Last week's Friday Update for Star Wars: The Old Republic included a short community Q&A that raised a number of interesting questions and provided a few thought provoking answers. So, this week we'll be taking a look at some of the neat tidbits that came out of the Q&A.
One of the more interesting questions to come out of this latest community Q&A was on the ability to level exclusively through PvP in Star Wars: The Old Republic. I knew that SW:TOR’s PvP would allow players to earn experience points, but I was surprised to hear Dallas Dickinson (Director of Production at Bioware Austin) answer in the affirmative regarding leveling through PvP.
This is one area of the game I certainly don’t mind Bioware pulling from Warhammer Online, but oddly enough, I don’t think I will ever really make use of it. It worked great for Warhammer, but this is the only game with a KOTOR-like storyline, you better believe I’m going to want to experience it on all my characters!
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The only time I can see myself wanting to level through PvP is if I’m playing a new class on a side I’ve already played before and don’t care to repeat the sidequests or other non-class specific content. In that case, I might go ahead and use PvP to fill in the gaps between class quests.
Another community member asked about multiplayer dialogue, more specifically, the way the consequences of decisions in MP dialogue affect your character. As Daniel Erickson mentioned at PAX, the game only factors your intentions and not the outcome of the winning decision towards your personal character development. If your groupmate wants to kill the Captain and you want to spare him, but the groupmate wins the roll, well, the Captain dies (and this affects the storyline of that series of quests/flashpoint), but you’ll still get Light Side points since you wanted to save the Captain. Yes, the logic is a bit iffy, but it mostly works. It would be interesting if you were able to argue between groupmates over such decisions (within the dialogue, think of it like conversation PvP), but alas, this should do fine.
For those of you following the game closely, the rest of the Q&A was equally underwhelming, with most of the revelations already well known throughout fan circles, but one final area worth noting was the mention of PvP servers in The Old Republic. While no details are given, I continue to salivate at the thought of PvP servers, though I admit, part of this has to do with the griefer in me.
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I’m not a terrible griefer, mind you, but in Age of Conan I was sometimes the douchebag that would kill you while you were in a conversation with a quest NPC. This was different from most MMOs where you simply clicked accept and moved on. Much like The Old Republic, Age of Conan offered interactive quest dialogue “cutscenes”, though they were not voiced (with the exception of your main quest), and so players were often in conversations with NPCs for longer than they normally would be in say, World of Warcraft. This similarity has got me wondering if I’ll be able to do this in The Old Republic. It all depends on whether Bioware cordons off the quest-givers with guard NPCs or not. I know it’s a real jerk move, but hey, if your guild is KOS (kill on sight), well, nothing is off limits!
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How did you feel about this latest community Q&A? What questions do you want Bioware to answer about The Old Republic? Share your thoughts in the comments below!
