Okay, let’s see, we take the little tweezers, avoid the metal sides, grab the funny bone and ZAP!!! No wait, we’re not talking about the game of Operation, we’re talking about Operations in The Old Republic.
Over at that Gamescom conference in Germany, Bioware did a live demo of the Eternity Vault, the game’s first Operation (aka, raid). So how was the presentation?
Let’s just say if I had been there I would’ve spewed my hefeweizen all over the conference floor. It looks amazing. Things were fast paced and action packed. It looked like pure controlled chaos. If you haven’t seen any of Bioware’s presentations, I encourage you to check out this post over at Darth Hater.
Now, until I get my hands on this thing I won’t really know how good it is, but here are some things I liked.
- Raid sizes of 8 and 16 players. Having experienced 10 and 25-man raids in WoW, I’d say SWTOR got the numbers right.
- Players were able to get into the action right away.
- There didn’t appear to be a lot of wasted time. You know standing around, marking targets, CC pulls, waiting for pats to clear, the sort of thing that’s very common in WoW raids.
- It wasn’t a giant cluster where the tank rounds up all the adds in one spot and all the DPS just AoE them down. There were opportunities for AoE, but it seemed like more of a reaction to how the fight was proceeding rather than a strategy in and of itself.
- That Annhilator droid was one bad Mutha!
- Players looked like they were participating in a story; the story wasn’t intruding on the game play (i.e., here comes a random cinematic of a bridge being built).
- Critters! Every good raid has it’s assortment of critters that players love to one-shot, and it’s nice to see the Eternity Vault is no different (I’m looking at you Mr. Tauntaun).
Players will spend most of their MMO life at max level, and with SWTOR that life needs to begin at 50. I love raiding in WoW, and I hope that Operations offer the same level of challenge and fun that I get from those raids. From what I saw this week, it looks very promising.
How about you guys, did you like what you saw? Are you excited about the Operations in SWTOR? While you think about that, I’m going to grab another hefeweizen and watch those presentations again.
May the Force be with you!
