Published by Mikro under E3,video on Jun. 05. 2011.
Here’s some honest, heartfelt and hopefully friendly advice for #SWTOR fans: take a deep breath and know we’re making an amazing MMO that IS coming. Trust me. It’s coming. 🙂
The above was tweeted by Stephen Reid, Community Manager of The Old Republic. Having met the man I can tell you he is the least bulls**t person in marketing I’ve met so far. The quote above, it is actually his honest opinion. After seeing Friday, pre-E3, information blast we come closer to sharing his sentiment.
Information was released through the official site and its Friday Update as well as through Gamespot and MMORPG.com. What we know now from this info blast is what we can expect to find out more about at E3.
End game content (introducing the first raid The Eternity Vault)
High level gameplay on Tatooine with Imperial classes
New Cinematic Trailer (last of the trilogy)
Something about Alderaan (I am thinking PvPvE scenario)
Vehicles (mounts)
Auction house and social hubs
Next big thing is the trailer released on Gamespot that shows all of the game’s systems and for the first time we officially see player mounts, auction house and social hubs. You can see the trailer bellow:
I am waiting for one more week before I pronounce it as official, but it seems that Bioware is starting their pre-release information flood. Friday updates are becoming more informational and we’re starting to see mid-week updates as well. Coupled with the events season it promises to be an information filled summer for SWTOR fans. What this Friday update talks about specifically is how the design of advanced classes changed since they were first talked about and what Bioware based those changes on. There is a detailed rundown of all the advanced classes in their current state, given by Georg Zoeller, Principal Lead Combat Designer. We now fully see 3 healing and 3 tanking builds present. Very interesting thing to see is the choice they made with the Jedi Consular and Sith Inquisitor. These classes can spec so they can be healers or tanks (tanking abilities have been added in the meantime; since the last AC info was released). Since both these classes were basically cloth users I wonder how they made them tanks. High evasion plus heals to get aggro? I don’t see them as paladins either. I must admit I am curious to see how this works out.
What I have a feeling Bioware did is incorporate your classic trinity roles into the most commonly used classes; Jedi Knight and Consular and Sith Warrior and Inquisitor (or as you’d call them – force users). The other classes are getting non standard trinity options or what some would call soft trinity classes. So we get a ranged tank, healing rogue and a healing “hunter” (ranged rogue). Just the prospect of discovering how these “new” roles function is exciting for me.
Friday update also goes over the decision making process through showing two images created through metrics Bioware gets from test servers and game testers. The images show a three-dimensional map with all the spots gamers died at and a smaller two-dimensional map showing where people thread the most and what places are fatal for their adventure. That image alone helped Bioware determine that Smugglers were having problems in the areas of their primary class story and were able to tweak the difficulty. I must add that the 3D image looks like what is known among game programmers as representation of geodata. Geodata is map data of X, Y and Z coordinates of the game level that determines what players and other level stuff (foliage, buildings, NPCs, etc.) stand on and can’t “fall through”.
In the midst of all the GamesCom madness people of Bioware managed to release a new Fan Friday as part of their continuous Friday SWTOR updates. First up is the update to Holonet with a new starships page. Although we saw all the other ships in the recently released space combat trailer, only two previously announced ships are in the starships holonet page, the Fury and the Defender. There are some new screenshots if you go onto the individual ship pages so make sure you check it out.
Fan Friday wouldn’t be complete without some awesome fan created art. Two of the most impressive fan created sketches I’ve seen have been made by Kromnz adn have been posted on the official SWTOR forums. “Jedi reading” sketch and “Three Deadly Siths” are surely worth seeing. You can find the rest of the mentioned art at the Fan Friday page on the official site.
The best is, as always, left for last. In the developer corner we get a full list of the advanced classes and some details on them. The list is very close to the one we provided from our GamesCom exclusive coverage, but with more details on some of the advanced classes we didn’t manage to write down.
Character customization in SWTOR is also made possible through a concept called advanced classes. It is a specialization of your primary class into one of two paths.
Today at GamesCom 2010 the working titles of all 16 advanced classes were revealed. They are:
Smuggler
Scoundrel (Stealth/Medicine; Burst ranged damage or healing)
Gunslinger (Dual pistols, Quick draw, Ranged DPS)
Sith Inquisitor
Sorcerer (Single saber; ranged damage class; Healing; Think of someone that just loves using lightning; Think Palpatine; They even heal with lighning (joke, but they do heal))
Assassin (Double bladed light sabers, a lot of melee damage, When you think about the Assassin think about Darth Maul and Zabrak and tattoos. That’s the general vibe they are going for)
Jedi Knight
Sentinel (dual saber (not double), melee DPS; Think young Anakin)
Guardian (tank, party buffs, Think Obi Wan leading the attack with the troops
During our talk with James Ohlen, he said that they wanted to have 4 healing capable classes so that out of 16 available advanced classes, 25% can heal and when you translate that to a group of 4 there will always be one class capable of doing some heals. (If they spec for healing option of course)
