Current Progress:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=c2eq2UFXZvM

For me the real game starts when I hit the level cap, and can begin raiding. I love the difficulty, skill and coordination required to raid. I love that not every single person you run into is able to pull it off.

How do you spend your time once you reach that max level? How do you see raiding implemented into The Old Republic?

Imagine you have your twenty men sitting in your guilds hangar organizing for the up-coming raid when time finally comes. You all jump into your guilds carrier/cruiser type ship and head off, your target? that Sith Destroyer cruiser that has been spotted around said planet. As you come out of hyperspace and begin to close in on the ship. Your best pilots jump into their respective ships in the hangar and head off to be greeted by a squad of Sith pilots. The rest of your men, man the turrets with your captain steering the ship.

After an epic battle and the sith fleet destroyed the real fun begins when you begin boarding.

Your raid of twenty splits off into squads of 5, and begin to spread out searching the ship looking for, prisoners/convicts/stolen plans/intelligence/some valuable object . But it's not that simple, every corridor is filled with sith assassins and other military types, maybe a few sith tamed creatures if your lucky. As you travel through the halls you come to a sealed door that can't be cut through with your handy dandy jedi. You call your commander and report your situation, he relays the command to all available squads to look for a security room to unlock the door.

Just clearing it though isn't that simple, you have to have a skilled enough slicer with you, it's not just a simple click and done task either, the slicer will have to work his way through a series of tasks through a lack of better words "mini-game". Once completed though he will have the ability to open and lock doors, he'll be able to go through the security cameras and find what you're looking for, and have access to defense turrets and gas rooms, being able to disable or use them on the sith themselves.

Raiding would not just be "kill everything" there would be a multitude of non combat capabilities. As in my previous example you have "slicers" you have your diplomat who would try and settle the conflict without combat(for non sith raids) you would have your charismatic entertainer type profession(if they have one) trying to talk her way into getting maybe a passkey or maybe the location of whatever your looking for or even maybe you could convert him to your cause and he would join your group almost like a second companion character for the mission. There are a lot of other class possibilities as well.

So that there is some added pressure and excitement they would be timed so that you don't have raids lasting hours to appeal of the casual gamer. Be it the ship activating it's self destruct or your target jumping in an escape pod and leaving. I also thought it could have a really cool tie in with PvP, imagine you just board the ship and begin clearing, when you hear over the intercom "A second ship has boarded us! on the starboard side! be on alert!" then it becomes a race to the objective, and somewhat of a capture the flag mission, you getting to the target and escaping with it.

There would be a plethora of strategic options, would you try getting the objective? or would you try to get to their ship and ambushing them on the way out? would you rush to the security room and use the ships defenses against them? or would you just send your whole raid at them to try and drive them off?

There would be no more single giant raid bosses where you have 20-40 men wacking away at it for 30 minutes, instead you would have many smaller single group bosses, it would require coordination and movement, no more standing in one spot the whole time spamming a button. The single boss could run off through the halls leading you into a trap or just bring the fight into many rooms with different environmental layouts.

This wouldn't just be restricted to space and ships either, it could easily be a land based raid as well delving into an opposing factions base, or maybe even some ancient ruins.

(Just to make it even longer, bounty hunters should be able to board the ship as well if he has a target on-board, it wouldn't really inconvenience the whole raid unless the bounty hunter stealthed his way to the raid and waited for a boss engagement to ensue.)

If you read all of that I applaud and thank you.

So what do YOU think, how do you want raids to be?

EDIT: Added in all the Bioware replies!

Quote:

Originally Posted by KyleGarner Quote: Originally Posted by DarthKraze For me the real game starts when I hit the level cap, and can begin raiding... ...So what do YOU think, how do you want raids to be? Terrific post and thread. Some really good thoughts there.

http://swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=8866&page=8

Quote:

Originally Posted by KyleGarner .02... to stir up the grey matter. All be it, it'd be quite a monstrous undertaking to exhaust all the game's content and discover the included secrets. What kind of end game *repeatable* content do you folks find desirable?

http://swtor.com/community/showthrea...t=8866&page=21

Quote:

Originally Posted by KyleGarner In terms of end-game encounters which people come back to more than once.. Do you guys feel random elements in PvE are more of a hindrance or something to spice up an encoutner? Granted, getting randomly one-shotted in the face without warning may not be so much fun. But would something like a ship coming in to carpet bomb from unpredictable angles (making players scatter to different safety areas) get more or less exciting? More than just memorizing which buttons to push in the correct order.. Can y'all name some examples where you really got excitement from an end-game encounter?

http://swtor.com/community/showthrea...t=8866&page=29

I totally agree more story should take precedence over anything else, that's whats gonna make The Old Republic stand out, that's whats going to make us all want to play it.

*new scenario inc*

Combining story and raiding might be an interesting take as well, imagine you're whole raid entering a zone which may in fact be a planet, where instead of staying together or even splitting up into squads like the OP they're not even necessarily anywhere near each other.

For example maybe the overall mission is to force a new colony on the planet to side with your respective faction(empire/republic) but to do that you're raid has to complete an assortment of missions on their own(would leave story open to gain control or trust through honorable tasks; rescuing someone who got kidnapped or protecting a village from invaders or more through back alley deals with paying people off and assassinations.

Possibly even through solo missions for the people who enjoy that play style or people who just want to try and gain their trust faster. This would leave the door open for all play styles and even their own personal morals and belief systems(light/dark side).

In the end all of the separate quests eventually lead to a grand finale where the colony becomes under attack by your opposing faction and you have to defend it.... or decide to loot it and leave the colony to be destroyed... Or maybe even if your "raid" has maybe roughed up a few too many people the colony decides they've had enough and decide to defend themselves from you!

Leaving the choice up to the player and raid would make the same encounter unique by having a different outcome week after week just by the different possible decisions each player makes to get to the end. In the way of development they could just endlessly add new options and ways to get from story arc A to story arc B and you really would never have the same raid twice. Un-explored content will always keep us interested and always keep us coming back.

Putting the story in the players hands is what I believe Bioware is going for and I don't think they should stop just in the leveling up but should also carry it into "raiding" as well.

Link to the post: End Game & You (Part 2)

I suppose I should post the original post here as well for those of you who don't know me from the swtor forums! Coming up in a few mins!

My guild took a trip into 25 ICC and has ourselves some Blood Queen Lana'thel in, tasty! I have one more Putricide vid that I'll post once it finishes uploading. After that all my vids will be new! hot off my computer screen.

Watch it in HD

www.youtube.com/watch?v=yt4vAtP_fHI

www.youtube.com/watch?v=WQsNFhiBrbs

And I guess I should point out the site theme is completely different but I still haven't even started working with any of the graphics expect more changes coming soon.