Wars: Uprising, that’s now shut down. The rest of the 20-strong team includes executive producer Nathan Germick, who also joins from Kabam, and former Bioware writer Alexander Freed ( storyline writer of the imperial agent!) ,…

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Star Wars: Uprising – Introducing the Assault Contract Challenge!

There is a new challenge in Star Wars: Uprising, that will earn you a Short-Term Smuggling Contract! Here is the forum post. To go along with this, Daniel Erickson added bit of an incentive to run those Bespin Assaults for some extra credits! You can read up on that here . Introducing the Assault Contract Challenge! Details: Players who complete all five of their Assault Missions for at least four days between 3/2 11:00pm PST and 3/8 11:00pm PST will be rewarded with a Short-Term Smuggling Contract! The Short-Term Smuggler’s Contract is a variant of the Long-Term Smuggler’s Contract, which provides the player with 40 Chromium each day they log in for the next seven days. The Short-Term Smuggler’s Contract will begin on 3/9 4:00pm PST and end on 3/15 3:59pm PST. The Long-Term Smuggler’s Contract will stack with the Short-Term Smuggler’s Contract so be sure to take advantage of this lucrative opportunity! (Tap…

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Star Wars: Uprising – Win 1 Million Credits if you assault Bespin!

Game Director for Star Wars: Uprising, Daniel Erickson announced a challange to the community. Here is your chance to win 1 million credits. Every Player who completes all of their Assault Missions (5/5 every day) between now and the next Sector Battle kick off AND runs at least 90% of those on BESPIN will go in a pool and one person will randomly be chosen to get 1 MILLION credits. Check it out: Hey Everyone, After so many questions this week I reviewed the Bespin Battle Readiness targets and last cycle people basically started to run Bespin, got discouraged, stopped and went and ran Mataou, frustrating many of the end-level players. In 2.1, Battle Readiness rewards will scale with level which should alleviate a lot of this problem but for right now I’m going to make a personal challenge with the tools I have. We’re already having an Assault Mission…

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Former SWTOR Lead Writer Daniel Erickson Working on Chapter 2 for SW: Uprising

Curious what former Lead Writer for SWTOR Daniel Erickson has been up to lately? Well, his recent Tweet will set the record straight (sort of): Sorry for the lack of updates lately. Deep in dev on Chapter 2. Which is literally more than 150% the size of the entire present game. — Daniel Erickson (@DanielAErickson) September 26, 2015 The former Bioware writer is now Director of Star Wars: Uprising and like those of us here, a BIG Star Wars nerd. I don’t know about you but I love seeing people who are truly passionate about games work on games. Being a writer myself, I also have a special kind of love for game writers. It’s why I was such a fangirl over meeting Erickson and Alexander Freed. These guys are not in it for the money or for fame (so many don’t even recognize their names). They are in it…

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Star Wars Uprising – Dev Diary Introduction

I have been looking forward to Star wars: Uprising and thus, following along with updates from the dev team that tell us a bit more about the game. All too often we see mobile games that are movie tie-ins just created to be quick money grabs. Kabam! is known for putting more effort and depth into their games and this one is going to be no exception. In fact, this one might set a precedent. The new Dev Diary Introduction video will show you just what I mean. They’ve actually tried to create a real Star Wars experience in the  palm of your hand with this one and you can color me impressed. I think there is one person on the team who probably has  a lot to do with that. Daniel Erickson who was creative director on SWTOR, is now creative director on Star Wars: Uprising.  It’s nice to see…

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Daniel Erickson hires Emmanuel Lusinchi to Bluepoint Games

Could some of the old BioWare team get back together to work on a new project? It’s a theory we tossed out there back when the news of many key BioWare players leaving was first revealed. Well today Twitter gave us a little more insight into this very topic! A tweet from former BioWare develop Daniel Erickson today confirms Emmanuel Lusinchi has left or will be soon leaving BioWare to start work at Bluepoint as a Lead Designer. There were previous rumors about Lusinchi leaving but nothing solid or in the public until this tweet today: — Daniel Erickson (@DanielAErickson) November 5, 2012 I have to admit that it’s tough to see how passionately these developers and designers talked about SWTOR earlier this year at the Guild Summit and now they are dropping off like flies. These are people who put their heart and soul into their work and for those of…

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Confirmed – Daniel Erickson leaving BioWare

A few weeks ago we wrote the story that Daniel Erickson was “Actively looking for new opportunities” . Today Mr. Erickson confirms this rumor via twitter as he has started his new twitter account for job hunting and design thoughts. Back in early September, we saw via Erickson’s LinkedIn profile that he was looking for new opportunities. We speculated about what this might mean but warned against jumping to conclusions and thinking this meant he was leaving BioWare. However, with so many BioWare Austin staff members making their exits, it wouldn’t be a big surprise. Well, now we stumbled across this Tweet and this new Twitter account from Daniel Erickson and it’s clear that he has officially left BioWare and is on the job hunt. So he has known for at very least, the month of September that he was leaving or was already gone. So now that we do know it…

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Daniel Erickson is “Actively looking for new opportunities”

We learned in the past that making assumptions based on a person’s LinkedIn profile is not always the best idea. Some people take a little thing such as change of job description and blow it into something it’s not. However, if you take a look at Daniel Erickson’s profile, you will see that he says he is “Actively looking for new opportunities”. This lends itself to a little bit of conversation. The Lead Designer/Creative Director at Bioware/Electronic Arts works in the gaming industry, an industry we know is booming and at the same time, one that can change with the snap of your fingers. It takes an entire team of people to build and launch a game and after that launch, all of the same team members are not needed to stay on. Layoffs usually happen and those creative people have to search for a new job or a new…

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Daniel Erickson Interview – Players Progress Quicker than Thought

It seems the fans of SWTOR really got one over on BioWare, progressing much more quickly than they thought they would, says Daniel Erickson in an interview with GameSpy UK. This isn’t really surprising news to most who have played the game or even followed the news and updates regarding SWTOR. We saw firsthand how quickly some players barreled through the content, hungry for more. Star Wars: The Old Republic has done a pretty good job with supplying a constant flow of post-release content. Think about it: it’s an MMORPG that has only been out for six months and we continue to get free content updates, and there are even more on the way as evidenced from EA’s Press Conference yesterday. But are these upcoming changes to SWTOR the result of plans that were made far in advance, or are they a response to player behavior? Turns out it’s a…

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Will it Help SWTOR to Get Megaservers?

Big changes and additions are happening with SWTOR. In addition to the announcement of the new patch (1.3) coming soon, there was also a big exodus at the BioWare Austin studio. This was a huge disappointment to me because I went there, toured the studio with David Bass, saw employees hard and work and also saw how much all of the staff there seemed to care so much about their job. It really is a sad day to see so many people let go who really cared about the game and have put so many years of hard work into the game. Of course it is the nature of the game that staff gets let go from a video game project once the game is launched and less work is needed for it but letting community manager Stephen Reid go was a real blow. Why would a successful game let…

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Daniel Erickson reveals plan to merge into super-servers!

Here is an interesting piece of news.  In an interview with PC Gamer, our main man Daniel Erickson, spilled the beans about the upcoming serve transfers.   Answering a question about the upcoming changes in patch 1.3 regarding the group finder tool, Mr. Erickson had an interesting answer: From the interview: PCG: Will they be cross-server at launch? Is that planned for the future? DE: They will not be cross-server as we are coming up on a huge move to servers with massively higher population caps than we have today. So  is that how they’re going to (more or less) avoid the stigma of server mergers?  Best they could do, I guess.  No more low-pop servers, same-server Group Finder viable… nice! I, for one, will welcome our new super-server overlords.

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SWTOR Patch 1.3 Interview with Daniel Erickson

BioWare’s Daniel Erickson, Lead Designer for Star Wars: The Old Republic revealed some interesting information in an interview with SWTOR Hub about patch 1.3 and what we can expect in the future of the game. With many players and skeptics questioning whether or not there will even be a future of the game, this is as good a time as any for BioWare staff to come out with more info to keep players interested.  Here is a snippet:  Ten Ton Hammer: Is the developing team satisfied with the current direction of the game or can we look forward to the game moving into another direction, like harder content with more prestige items? Daniel Erickson: The best thing about a live MMO is that you have a living, changing game. SWTOR will continue to evolve and improve across the board. Harder content outside the operations is a personal passion of mine…

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