BioWare’s story-based MMORPG is a surprising hit with competitively-minded players.
Think of Star Wars: The Old Republic and the first word that’ll hop into your brain probably won’t be PvP , yet according to the MMORPG’s lead designer Daniel Erickson over 50% of TOR players take part in PvP matches, dubbed Warzones, on a daily basis.
For an experience which prides itself on allowing players to roleplay and craft their own story, that level of popularity will surprise a lot of people.
Mr Erickson revealed the percentage during a recent interview with GamerZines to discuss the merits of the latest Legacy update. We asked him whether the addition on combat logging – the ability to track how combat efficient your character is during quests and battles via a spreadsheet outside of the game – was in an effort to make TOR more palatable to the PvP audience and give players something different to do once they hit the level cap.
Warzones: PvP Star Wars-style.
“It’s not actually giving players something additional to do, I mean it does that, but it isn’t the motivation,” he explained.
“What happened was that we also brought in the guys that had worked on PvP for Warhammer Online. Those guys came over from Mythic and built our PvP and our Warzones, which turned out to be wildly popular. Over 50% of our players play Warzones on a daily basis which is astronomical for an MMO community.”
Once you launch a game it becomes the community’s game, if your community says, “Great job on the story – we love it, but we want more PvP,” then we say, “Great more PvP features it is!”
Ranked Warzones are next on the agenda for this game’s PvP scene, and judging from their popularity fans should expect plenty more PvP inclusions in the future.
BioWare Austin has always talked The Old Republic’s two-pronged approach to MMO design, offering both story and a competitive Star Wars environment making the most of Lucas Film’s iconic archetypes, but we have to admit even we’re surprised that so many players are purportedly jumping into the game’s Warzones time and time again.
To read the rest of this enlightening interview, please follow this link.
Tags: The Old Republic
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