Star Wars: The Old Republic: PvP Hands-On Preview

During
a recent visit to EA's Redwood Shores studio for Star Wars: The Old
Republic "Immersion Day", MMORPG.com Community Manager Mike Bitton had
the opportunity for a hands on preview of one of the game's most closely
guarded features: PvP and Warzones. See what Mike saw and check out his
thoughts about PvP in the Old Republic.

Previews By Michael Bitton on May 05, 2011











Let’s get something out of the way real quick: PvP in Star Wars:
The Old Republic is awesome. If you’ve been following our coverage of
the recent Star Wars: The Old Republic “Immersion Days” event you’ll
know that we chose to use our two days with the game as an experiment to
find out how group friendly the game was. While there were a few
issues, PvE turned out to be a pretty solid group experience. But what
about PvP?
Our PvP demo was set for our second day at the event,
and following a successful day grouping with some of my colleagues in
the press I decided to approach the rest of the group with a new plan:
beat the developers at their own game. Let’s face it, they were tossing
us into the deep end here with PvP and this is probably the only time
the developers will be better than the players as they know their game
and the Warzone better than we did. So, why not rob them of this small
pleasure and add a little competitive twist to the demo?
Before
we got into our matches we were given a short presentation to
familiarize us with the various classes, Advanced Classes, and roles
available to players in PvP. BioWare also took this time to highlight
some of the interesting things they are doing with PvP, including what
they are doing to address some of the stand-out issues that tend to
plague PvP in most MMOs.


The
first issue has to do with tanks. As most MMO gamers know, tanks
traditionally have a hard time finding a place in PvP when it comes to
doing their job of protecting their allies. After all, aggro and threat
have no function in PvP. To address this, taunted players attacking a
tank’s allies in The Old Republic will instead suffer a significant
damage penalty, encouraging them to focus on the tank to make full use
of their damage potential. If the enemy decides to attack the tank’s
allies anyways, the tank still wins as he’s still protected them by
allowing them to take less damage, and if the enemy focuses on the tank,
well, mission accomplished! Additionally, tanks will also be able to be
able to Guard a designated player, which allows the tank to share 50%
of the damage being taken by their guarded ally. Both the aforementioned
approach to taunting and the Guard feature worked excellently in
Mythic’s Warhammer Online, and I was glad to hear that these features
will be part of Star Wars: The Old Republic’s PvP experience.
BioWare
is also attempting to address the issue of crowd control in Star Wars:
The Old Republic. This issue actually turned out to be a little bit
trickier to deal with than it already is in most MMOs due to BioWare’s
focus on creating a cinematic combat experience. To address the issues
of crowd control, BioWare has implemented a “Resolve” bar which appears
underneath your character’s HP bar and fills up as you are subject to
crowd controlling effects; once the bar fills to maximum the player is
immune to all crowd control effects for a full eight seconds before the
bar resets.




If
you’ve watched many of the gameplay trailers released up to this point
you’ve probably noticed that enemies tend to react a lot to what’s being
done to them, especially in lightsaber combat, and this does a great
deal in helping BioWare achieve that cinematic combat they’ve been
striving for. The problem arises when they had to consider how this
would work in PvP combat. The team struggled with balancing the desire
to have PvP combat look as “Star Wars” as the PvE combat, and ultimately
decided to keep the animations. The compromise was that basically any
action that removes control of your character now counts as a crowd
control effect towards your Resolve meter. This means things like short
knockbacks, or channeled lightsaber attacks where you are stuck reacting
to the blows also count as CC. The amount the bar fills up by is
completely determined by the severity of the CC being used on you, a
brief pushback will only fill the bar slightly while a hard stun might
increase the bar by a significant chunk.
In addition to the issues
addressed above, BioWare intends to treat PvP as a fully viable
leveling track as they don’t want to put anything in the game that would
give players the impression they’d better spend their time doing a
different activity. If you enjoy doing PvP, you’ll be glad to know you
will earn experience points, credits, and even tokens towards an entire
line of gear and consumables created specifically for PvP. PvP gear will
be appropriately aggressive looking as well; even your peace-loving
Jedi Knight will look like a battle-hardened badass when fully decked
out in PvP gear.
A ranking system known as “Valor” will also help
set the better players apart from the crop and even factors heavily into
the game’s matchmaking system for Warzones. Star Wars: The Old
Republic’s matchmaking system will attempt to match players of similar
Valor rank, try to create balanced teams with healers and tanks, and
most importantly, separates the solo queue from premades. No one likes
getting stomped by premades in a pick-up group and BioWare’s definitely
heard you there.




Finally,
a Commendations system, which was described as a kind of
“mini-achievements” system, awards players for their accomplishments
throughout a Warzone match (and even announces the achievements to other
players). Players can earn commendations for all manner of actions
including killing other players, teamplay activities such as securing
objectives, and even tanks and healers get some love. Indeed, the game’s
scoreboard actually tracks damage taken as well as damage dealt so
tanks that do their job really have something to brag about. At the end
of a match players can also award a single commendation to another
player on their team that they felt did a good job (no, you can’t award
one to yourself).
With the presentation over we went ahead and
took our seats at the same stations we’d played at the day before, and
each station was setup with a premade level 20 character to play with. I
ended up with a dual-wielding Sith Marauder (DPS Sith Warrior), while
the rest of my party consisted of a Sith Sorcerer (Healer), an Agent
Sniper, and I believe either a Bounty Hunter or Agent healer. True, we
were lacking tanks in our little group, but the Alderaan Warzone we were
to participate in was an 8v8 and so there were four other players who
would join us on our team.
The setup was a best of three (Press
vs. Developers) with a warm-up match to get used to our characters. The
Alderaan Warzone we participated in was the original Warzone revealed at
E3 last year, and is probably best compared to a Titan match in
Battlefield 2142 (though there is no final assault on the ship itself).
Players spawn in their respective warships and fly down to the
battlefield atop speederbikes. The objective is to secure three turrets,
with each secured turret firing on the opposing team’s ship depleting
its hitpoints and eventually destroying it. Naturally, the more turrets
you hold the faster the enemy warship is destroyed. The ship even
visually reflects its damaged state and once the ship is destroyed it
will actually crash down into the ground in a massive fireball.
Unfortunately, that cutscene wasn’t ready at the time so we didn’t get a
chance to see it for ourselves.
While playing our warm-up match
we focused on working as a group and applying what we’d all learned
playing together in heroic content during our PvE experience on the
previous day in order to improve our chances in PvP. This meant proper
communication, healing prioritization, and making tactical use of crowd
controlling effects, something especially important with the new Resolve
bar as you have to keep in mind where and when you use your crowd
control. Hitting a dangerous player with a near maxed bar with some hard
CC can often work against you as you pretty much give the guy a full
eight seconds to go crazy on everyone. As a sidenote, Resolve proved to
be a very effective way of dealing with crowd control effects as I never
felt like I was being taken out of the fight for too long, and
communicating on who we wanted to take out of the fight and at what
moment turned out to be key in winning a number of important skirmishes.
There is also an Unreal Tournament/Quake vibe to the matches as there
are a number of powerups scattered throughout the map, and so knowing
map layouts will be especially important for competitive players. For
example, I made use of the damage and speed powerups to quickly get to
far away turrets under siege and to give me that extra edge in turning
the tide of battle once I got there.




Unfortunately,
we lost our wam-up match to the developers as we weren’t really paying
much attention to the objectives, opting to instead turn the match into a
team deatmatch of sorts. My warm-up match also woke me up to the
awesome raw power of the Sith Marauder, who turned out to be an absolute
wrecking ball on the battlefield in the right hands. I went 21 and 0
during our warm-up, and this was really only the beginning of what was
to come.
During our first real match my groupmates and I applied
everything from our warm-up while also paying close attention to the
objectives, leading us to a very satisfying victory. We were a crack
team focused on securing two of the three turrets and defending them
with all we could muster. My Sith Warrior was an absolute menace, to the
point of having the developers yelling and swearing at the mere sight
of the guy. I also picked on Daniel Erickson a lot as he was a Jedi
Consular and so I thought he was the healer for a while. Whoops!
For
those of you interested in the Sith Warrior, I can tell you that a
pissed off Sith Warrior is really something to fear as if you know what
you are doing there is simply very little way to escape his wrath. In
close combat he has a number of high damaging abilities including an
awesome Impale move and a heavy bleed DoT. At range, the Sith Warrior
can Force Choke his enemies stunning them during the three second
channel, and then Force Scream at them for a one-two punch of CC and
high ranged damage. This proved very useful at dealing with runners, but
if that’s not enough your charge is extremely effective as well.
In
fact, the Sith Warrior’s charge doesn’t work like you’d expect it to in
your typical MMO; height isn’t an issue. You can leap up and down
several stories to your selected target, which makes for some amusing
situations with players who think they’ve gotten the upper hand by
finding high ground to attack you from. For example, one Trooper thought
he was slick shooting at my team from an elevated platform with no way
to get to it other than to basically run around a large portion of the
map. This was no problem for my Sith Warrior; I stood underneath him
taking some blaster fire in the process, put on my best “Challenge
Accepted” face and just leapt right up to him, tearing him to shreds.
There is one caveat though: you cannot charge targets who are taking
cover, which is understandable, as this would really limit the
effectiveness of Snipers and Smugglers.



PvP
combat in The Old Republic felt visceral, fast-paced, and most
importantly, tactical. I could even take on multiple targets and survive
if I used my abilities correctly. At one point, I’d gone over to a
turret that Daniel Erickson’s Jedi Consular was in the process of
stealing away from our team. Alone, I almost felt bad (almost) as he
groaned knowing the beating he was about to catch, however, two of his
lightsaber-wielding brethren soon showed up to save his bacon and by
this point I’d built up a reputation for being a total menace so I
didn’t want to give them the pleasure of exacting their revenge upon me.
I stepped up to the challenge of trying to kill all three of them
myself (which sounds suicidal but I was feeling cocky at the time), and
with some sound choices I was able to take out two of the three before
my teammates showed up to ensure our victory and secure the point.

We
decided to up the ante in round two by spending our earned PvP tokens
on powerful consumables such as speed buffs, but I also opted to make
use of a “thorn shield” consumable as the BioWare team had enough of my
shenanigans at this point and made serious effort to focus me down. I
figured I’d give it to them back a bit as they’d actually gotten me to
die a few times. Speaking of focusing me down, my Sith Warrior’s
rampage was largely enabled by having an awesome team, with
GameBreaker.tv’s MikeB (yes, there are two of us) and Curse.com’s Kody
providing some excellent healing support. More interestingly, the other
MikeB, who was playing the Sith Sorcerer often either tied me or inched
ahead of me in kill count, all the while keeping the rest of us well
healed, so those of you thinking you’ll just be playing whack-a-mole
with health bars can rest assured: beating ass as a healer is definitely
possible.
Ultimately, we swept the BioWare team in our best of
three, but it wasn’t just the shutout that made the experience exciting,
it was the ebb and flow of each skirmish; there was never a feeling
that we were snowballing them even when we ended up winning out. Showing
up with more people wasn’t a guarantee for victory, this wasn’t a zerg
game. Making tactical decisions during each and every skirmish was
rewarding, and a bad situation could easily turn around with some good
communication and proper execution.



As
a former heavy roleplayer turned bloodlusting PvP player, I can tell
you I live and breathe for a solid PvP experience nowadays. Content, no
matter how good it is, eventually runs out, and you want to do
something with all that sweet gear you’ve put together so PvP is
definitely my activity of choice. What especially stood out to me is the
fact the game worked well both when I was tightly working with my
groupmates and during the times I’d decided to lone wolf it and take an
objective alone. Some games put either too much or too little focus on
the group dynamic, often resulting in either a team of lone wolves
paying no attention to teamplay or an experience where you feel
absolutely useless when trying to excel on your own or carry a team.
Obviously, I cannot speak to the larger picture of PvP in Star Wars: The
Old Republic (especially the open world aspect, which will allow for
companions, Warzones do not), but the small taste we got of level 20 PvP
in the Alderaan Warzone was probably the most fun I’d had doing PvP in
quite some time and I can only hope that BioWare manages to retain and
somehow improve on that experience in the months leading up to launch.