Media Embargo: IGN Talks Combat

Articles continue to fly off the keyboards of the press, and today we get another one from IGN where they preview the combat of SWTOR.

I know that the intention behind the system is to make you consider whether you would rather use a special skill right that second or build up more of your class resource in order to pile on the damage a little later. The issue I take, I think, is that my basic attack didn’t have damage anywhere near comparable to even some of my weaker resource-using skills. It didn’t seem to scale very well, and it made swinging my Lightsaber at a group of droids feel more like wagging a twig.

The author goes on to explain the lack of auto attack and the feeling of that while playing. Instead of sitting there doing nothing and watching some numbers crawl up the screen, players are expected to use a keypress every time they expect to do something. The author then goes on to explain a quick observation of the Trooper vs. the Jedi Knight.

It didn’t help that the Knight has so few area-of-effect attack options, at least before level 20. In The Old Republic, most of the enemies you fight come in small groups. This is a design choice intended to make your character feel powerful from the get-go, but it ended up having the opposite effect after I saw what classes like the Trooper were capable of. My Jedi Knight had a single ability that damaged multiple targets, and the damage wasn’t particularly high. If so much of the combat didn’t emphasize multiple targets so heavily this wouldn’t have been an issue. The Knight also didn’t get any powerful crowd control, which made questing alone somewhat frustrating at times, and made me more reliant on my companion for mass killing power. Yes, the Knight (and especially the Guardian advanced class I chose) is meant for tanking in group situations, but BioWare may need to introduce skills that are more viable for solo-play or may risk discouraging low-level dedicated tanks.

It looks like Bioware has some balancing to do, at least from the perspective of this IGN Staff Writer. However, as we found out at NYCC, the developers are still putting out new builds and don’t seem to be slowing down!