Wednesday, November 9, 2011

RvR in SWTOR?

This week, the SWTOR team at BioWare Austin invited a number of fansites down to check out the latest and greatest.  One of the big ticket items they got to see was PvP on Ilum.  This is the only announced world area dedicated to PvP.  Unless you roll on a PvP server, then you can get it on almost anywhere you want.

For the full details, head on over to Ask a Jedi.

Quick Summary. Basically, Ilum has a large RvR lake (in WAR terms).  There are 2 bases: one Republic, one Empire.  In between there will be 3 objectives to be captured. Capture them all and your faction wins.

Reward.  What do you get for winning?  It seems like a faction-wide buff to Valor gain.  Valor is basically Renown.  It is said that the buff stacks, so multiple captures increase the buff.  The lake will also contains rare crafting materials.

Cool Stuff.  The battlefield has Walkers (AT-AT kinda stuff), Bombers, Rocket launchers and who knows what else.  We saw some of it in a video they released a short while ago.

Thoughts.  It's nice that TOR is attempting to put some interesting PvP into the game.  I'm certainly going to check it out once I reach 50, I want to shoot some Walkers!  The rare crafting materials also seems like a great reason to visit the zone.

Overall, I'm not sure how well it will work.  One area to fight in will get old fast for a lot of people.  They say that the zone does not reset (like Wintergrasp) which is a good thing, but then we get to the problem of unbalanced populations.

If the Republic is just more active (or more coordinated) they will gear up faster and be even stronger.  I'm not sure there is anyway to really solve this, especially with 2 sides and limited places to fight.

We still don't know all of the details, so I'll keep an open mind.  In the end, I'm playing TOR for the story so I am not very concerned with the PvP side of the game.  If it turns out to be good, it's a nice bonus.    Who am I kidding, I can't resist PvP.