BioWare details crafting and PvP a bit more for SWTOR

Last week, BioWare dished a bit on the crafting aspects of Star Wars: The Old Republic. This week, there's a bit more detail on it, and thankfully, the developers are turning the sometimes daunting task of crafting on its ear a bit.

Oh, and there's a bit more on PvP as well.

Crafting in the game will basically be accomplished by your crew members so that you can run off and do other things. How this works, was explained to Massively by lead writer Daniel Erickson.

"If you wanted to play the old-style crafting game, and you wanted to watch that progress bar for 20 hours, I mean, you could," he said. "You could just stand there. But this is always the part that seems monotonous. So [in SWTOR], I'm the crew boss. I decide what we make. I'm the guy that knows all the recipes. I'm the guy that knows how to do everything. And then I'm putting all of these people to work as my whole crew, into one unit -- your companion characters are all a unit with you. And so, one, it makes all of your companion characters useful, which is nice. Two, it puts in skills for people who aren't ever going to be real crafters. People who are not really into crafting are going to take mission skills, so their people are still going to be useful, but they're going to run them on missions all the time. But serious crafters say that it's a super deep system.

"[I] can't talk too much about it, but you are going to be able to make stuff that is among the top stuff on the entire servers. And there are going to be people who know things that almost nobody else on the server knows how to do. There are elite, rare recipes. People who want to dabble in crafting, can, and can be successful in it and make themselves a little bit better. People who are not terribly interested in crafting can do the mission system and still get some cool stuff out of their companion characters. People who are really into crafting have a huge, complex system that they're going to be able to go into and become masters at."

So, choice is a good thing in this respect. Nothing is worse than sitting there, staring at a progress bar when you can be out killing s**t, ya know? It's good to know we canhave minions to do it for us if we so wish.

Now, onto the  PvP bits.

The reward system in the Warzones, explained a bit by lead PvP designer Gabe Amatangelo, it's not going to be an all-or-nothing system. Players will be rewarded based on how much effort was put into the battle. Obviously, the longer you hang around, the better the reward. Each Warzone will also have a different mechanic, but certain ones - like the reward system - will span across of them.

"Basically (long story short) once you're invested in the match, if you're trying to min-max your rewards, you're not going to want to leave," said Amatangelo. "You want to finish the match and then start another match. Now, it's a fine line, because you don't want to not have the incentive to win. So it's not like everyone gets equal rewards, not at all. But if you do the math -- and of course, players will -- it's going to be better for you to finish that match, and then go into the next one and try to win the next one.

"[Warzones are] finite, and the goal is that it's immersive along the way. You want to feel the tension of the combat, and so there's a lot of visceral elements that elevate that tension as it goes on. In the months to come we'll be talking about some other PvP features including some more specifics about features inside Warzones that kind of go hand in hand with that sort of elevation of gameplay tension."

SWTOR is slated for release sometime after Q1 2011, and EA announced this week it has taken over full publishing duties from Lucasarts.