Posted by Lethality in News | 17 Comments

So here we are at the end of a long day one of the Fan Site Summit. Games were played, secrets were shared, lasers were tagged. It was another incredible day at BioWare’s Austin studio learning all we can about everyone’s favorite upcoming MMO, Star Wars: The Old Republic.

Though there was a full slate of activity today, for this report, I want to talk about Ilum. As you may recall, BioWare introduced the planet Ilum as the first open world objective-based PvP zone at PAX Prime in August. Though brief, the glimpse we saw then of walker vehicles traversing the frozen tundra and legions of troops charging into The Battle of Ilum was enough to get the PvP juices flowing.

We were excited today when BioWare’s Gabe Amatangelo, Lead Endgame Designer for Star Wars: The Old Republic came in to talk to us about this resource-rich planet. He was able to provide some details and answer some very specific questions that have been on the mind of the community. Although we can’t show you any new screenshots or other visuals we saw, we just wanted to give a recap of the highlights here:

Ilum is a level 50 end-game zone

About half of the planet’s size is used for the world PvP objective, and it’s a large planet

There are 5 control points in the zone: a Republic and Empire base at the north and south, as well as 3 central resources

All 5 points must be under control simultaneously for victory

Certain control points engage/deploy walkers that can and need to be take down by special shoulder-mounted rocket launchers, and perhaps other means. It takes a good 10 seconds to fire one of these rockets

Victory conditions award a buff that can stack, which awards extra Valor points (earned during other forms of PvP such as Warzones)

This buff is faction-wide

The status is persistent, no timers for the game to artificially start or “reset” – it’s always on

There are rare crafting resources available throughout the zone

Zone can hold hundreds of players

Design accounts for population differences

Operation (raid) group size is 24 players. (Note: PvE Operation instanced content is designed for 8 or 16, but the group itself can have 24 people in it.)

You can get a sneak-peek at Ilum from our video at the Star Wars: The Old Republic panel at PAX Prime this year. I can tell you that as exciting as this video makes it look, it’s 10x more impressive on every level seeing it live!

If you have any questions, feel free to ask in the comments below and it may jog some other facts we learned today loose :)



