Star Wars: The Old Republic -
Bioware
With Warhammer Online subscriber numbers declining and Bioware, another Electronic Arts studio struggling to deliver PvP for their upcoming MMORPG, I flew to Austin with the Creative Director of Warhammer Online to evaluate the state of Star Wars: The Old Republic for its potential to deliver a compelling PvP experience. Once I returned to Mythic and delivered my notes, the determination was made that Mythic should move a small team of developers over to Bioware to take ownership of the PvP experience.
Working with the Star Wars IP, and in particular the Old Republic timeline created by Bioware previously in Knights of the Old Republic was an amazing experience. On the PvP team I helped to design reward progression, game modes, and thematic Warzone levels from concept to completion. I also worked closely with the combat team to refine class abilities and ensure full functional mirroring of classes across factions in order to balance both PvP and PvE. The game launched with three Warzones, all of which were well reviewed by the players, especially the unique Huttball arena.
Crowd control is one of the most controversial topics in MMORPG PvP. Star Wars: The Old Republic in particular had a lot of crowd control abilities for players. One of the core design pillars was to make players feel heroic by having them regularly face groups of several NPCs at once even when playing solo, which necessitated a lot of control abilities.
The most common solution to this common problem in MMOs at that time was diminishing returns for crowd control effects. This system works by progressively reducing the severity or duration of crowd control effects applied to players in PvP with each successive application within a short duration. This solution has three main problems. First, in a chaotic group PvP setting it is impossible to tell whether a player has recently been affected by crowd control and diminishing returns applied to them. Second, the unreliable duration of crowd control made it difficult to execute combos which required the target to be controlled for a specific duration. Third, diminishing returns applied to different types of effects separately. You couldn’t be stunned several times in a row for full duration, but you could be mesmerized, then stunned, then rooted back to back. To address these issues, I decided to try something different.
Piggybacking on the existing resource system I added a new resource called Resolve to address these issues. This resource built up any time the player was affected by any crowd control effect, and left them immune to all forms of crows control for a duration when the bar became full. This meant players could always see if their target was immune to crowd control or not, that crows control abilities that did apply lasted their full duration, and that players couldn’t be chain controlled by different forms of control effects. You can read a more detailed breakdown of this system here.