BioWare had a Community cantina at Gamescon yesterday, and quite alot of new info is now available. Below is a 30 min Q and A video captured by Echilda of The Potentiae on The Red Eclipse at the event, and below the video,Gamescom Cantina Q&A gathered by Dulfy from around the web.
Lot’s of new interesting stuff guys!
From jedipedia twitter
- No new fleet planned but there is a central hub you can travel to during the expansion
- There are big changes to crafting coming which they will explain later in a blog post.
- To add to that, someone mentioned that apparently they are planning to make gathering nodes adaptive, give you mats based on your crew skill level and the planet you are on
- Very early designs for SWTOR had a free roam space where you can drive your ship around and AT-AT walkers you could drive.
From Gamona.de
- Companions are being changed so you choose them based on their story aspect (i.e. who you like) rather than what they can do abilities wise. More details on this later.
- Nico Okarr is only available as a sub reward right now, not sure if it will be on cartel market later. (Eric Musco confirmed that you can either sub by July 31 or August 10 to get it, not sure if referrals 7 day sub work or not).
- Base game has been modified to reduce the time it takes to reach 1-60 (150-200 hrs) to the time it takes to finish KOTOR for example.
From RA_Rashia (General QA)
Watch the video for full experience as I skipped/paraphrased some of the answers.
- Q: Will Colicoid War Games and Directive 7 get upscaled to level 65?
- Have to talk to George Smith, they are meant to be on the list of FPs to be upscaled.
- Q: Has the core vision of the game changed?
- Originally we had a concept of the galaxy being low tech and sort of post-apocalyptic but ultimately we decided it wasn’t feeling iconic star wars. The core vision of the game is a story driven exciting adventure you can share with your friends.
- Where we are now is what we should have been. With SOR we raised the bar with storytelling. Choices/dialogues got better but Fallen Empire will blow it away.
- Free flight space – getting on a ship and fly anywhere you wanted to, AT-ST/AT-ATs you could actually drive around were originally on the list of things to do. This was the old wall of crazy we originally had.
- Q: What about choices that matter globally or world changing?
- This is not a single player game so it is hard to do these things. It is something we have struggled with for 7 years. With Fallen Empire you will see decisions you made with companions and events that will have ramifications far down the road. It is hard with our technology to do world changing events.
- Q: With restructuring of the companions, what does it mean for crafting?
- No comment at this time. There are some big changes coming with crafting that I am not going to get into it as that is something we will announce later on. Companions play into that so you can expect some changes.
- Q: No new operations, how do you see that going in the future?
- We are scaling all the FPs/OPs to max level. Some story important flashpoints turned into solo mode. Our goal is to make all flashpoints/operations relevant no matter the level. So even when we add in more levels later, they will always be relevant. By doing this rescaling now, we are paving the road to add future ops/flashpoints.
- Q: Do you have any insider trading info to give out for someone who is trying to max/max crafting for Fallen Empire right now?
- We are restructuring all of the crafting. Low level players can get useable mats from high level nodes and vice versa. You not going to hurt yourself no mater what you do.
- Q: Chat bubbles/hood toggle?
- There is a performance issue with chat bubbles and we are working to solve that as it is something we really want. It is not a promise though. Once we get around the performance issue we will make a big announcement about it.
- Q: Melee feels worthless in current operations
- It was completely unintentional that bosses were getting really melee unfriendly. I went to the QA and said when you test bosses you have a group full of melee and a group full of ranged. If the full melee group can’t beat the boss we will go back to the drawing board. We now have a way to test this so melee classes are not constantly feeling screwed. The Ziost operation boss is very ranged unfriendly for example because we felt sorry for the melee.
- From a design perspective, it is very easy to fall into the trap to make it punishing for melees, we are not trying to do it intentionally.
- Q: Fleet
- No significant change to fleet in Fallen Empire but that doesn’t mean you will always be on the fleet. There is another location that will have supplemental activities.
From RA_Rashia (Q&A with the Voice Actor)