Posts Tagged ‘pve’

Eternity Vault

Recently released by the developer team at Bioware was a new theatrical video about one of the latest additions to Star Wars The Old Republic, the Eternity Vault instance.

This particular adventure will be aimed at players from the Sith Empire, and they will attempt to storm the Eternity vault in groups between four and twenty four.

The Eternity Vault is a hidden away portion of SWTOR’s own Jail planet, which was recently (within the timeline of the game that is) discovered by the Sith Empire’s scouts. Inside is said to be remnants of the Alien Civilisation that built the planet wide metropolis, and prototypes of many technologies they never got around to producing en mass.

However, seeing as it was built on a planet theoretically covered in criminals, the mysterious civilisation left it very well protected. So much so in fact, that the Vault’s defence system was easily a match for the first scouts, and activated a more serious defensive network to prevent further attacks.

Eternity Vault should be an entertaining PvE instance for high level Sith Players, and give them valuable experience and items. As has already been stated by the SWTOR developers, we will not have a return to the vanishingly small loot drops of games like WoW, with a more bountiful approach taken to all PvE encounters. This will mean players will not need to repeat raids such as Eternity Vault copious numbers of times, although it will certainly be a possibility for those keen enough.

Forum Guilding on TOR

Just earlier this week the developers of The Old Republic released a new forum tool allowing players to join guilds with their accounts, and have this recognised officially once the game begins.

In the morning an Email went out to all subscribers detailing this system, and within twenty four hours there were more than sixteen thousand guilds. This a huge number, especially when many already have between ten and twenty members. In previous estimates we had the number of unofficially guilded members sitting at around six thousand, but with this update it appears we were very much clearly mistaken.

Although many of these guilds may have been made by spammers, or people just messing around, they still go to show just how fast news spreads on the internet when so many are interested. This lesson was learned the hard way by Bioware today, as the servers which they believed adequate were easily overloaded by the huge influx of traffic.

So far when creating guilds on the forums players can choose the faction of the guild, as well as one focus out of Rp, PvP and PvE. They can also set certain requirements such as voice chat, forum participation or community play, however most guilds are friendly enough to not discriminate against possible candidates in this way. Players also choose the location of their guild, US East, West or Europe. According to Bioware based on this choice their guild name will be reserved on an appropriate server when the game goes live, making sure that dedicated members of the community are not beaten at the gun by those with super fast internet or line-cutting skills at TOR retailers.

One thing which disappointed some players was the maximum length of guild names. This made it impossible for one of the game’s biggest guilds, The Grand Army of The Republic, to have their chosen name. Rather, they had to settle for Republic Grand Army.

As the number of guilds continues to sky rocket Bioware will have to find some way to change the sign up process to make it less exploitable. Perhaps making a minimum number of members would fix this, otherwise they may find their servers again overwhelmed by floods of data in the future.

Flashpoints in The Old Republic

Recently on the official SWTOR website an overview of the Flashpoint system for TOR was released. Flashpoints are said to be action-packed, story-driven adventures which are undertaken by groups of players.

So far it appears that they will be similar to the heroic instances from SWG, and raids from games such as World of Warcraft. However, flashpoints have a few things not present in other games, namely the ability to adapt to player decisions, and take their own self-contained stories in different directions.

They are said to contain difficult decisions which will have a large impact on what enemies you fight, and even the eventual outcome of the particular flashpoint.

While there will not be limitless numbers of possible paths players can follow through a flashpoint in SWTOR, just by adding three decisions along the way each with two simple answers, there could be up to eight alternate endings to a particular scenario.

So far information on five flashpoints that will be included in Star Wars The Old Republic has been released. These are split into three groups, early middle and late game. It is good to see ones aimed at lower player levels, as this is often forgotten in other games (such as Galaxies) and prevents the levelling up process from being quite as boring and monotonous as many MMORPGs make it.

The flashpoints that have so far been announced are as follows:
Early Game: The Esseles (Republic only), The Black Talon (Empire only)
Mid Game: Taral V (Republic only), Boarding Party (Empire only)
Late Game: Directive 7 (Republic & Empire)

In other games instances and raids have often bored players, as it is usually necessary to run them a large number of times. By giving players more choice of what to do during the flashpoint, the developers of The Old Republic should lessen this repetitiveness by a large amount, and make it enjoyable for players to run a single flashpoint five, ten or even fifty times.

Following is the trailer for the Taral V flashpoint: