Georg Zoeller, Lead Combat Designer for Star Wars: The Old Republic has spoken up about a few battle-related topics today. Good ol’ Georg also threw in a VO-related tidbit for extra credit.

You tried to tank. You tried to spank. You ended up pwnd.

Firstly, Zoeller assured us that boss battles will not be restricted to “Tank ‘n’ Spank” tactics which is good to hear (although a little ‘TnS’ can be fun.) Here’s your quote:

Tank ‘n’ Spank

“This has been discussed before, but to re-iterate:

The Old Republic uses a wide palette of mechanics for the harder boss fights, it is not just ‘tank ‘n’ spank’.

When it comes to videos, there’s a number of reasons why you haven’t seen anything more complex:

(a) Throwing people who have never played the game at a level 32 Flashpoint is tricky. It requires the game to be adjusted so that they actually have a shot and don’t die constantly. Don’t expect us to demo complex boss mechanics at pick-up demo events.

(b) Boss mechanics are spoiler material.”

Next, in reference to the Jedi and Sith Impale ability the conversation went something like this:

Impale

“Raesha: Is the impale move actually an ability, or an elaborate death animation?

Zoeller: Ability. These kinds of abilities have multiple segments, each of which can hit or miss (which may give the target a window to escape…). That said, some of these abilities can be upgraded to root or stun, or the player can use other abilities before hand to set up the kill and make sure the target is not going anywhere.

The whole system is rather complex and we’ve spend significant amounts of resources and time to balance visuals and gameplay – we don’t want to lock the player in place or stop them from moving, but we do want the choreographed combat / blaster bolt deflection / over the top abilities. Naturally, there are situations where we have to trade off the visuals for the player’s ability to act smoothly and freely – but most of the time, there’s ways to make both work that play well – at least our testers are pretty positive about it so far.

No other MMO has done something like this, so I can understand it’s confusing / hard to understand.”

Finally, Zoeller commented in reply to a forum poster’s worry about aliens speaking in “repeated loops”:

Alien Tonuges

“Actually, the large majority of game content is fully voice acted by humans. There is Alien VO where it makes sense as part of the Star Wars lore (people don’t want Hutts to speak English).”