Tuesday, June 15, 2010

Personal space ships and instanced PVP for SWTOR

E3 has started and new information about some of our most anticipated games is starting to trickle out.  I was eagerly awaiting new information about SWTOR and we've gotten two bits of information.  The first that there will be "player housing" in SWTOR in the form of a personal space ship.  But for me more importantly I was eagerly awaiting information about PVP.  Unfortunately I was a bit disappointed as I got to 1:20 in the video and heard that battles occur in warzones.  Which most likely means no, or extremely limited open world PVP.

I hate to use SWG as an example of anything but my fondest memories of that game are always about the PVP that was had in it.  Even with the debilitating lag that large battles caused the mid to small scale was fantastic.  Even the large scale battles were great in the sense of what you eventually could accomplish.  Being able to "claim" territory by placing and defending bases was a central focus of the warfare and I had hoped something similar would be brought to SWTOR.  If nothing else being able to change alignment of towns and quest hubs that would in turn offer bonuses and additional content to the controlling side.  While we have very scant information to go from the specific words of "In the Old Republic players battle it out in war zones" does not evoke the sense with me Bioware must have hoped it would.  I'm still waiting to hear how this game is an MMO and the announcement of instanced PVP certainly doesn't tell me that.

[edit]
Bioware later clarified the situation through additional interviews to say that the warzones are "zones" but that decisions about how players will access them hasn't yet been made.  Specifics about what is actually meant by zone wasn't given so it's not known whether they are "zones" like the WoW battlegrounds which are instanced, or more akin to Wintergrasp.