Wild Space: Attributes, Interview, And Flashpoint Loot Info

It’s a big galaxy out there, and Wild Space can be a dangerous place. Worry not, explorer – each week we’ll navigate you safely through the lost hyperspace routes of the Deep Core and track down the great articles and entertainment from around the SW:TOR fan community, all in less than 12 parsecs, of course!

Are you new to MMOs? To the uninitiated, the deluge of different statistics and acronyms may seem quite daunting. Fortunately, the folks over on Force Junkies have got you covered. As part of a new column called “SWTOR Mechanics 101”, they go over, in detail, all of the attributes in TOR as well as some of the common abbreviations that are helpful to know when playing an MMO.

The information on the secondary attributes (Power, Defense Rating, Critical Rating, etc…) is particularly helpful since it may not be immediately apparent what some of those attributes do. I didn’t even know what “Alacrity” attribute was (or even how to pronounce it) until I read this article. For those that want to understand what attribute they need to focus on for their class and role, I would really encourage you to check out this helpful article on Force Junkies.

This week, Republic Trooper was able to score a great interview with TOR’s Art Director, Jeff Dobson. The sheer amount of different art team staff is what amazed me when I read this. There are concept artists, character artists, environment artists, VFX artists, GUI artists, animators, and technical artists, just to name a few. There is also an entire team devoted solely to in-game cut-scenes.

I was also quite excited to hear that everything starts with the writing team and the art team works very closely with them to bring their vision to life. The goal, of course, is to create the most interesting and engaging experience possible for the player. From Mr. Dobson:

The stories we want to tell in the game all start with the writing team. Sometimes the artists will collaborate with them at the earliest stages to develop that vision, but that group does the heavy lifting on new ideas. We then go through the concept artists to start visually developing an area to tell the story with pictures and to drive the overall artistic feel and color of an area or character. For world art, World Designers use what concept art delivers to help get the area blocked in for gameplay. 3D artists then jump on board and make it pretty. Finally, we iterate as much as necessary to make sure the area is fun and beautiful. That is all an over-simplification of the actual number of steps, of course, but hopefully that gives you a general idea of the number of people and amount of collaboration that goes into what you see on the screen with The Old Republic.

Check out even more of this interesting article on Republic Trooper.

Last up this week, SWTOR Strategies stumbled upon a really useful graphic for players who love to run Flashpoints. Credit for the awesome graphic must be given to Koog’ie Berserker. The graphic includes the required level to participate each Flashpoints as well as the level of the loot that you can expect to receive from it. It’s really handy information if you are looking to find that last piece of armor you need to complete your set and makes it really easy to understand where you need to go to get it. Check it out on SWTOR Strategies.