Oct 1, 2010

Posted by in News, The Smuggler's Blues | 2 Comments

Friday Update: Designing the Advanced Classes System

Today’s official Friday update was a brand new developer blog written by BioWare Principal Lead Systems Designer Georg Zoeller… In the piece, Georg provides some juicy, long-awaited details on the design of the Advanced Class system:

In some cases, this led to integrating ‘traditional’ MMO roles into our existing class structures: The play style generally associated with the ‘healer’ role in MMOs is very popular with many players and we wanted to make sure that we offered that role in our game for our audience. In fact, we are offering two classes that can develop into fully capable healers for each faction via one of their Advanced Classes.

While the blog entry provides a slightly more clear picture of how Advanced Classes play a role, there are still questions left with answers unconfirmed:

  • Is your Advanced Class choice permanent? We’ve heard yes and maybe.
  • Can you fill more than one combat role with your Advanced class? We’ve heard no.
  • What level do you choose your Advanced Class? We’ve heard it’s not level dependent.

In any case, the blog is a must-read for any fan who is closely following TOR, especially those of my Smuggler brethren, because the Smuggler class is used as the example throughout the post!

With “trees” within the Advanced Class such as Scrapper, Sawbones, Sharpshooter and Dirty Fighting, with a shared tree of Luck, the Smuggler class is shaping up to be just what I was hoping.

Smuggler AC Talent Trees

Smuggler AC Talent Trees

We also hope that this developer blog might signal the beginning of more game systems-related information releases. Long overdue in this author’s opinion.

Click here to read the full blog post, and don’t forget to follow our coverage all next week of the GDC Online conference in Austin, Texas… where you can be sure we might use a few Dirty Tricks to get some more info out of BioWare!

  1. Can you fill more than one combat role with your Advanced class? We’ve heard no.

    Where have you heard that. The Scoundrel can be able to be a healer, a stealth dps, or a stealth healer. That’s at least 2 combat roles.

    • Lethality says:

      In our interview with Blaine Christine at PAX.

      http://www.askajedi.com/2010/09/06/pax-blaine-christine-and-daniel-erickson-audio-qa/

      AAJ: So as a followup, does that Advanced Class choice dictate what role you will play? For example, if you choose Guardian, is the tanking role basically what you’re going to do? Could you fill another role in a group?

      BC: That’s a great question… I think primarily the Advanced Classes are what we’re saying allow you to sort of mix and match. We haven’t gotten any details on how re-specs will work, but obviously you could potentially re-spec to get a different Advanced Class. But yeah, your Advanced Classes are the things that allow you to, for instance, as a Smuggler go into underworld healing and then become sort of a healer class.

      So if they do allow AC repsecs, then that’s how you will play a different role. If they do not, then you won’t be playing a different role in combat, at least according to that answer :)

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