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Hands On with the Novare Coast

Hillary Nicole Posted:
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POKKET'S IMPRESSIONS

At PAX East 2012, Bioware showed off  their new Star Wars: The Old Republic warzone, Novare Coast, and talked about their upcoming items in Patch 1.2. Having gotten into the convention earlier than most convention goers (due to being media), I sat down with other press to play the new warzone on a premade level 20 Gunslinger. I was pretty excited because I'd leveled a gunslinger during beta... so I was decently familiar with the class.

Being the obsessive person I am, I immediately noticed that there were only the default keybindings, so I took the time to bind the Naga buttons, as well as ALT + numbers and letters to each specific skill. This isn't a rant, so much as me letting my OCD get the best of me in the middle of a video game convention.

As soon as the warzone started, I found myself being the only one going after objectives, rather than damage and kills. In a way I was sort of shocked, but then it made sense to me why they'd be showing off these features in the convention... there are plenty of people who still are unfamiliar with the content (whether old or new).

I will say that my OCD with changing the keybinds probably helped me to dominate in 1v1s against the enemy team. So much so, that it got to the point that enemies avoided whatever point I was defending, and would try to take a different one.

About half way through the match, and after spamming multiple times in chat to defend, my team pulled it together and we kept two points for the remainder of the match for the victory.

Since I had gotten my fill of capping and killing other players, I passed the reigns off to a nice lady (you may know her as Amana on MMORPG.com’s forums) who was standing behind me. Though she explained  that she had no idea how to play a 'slinger, I assured her it was as simple as pressing F, then rotating through buttons 1-4.

After I was finished with the demo I interviewed Cory Butler of Bioware regarding Patch 1.2 and the future of the game.

BILL’S IMPRESSIONS

I’m not as hardcore as Pokket.  I don’t have a level 50 yet even. I’ve just restarted to a Sith Warrior not long ago bececause I got sick and tired of my Tracer Missile spam on my Bounty Hunter.  I expected to suck when we sat down at SWTOR’s booth on Friday morning to play a little Novare Coast. But the new warzone was self-explanatory and easy to grasp: capture the points hold them until your team emerges victorious.

I’ll admit it, at first I was one of those people Pokket mentions as just going after the kills.  My Jedi Knight did wind up topping the damage charts, but about five minutes in I realized the real key to victory would be about making sure we held our ground and kept control of the strategic locations. In a way, it’s similar to Alderaan, but there’s something about the layout and “bunkers” where the capture points lie that add an extra bit of flare to the warzone.  All I know is that I really found myself loving the thing, though perhaps it’s because we were winning.   In the end, it’s good to see a new warzone coming to SWTOR.  I’m one of those folks who prefers to play the warzones in between the main class quests as a way of avoiding a lot of the more tedious side quests.  It’ll be nice to shake things up from the current three, and especially so when cross-server queuing goes in to do away with the all Sith Empire (all the time) matches of Huttball.  Who knew being bad would be so popular (we all may have)?

Novare Coast is live now on the servers with patch 1.2.  If you’ve been hankering for a new way to kill Jedi, check it out!