The original director of BioWare's long-running MMO Star Wars: The Old Republic—which is now being run by Broadsword—had not played a single game in the genre when he started work on it, he has revealed.
In an interview, BioWare veteran James Ohlen described the studio's founders Ray Muzyka and Greg Zeschuk calling him into their office in 2006, halfway through the development of Dragon Age: Origins, and asking him to oversee a new office in Austin, Texas, making MMOs.
"And I was like, 'I hate massive multiplayer games. But all right, I'll do it.'
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"The day after, I created a character in World of Warcraft and started down that path ... I was playing all the MMOs and getting to a high level and I forced myself to love them," he says, chuckling.
"But before that, no, I just wasn't a fan of the genre."
The Old Republic, which is still going today, launched in 2011 and was the most expensive game ever made at the time, with estimated costs north of $200 million.
"How the hell did they trust me with this much money? And I didn't even like MMOs! I don't understand how the world works. The world is weird."
He said he was "depending on his lieutenants" such as lead writer Daniel Erickson, lead combat designer Georg Zoeller and lead PvP and flashpoint designer Gabe Amatangelo, who was the "MMO expert" handling the endgame.
"And really I was just making sure that they weren't all going to kill each other," he says. "I was making decisions at the highest level, but really it was like, how do I empower [them], and how do I make sure that story is still a big part of it, because that was supposed to be the big differentiator."
Ohlen—who was also lead designer on Baldur's Gate 1 and 2, Neverwinter Nights and Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic—quit BioWare in 2018 after 22 years.
In the full interview he discussed his regrets around The Old Republic's rocky launch. The team built around 200 hours of content for players spread across eight origin stories—in hindsight, Ohlen would've preferred 60 hours across a couple of meatier origins, he says. He wanted it to be Knights of the Old Republic online, but in the end it felt more like "WoW in space".
"When you're doing that much content the quality starts going down. You have to start depending upon rules instead of creativity, and the content got more vanilla. I feel like if we had maybe just two storylines and a shorter game, that would have had a huge impact," he says.
He also revealed how his grand plan to relaunch the game under a new name—Star Wars: The New Republic—was denied by EA's board despite the backing of EA exec Patrick Söderlund (EA acquired BioWare in 2007).
"The big challenge was Patrick Söderlund, who hates Star Wars: The Old Republic. And I convinced him … it was one of the greatest accomplishments of my career," he says.
"We were going to be able to have a Star Wars: The New Republic, until the board of directors of EA, who all remembered the launch of Star Wars: The Old Republic, and remembered spending $300 million, they're like, 'Why the fuck are we gonna spend a bunch more?'"
It ultimately marked the "beginning of the end" for him at Bioware, he says.
The Old Republic's longevity proves its success. It underwhelmed at launch despite rave reviews but it has, by all accounts, kept a loyal fan base. In 2019 EA revealed it had brought in close to $1 billion.
2019 was also the year Ohlen co-founded Archetype Entertainment, the studio behind sci-fi RPG Exodus, but he left in December 2025 and in the interview he explains why. "I was running on fumes, and it was hurting my health, and my personal life, and everything. I just need to step away."
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