The lead combat designer at Bioware has spoken out about the levelling method in Star Wars: The Old Republic, defending the often-favoured experience gain level-up over skill-based levelling.
Chipping into a long-running discussion on the game’s official forums, Damion Schubert argued against the original poster of the thread by saying that skill-based levelling wasn’t a more realistic way to level a character. In fact, he said, it can create some extremely unrealistic situations. Schubert went on to give examples of previous games that required player to progress their characters by completing the same actions repeatedly:
“In the original Everquest, it was not uncommon to see a player throwing himself off a cliff over and over again to improve his safe falling skill, or to see a person macroing some random text gibberish in order to improve his languages. In Meridian 59, players used to park themselves in front of low level monsters and leave the keyboard – they were unlikely to die, and could accumulate defense points in a slow, steady and totally risk-free manor. In Oblivion, the best way to build an assassin character is to hop through fields picking flowers. Jumping improves your Acrobatics (I believe), and the player needs enough flowers to grind up his Poisoning skill.”Schubert then explained why experience points would better suit Star Wars: The Old Republic, mainly because it encourages players to take part in XP-gaining activities (read questing), which TOR is based heavily upon.Looking forward to SW:TOR? Don’t forget to check out the recent Bounty Hunter screens that EA released last week.
