Star Wars Galaxies Dev Diary: Let the PvP battles begin
Even while the Star Wars Galaxies team is plugging away on their newest game update, the staff still has some time to give us some of their thought process behind their work on the game.
Today on Massively we're happy to have Thomas 'Hanse' Eidson, one of SWG's system designers, dropping by to give us his thoughts on creating the brand new PvP battlefields for Update 10. The new battlefields are areas for team based PvP, where teams accomplish objectives in addition to annhilating one another to win the map. Think of it like Battlefield 2, where both teams have a set reinforcement count and will lose should that number ever drop to zero.
Thomas has much to say on their efforts to make sure teams were always balanced, to the creation of new rewards for the battefields, to finding plots of land to even make these new areas! Hit the continue reading button below, and grab yourself an insider's view of the development of Star Wars Galaxies.
The Making of Game Update 10: Let the PvP battles begin!
Hey everybody, Thomas 'Hanse' Eidson here to write about some of what went into making Update 10.
After much internal discussion, it was decided that Game Update 10 should focus on our PvP (Player vs. Player) game. PvP had not been touched in a while, and we saw that decent portions of our player base were participating in PvP activities on a regular basis.
We thought about how we could reinvigorate our PvP experience, making it more fun and rewarding. Our approach centered on giving goals to PvP once more. To do this, we decided to bring back the battlefields that had been removed about a year after the launch of Star Wars Galaxies. We felt that we could add a great deal of variety to these battlefields by giving each one unique objectives, thereby creating different PvP "mini-games" that players could enjoy.
I began by researching locations, placing down PvP regions, and load balancing these new regions to keep the area from becoming too crowded. With this load balancing built right into the battlefields, I alleviated a common player concern pertaining to imbalanced PvP battles (e.g., a battle with eight Imperial players vs. three Rebel players). My work on load balancing ensures that players will always have teams that are more or less the same size.
Finding locations in the world that didn't have any player housing and were also large enough to become a PvP battlefield was a long process. Once the regions had been identified, we quietly pushed out a change to our LIVE servers that made these "no build" regions. This was to prevent people from placing structures on these areas prior to the release of Update 10. Once that was done, I began customizing the identified zones with our terrain editor. There's something soothing about making beaches in video games for me. Massassi Isle was probably the most fun I've had in years. Most of our work deals with code and data tables, but this was much more creative and more artistic. It started as an empty and treeless island and became a vibrant island with bunkers and bases on it. Eventually, I made new particles for smoke and explosions, which brought the battlefield to life.
