End Game and You

[Darth Kraze]

For me the real game starts when I hit the level cap, and can begin raiding. I love the difficulty, skill and coordination required to raid. I love that not every single person you run into is able to pull it off. I love being in that elite group of players who are known server wide.

 

How do you spend your time once you reach that max level? How do you see raiding implemented into The Old Republic?

 

Imagine you have your twenty men sitting in your guilds hangar organizing for the up-coming raid when time finally comes. You all jump into your guilds carrier/cruiser type ship and head off, your target? that Sith Destroyer cruiser that has been spotted around said planet. As you come out of hyperspace and begin to close in on the ship. Your best pilots jump into their respective ships in the hangar and head off to be greeted by a squad of Sith pilots. The rest of your men, man the turrets with your captain steering the ship.

 

After an epic battle and the sith fleet destroyed the real fun begins when you begin boarding.

 

Your raid of twenty splits off into squads of 5, and begin to spread out searching the ship looking for, prisoners/convicts/stolen plans/intelligence/some valuable object . But it's not that simple, every corridor is filled with sith assassins and other military types, maybe a few sith tamed creatures if your lucky. As you travel through the halls you come to a sealed door that can't be cut through with your handy dandy jedi. You call your commander and report your situation, he relays the command to all available squads to look for a security room to unlock the door.

 

Just clearing it though isn't that simple, you have to have a skilled enough slicer with you, it's not just a simple click and done task either, the slicer will have to work his way through a series of tasks through a lack of better words "mini-game". Once completed though he will have the ability to open and lock doors, he'll be able to go through the security cameras and find what you're looking for, and have access to defense turrets and gas rooms, being able to disable or use them on the sith themselves.

 

Raiding would not just be "kill everything" there would be a multitude of non combat capabilities. As in my previous example you have "slicers" you have your diplomat who would try and settle the conflict without combat(for non sith raids) you would have your charismatic entertainer type profession(if they have one) trying to talk her way into getting maybe a passkey or maybe the location of whatever your looking for or even maybe you could convert him to your cause and he would join your group almost like a second companion character for the mission. There are a lot of other class possibilities as well.

 

So that there is some added pressure and excitement they would be timed so that you don't have raids lasting hours to appeal of the casual gamer. Be it the ship activating it's self destruct or your target jumping in an escape pod and leaving. I also thought it could have a really cool tie in with PvP, imagine you just board the ship and begin clearing, when you hear over the intercom "A second ship has boarded us! on the starboard side! be on alert!" then it becomes a race to the objective, and somewhat of a capture the flag mission, you getting to the target and escaping with it.

 

There would be a plethora of strategic options, would you try getting the objective? or would you try to get to their ship and ambushing them on the way out? would you rush to the security room and use the ships defenses against them? or would you just send your whole raid at them to try and drive them off?

 

There would be no more single giant raid bosses where you have 20-40 men wacking away at it for 30 minutes, instead you would have many smaller single group bosses, it would require coordination and movement, no more standing in one spot the whole time spamming a button. The single boss could run off through the halls leading you into a trap or just bring the fight into many rooms with different environmental layouts.

 

This wouldn't just be restricted to space and ships either, it could easily be a land based raid as well delving into an opposing factions base, or maybe even some ancient ruins.

 

(Just to make it even longer, bounty hunters should be able to board the ship as well if he has a target on-board, it wouldn't really inconvenience the whole raid unless the bounty hunter stealthed his way to the raid and waited for a boss engagement to ensue.)

 

If you read all of that I applaud and thank you.

 

So what do YOU think, how do you want raids to be?

 

If you want to give the post some love in hopes someone who has any say see's it here's the offical forum link http://swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=8866

[Char Ell]

Hmmm.... This makes me wonder if BioWare will support difficulty levels in TOR by creating servers for casual, intermediate, and hard core players. Sounds like you're hard core and I think I fall into either the casual or intermediate player buckets.

[Darth Kraze]

I think the only normal server types would be PVE, PVP, RP, RP-PVP, etc.

 

If they were labeled by personal skill level, I would see a lot of casual to intermediate players go onto the hardcore servers, and a lot of hardcore players go on to the casual servers just so they can dominate.

 

By keeping them unlabeled they will achieve a better balance.

[Scars Unseen]

Meh. I'm more of a RP kind of guy who likes to throw PvP into the mix. For me, end game raiding is a game killer. Once everyone gets there, suddenly none of your friends are around because they are always raiding. The end game is what made me quit WoW. I got sick of everyone always chasing the next drop so they could stay competitive instead of actually enjoying the game.

[Ztalker]

I hope they will take the new Wrath of the Lick King example.

 

Wrath is an epic roleplaying story, in which all Warcraft lore is used. There is ALSO an entire PROVINCE where the two factions can fight. An entire PROVINCE filled with lv 80's fighting a REAL war.

 

You don't have to go there, but you can. Instead of raiding and spending 4 hours in front of a television screen, you can join the horde or alliance. It's good story-wise and it works.

 

I'd love to see this in the TOR mmo. Just an entire area you can fight. Lower level players can avoid it, higher level players can create a group and go there. It would rock.

[Darth Kraze]

lol holy crap, I just realized someone from Bioware commented on my post, "Terrific post and thread. Some really good thoughts there."

 

http://swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=8866&page=8

 

Posted about half way through, with a "B" avatar :

 

he's a "Bioware Associate World Designer"

[Char Ell]

Nice. Maybe at least some of your ideas will be used in TOR. Or maybe they had already planned on using some of them.