Star Wars: TOR Bounty Hunter Class Announced, They’re Doing it Wrong…
When Star Wars: The Old Republic was announced by Bioware, king of the western RPG, my mind started reeling. Would it flop like Star Wars Galaxies did? Could it hold my attention for as long as World of Warcraft did?
The Star Wars universe is one of my favorite settings, be it the Rebellion Era, the Clone Wars, the New Jedi Order, even the Sith Wars, I love it all. The technology, myriad alien species, and the planets are all just so varied you could literally write almost any story in any setting you wanted in the Star Wars Universe.
What I don’t love though, is most MMORPGs. I used to play World of Warcraft for the better part of two years in one of the best guilds on my server, and I was having a blast. Then, the Burning Crusade came out, and I was disenchanted. I didn’t want to play any more because of various things added to the game to “balance” it. So, I started playing other games again, and it was good. I started to miss the social aspect of WoW, so I started looking for another MMO to fill the void.
When I heard that TOR was announced, I was genuinely excited. I love Bioware’s games, so I figured this transition was a good move for them as the persistent worlds that I had tried in Neverwinter nights were alright. Maybe with roles that I could get into and a setting I could identify with, an MMO-type game by them would be pretty good.
Fast forward to yesterday, and Bioware has officially announced the first class: Bounty Hunter . The only thing that I can garner from the page is that Bounty Hunters are all going to play a lot like Boba Fett would, equipped with a Blaster, a Jetpack, a flamethrower, and the classic Mandalorian armor that he’s famous for. Which is great if you want to play as him, but that’s not for me.
I was hoping that the Bounty Hunter system would work more like it did in SWG, where you could place a Bounty on any other player character, and up to three bounty hunters could be tracking them at once. This lead to a variety of differently equipped and built (statistically) characters coming after you, and changed your play style from attack to attack. Hopefully they add this aspect to TOR, because from what I’ve been reading it seems as though there is going to be a large focus on NPCs, so I would assume that most, if not all, of the kills that you have to make for the Bounty Hunter quests will be against NPCs.
I’m not sure if I like that for TOR. I know Bioware is all about great writing and storyline, so a good portion of the game is going to be like a single player experience. Hopefully for endgame, they’ll follow the SWG model of Bounty Hunters, where anyone can take up a Bounty and kill the person, resulting in a different approach depending on the Hunter’s play style.
What about you? Would you rather have all Bounty Hunters be the same, or would you rather have varying types and styles of combat at your disposal? Do you want Player/Player interaction or Player/NPC interaction in TOR?
A bounty hunter system that relies purely on NPCs is always going to be missing a huge feature. Having a bounty on your head would surely be a way to keep the top players on their toes, that way almost every player on the server could end up being the next huge boss.
There is still a chance they will change it. I thought is was still in pre-alpha. Also it would make sense for most bounty hunters to be mandalorian since the end of the mandalorian wars left all of them homeless & jobless. I agree that there should be more varying types of bounty hunters but it might just be that they wanted to highlight those items. Alternately mandalorians might play a big role in the narrative of the game. I feel like a twat for using the word mandalorian.
True. I guess the setting they’re using would dictate that most Mandalorians (why isn’t that in my firefox spell check dictionary…) are Bounty Hunters, and there are a lot of them. I was hoping for a more open choice of profession, rather than having pre-defined classes that you picked when you started the game though, and that you picked your abilities as you leveled up. But yeah, the game is still in relatively early development, so there’s still time for Bioware to hammer out the details. I’m just being nitpicky because I don’t want to see another shitty Star Wars game.
I think every one doesn’t want to see another shitty star wars game. I am still getting over star wars Jedi knight academy. I just hope that they were showing off mandalorian items in the trailer because I so want to play a Wookiee bounty hunter. I found a bounty hunter screen shot on the web site that didn’t look like a mandalorian.
http://www.swtor.com/sites/all/files/bountyhunter/screenshots/ss4.jpg
Heres to hoping bounty hunting doesn’t just shoe horn you into playing Boba Fett. What if I don’t want to end up as a Mandalorian? And Mandalorians are very prideful people so being shady and dishonourable like most of the lot. I like the idea of the jet pack being the equivalent of the lightsabre to a Jedi. I’d prefer a rocket pack to a laser sword everyday.
well keep in mind that mandalorians are the trusties bounty hunters because they always keep their word. I did some research as well, mandalorian is more of an affiliation than a real race, rodains and other races have been known to be mandalorians and according to wookiepedia after the treaty of coruscant mandalorian armor became popular. I might just be thick but this seems like a dumb reason to popularize mandalorian armor.