The Old Republic Update: Companions and Jedi vs Bounty Hunters
Posted By Admin on October 13, 2011
It is Friday, and for the community surrounding Star Wars: The Old Republic, that means it is update day. Today, the SWTOR team offered up two updates- one on companions and the other on their thoughts regarding two of the classes, namely the Jedi Knight and the Bounty Hunter. Let us start with the Companion AI piece, and then go on to the video.
One of the things that BioWare’s team has wanted to do is make sure that the companion characters are not, well, like World of Warcraft pets, which have very little in the way of direct AI and tend to get stuck a lot. One thing that they did not want to do, though, is force players to have to manually control their companions- if they did not want to.
William Wallace, Senior Game Designer for the game, recently stated:
Originally, our companions functioned almost entirely on their own, with only a few options for manual control. From both internal feedback and testing, we found that the integral nature of companions to gameplay in The Old Republic(TM) had many players wishing for more control over their companion’s behavior – they wanted more than what they had experienced in other massively-multiplayer games.
To address this, we’ve taken a page from other BioWare games and added AI toggles to each ability to control whether the companion should decide on their own when to use them, or whether they should be manually activated by the player. Players who are not interested in managing their companion can leave the default toggles on and let them run on autopilot. Skilled players can take complete control of the companion by expanding the companion bar onto their screen and using the abilities directly as though they were player abilities.
This actually sounds very good. It is certainly a step up from the problems that one can experience while playing WoW or even Star Trek Online, where you have an entire away team which acts pretty much independently from the player. Wallace notes that:
Players may choose to disable some area-of-effect abilities when using crowd control or when fighting tough single enemies.
Players may activate special modes or stances for their companion, causing them to focus more on damage or tanking, or on a single target versus groups of enemies.
Players may want to manually activate buffs and powerful special abilities on long cooldowns, as opposed to letting the companion pick when to use their most powerful attacks.
This is good news as most of the time, it can be incredibly annoying to deal with a much more simple set up. For instance, like it or not, in WoW, Hunter pets would often use buff or debuff abilities when you sent them into battle, and you had no choice but to go through a complicated series of things to toggle it off and on, and many Hunters lever learned that. It is good to know that BioWare seems to be doing a good job of learning from others.
Another thing that Wallace brings up, and has been discussed elsewhere, is that teams are limited to just four players for instances. This is a drop from other games, certainly, but it also has an interesting twist. You can have your companions in the group so long as there are not four characters in group. This is explained by Wallace as:
Star Wars(TM): The Old Republic(TM) features a large amount of group content, including Heroic Quests (challenging quests requiring 2 or 4 players to complete) and Flashpoints (highly engaging instanced story content for groups of 4 players). One benefit we’re seeing from our new, fully featured companions is additional flexibility about how players approach group content. A full group in The Old Republic always has four players. Any player leaving the group can be substituted by a companion of the group’s choice, with the party leader in control of which player gets to use their companion.
If a player leaves the group or its proximity, to travel to a vendor for instance, he is able to summon his companion for the journey. Upon reentering proximity of the group, the companion is automatically dismissed. The remaining group can temporarily substitute the missing player with one of their companions if desired.
Alright, that makes sense. What they have also done is that you can summon your companion at any point anywhere. Each character gets five companions at launch, and they will be increasing that in the near future. That will include some additional romance options for same-sex oriented players as well. That bit is something that happened because intense lobbying from the LGBT Community within the gaming boards.
And now for the video. Right now, I am going through Knights of the Old Republic II as a way to get use to some of this again and see into the lore some more. Still, when SWTOR launches, I have every intention of making every class available. So, enjoy the video, have some fun, and we’ll keep you posted with information as we find it.
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