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Monday :
http://starwarsgalaxies.station.sony.com/content.jsp?page=Blair%27s%20Blog%20-%20Monday
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Greetings...
Welcome to Blair's Blog on Combat Upgrade (CU). Every few days I'll give you a unique insight into what's happening with CU, what the next step is, and respond to some of your questions.
A note: Nothing here is set in stone. There will be changes based on design philosophy, playtest experience, and your feedback.
First, we posted the first of the combat upgrade documentation last Friday, and the thread is over 110 pages last time I checked. That's a lot of feedback! Thank you! Thunderheart and Tiggs worked to compile the thread into the top points for me, and I'll be responding to it over the next few days. We're also working on releasing additional documentation so everyone has a better understanding of all the changes. Expect to see more shortly.
An answer to an important question: Why are we doing combat upgrade? Many people are upset by the scope of the changes we are making. Many folks feel like the proposed changes will significantly change something they love. I understand. So why are we moving forward?
The answer is that the positives will outweigh the negatives when it is all done. Think about the original design of CU and how it was going to work.
It's the last statement here that is the problem. Essentially, we are in a situation where you must do damage to yourself in order to execute special actions! Compound that with the following points:
So, we are in a situation where some players must kill themselves in order to execute specials. Additionally, lots of players mitigate over 90% of the damage applied to them. How can we balance content and make combat fun when this is the case? If we gear toward the "with armor folks", everyone who doesn't have armor gets slaughtered. If we gear toward "non-armor folks", people with armor walk through the game and have no challenge.
We want to completely upgrade and improve the combat system inside a live game and replace it with something that will be more compelling, offer more choices to more people, and ultimately be more fun for everyone. If we aren't making the game more fun, then we are not living up to our commitment to our players -- this is a game after all.
On to the Questions of the Day: Questions you asked over the weekend based on the document we published Friday.
What are we doing today: We're gearing up for our next playtest which will be a mid level adventure fighting all manner of Tusken Raiders. We've got our base round of AI changes complete. Our AI teams of Matt Bogue, Pete Warner, and Jeff Freeman have worked hard to rework lots of the existing AI and take it to the next level. In a future update, I'll describe some of the inner workings of how AI actually works behind the scenes.
For today, they will finish the work needed to get AI special attacks in the game. This is slated to be done today, with a pass on adding the healer and grenadier types later this week.
That's it for today. See you next time.
Blair
Producer