One of your biggest breaks could come from the most unexpected of places. As is the case of a tenured developer at BioWare, who found himself leading the development of successful MMO Star Wars: The Old Republic despite disliking the genre wholesale.
For a number years, James Ohlen was a prominent designer at BioWare, working on the likes of Baldur’s Gate, Dragon Age: Origins, Mass Effect, and the first Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. Then, he had a fateful meeting with studio co-founders Ray Muzyka and Greg Zeschuk about venturing further into a galaxy far, far away, and directing The Old Republic in Austin.
“And I was like, ‘I hate massive multiplayer games. But all right, I’ll do it,'” Ohlen explains to PCGamer. “It took me a day, I talked to my wife and said, ‘It’ll be an adventure, we’ll only be there for a year.’ I’m still here. Maybe I should have known better.”
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The project was on a scale different to what Ohlen was used to, to say the least. Though exact figures are uncertain, reports place The Old Republic’s overall budget at over $200 million, making it one of the priciest games ever made.
Ohlen describes his role on the game as something of a cat wrangler who had to guide the “big ego designers” and make sure they “didn’t kill each other.” In 2018, seven years after the MMO from a long, long time ago launched, he departed BioWare. By the end, Ohlen says, he was just absorbing a nice salary, describing himself as a “highly paid, completely useless person.”
Star Wars: The Old Republic is still running, though now it’s supported by Broadsword Online Games. Ohlen was recently working on upcoming sci-fi RPG Exodus at Archetype Entertainment before stepping away from the team in late 2025.
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