legacy-system

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  • Storyboard: Family legacy

    by 
    Eliot Lefebvre
    Eliot Lefebvre
    12.02.2011

    The problem with providing systems for roleplayers is that pretty much every system developers try hits snags. Case in point: Star Wars: The Old Republic's Legacy system. For those of you who haven't yet heard about the system, please let us know how you're getting the site in 1980s Siberia. But I'll gloss over anyway: The core element of the system is that when you hit a certain point with a character, you pick a surname to unlock as your "Legacy" for all characters on that server. As you advance with more characters, you gain more benefits from the Legacy and so on and so forth. What we're really concerned with is the surname part because that's the part that matters to roleplayers. Being able to make a character's overall tree a tangible thing is a powerful element. It allows you to actually play a family, or at the very least, a linked coalition of characters. Unfortunately, while the idea works well, the problem is that surnames are so important that I almost wish that the system had a different way of tying the elements together.