Star Wars: The Old Republic development team reached 570 members

BioWare has given an outline of the massive undertaking which produced MMORPG Star Wars: The Old Republic.

Speaking at a panel at GDC 2012, as reported by Massively, production director Dallas Dickinson and executive producer Rich Vogel said the Star Wars: The Old Republic team had 30 producers, 40 platform engineers, 80 programmers, 75 designers, 140 artists and 280 quality assurance positions.

The focus of the panel was the management of such an enormous group working on diverse and substantial content, and the pair gave some insight into how BioWare managed it.

“We brought everyone to us to explain where they were. In the background we had a board that was twenty feet across and had magnetic strips of different things that outlined what we needed to do and were tracked daily,” Vogel said, according to G4.

“It’s very important to cut your babies in half early and often. It’s also very important to that you don’t do nice-to-haves. That’s what everyone wants. We made people cry in the Death Star many times.”

Star Wars: the Old Republic's development was notoriously expensive, worrying in investors, but the MMORPG has 1.7 million subscribers and is expected to reach at least 2 million.