During the recent Star Wars: The Old Republic immersion days that Ars attended, the PvP play took a backseat to the PvE— after a briefing on the type of warzone we would be playing and the relevant class mechanics, we spent only two hours or so clashing Empire and Republic forces against one another. What we did see indicates that BioWare has put a lot of thought into their approach to PvP with a view to making it distinct from other MMORPGs, though it's hard to say how the setup will stand up to the use and abuse of players.

The setting of the warzone was a fairly standard resource war-type: each side was trying to control one of three turrets shooting at an enemy ship nearby during the Alderaan civil war, and once they had caused enough damage to the ship, it crashed out of the sky (the BioWare reps said that there is a great in-game animation of this in the next build) and the team that shoots their enemy ship down first wins. While this was nothing new, the mechanics that BioWare has implemented in SWTOR to mitigate the various disadvantages that arise in PvP combat were much more interesting.

One of the problems BioWare is confronting in their warzones is the usefulness of tanks. While in a dungeon, tanks can taunt an AI-controlled enemy and force it to concentrate only on attacking the tank, letting the healers keep the tank's health up while damage dealers break the enemy down. But in a warzone, where your enemies are other players with a measure of common sense, no one is going to waste time trying to chip away at a tank's colossal supply of health; at least, not before taking out all of the more delicate healers that can prolong the fight.

To mitigate that, SWTOR gives tanking classes the ability to "guard" one player, which automatically transfers a portion of the damage done to the guarded player to the tank. This puts the tank's massive health stores to better use, and though I was neither a class that could guard or merited guarding, the mechanic was definitely getting used: the amount of redirected damage shows up as a contributing metric in the scoreboard at the end of the warzone, and many players were putting up impressive numbers, with some defending as much damage as other players had caused during the entire match.

Players receive a bevy of rewards at the conclusion of a warzone: valor (roughly the equivalent of honor in World of Warcraft), experience, tokens, and badges for completing certain class-specific tasks. The size of each award was contingent on your performance, such as number of kills and deaths, damage dealt, turrets captured or guarded, and so on. Badges in particular seemed to boost your rewards significantly as a pat on the back for playing your class correctly—for instance, a simplistic badge-worthy objective for an imperial agent might be "roll behind cover while getting attacked."

The badges weren't trivial to get—in the few rounds we played of an 8 vs. 8 warzone, only one or two people per round would score all seven, while many scored only one or two. A unit frame would display around your character when you had done a badge-worthy thing during combat, but so far there's no indicator telling you what you did to earn it. That likely won't be secret knowledge on release, but we were badge-earning in the dark.

The experience of PvP combat was fairly fluid, even during the times I huddled my imperial agent behind his blue light shield as the bulk of the other team whaled on him (cover still works to protect your health even when enemies are hitting you from the side, top, and rear). Almost every class has a crowd-control ability of some kind that immobilizes enemies for a short time, and this turned out to play a large role in the combat structure. While the stuns were fun to use on players, BioWare seemed acutely aware of the frustration that can come from getting stun-locked, and has created a mechanism for mitigating it.

Every player, while in PvP warzone, gains a "resolve" meter that displays both in their HUD in and below their nameplates for other players to see. Each time a player is stunned or crowd-controlled, their "resolve" builds, and when the bar is full, crowd-control abilities won't work on them for a short time. This added a good strategic element to play, as crowd-control abilities had cooldowns of a minute or two and could easily be wasted on a full resolve bar when a player might only need to wait a few seconds for the stun to work.

As warzones are contained chaos for all but those most familiar with their classes, it was hard to get a full measure of the effectiveness of the more distinct mechanics like guarding and resolve. The Empire side lost most of the battles because, true to form, we were more preoccupied with killing people than completing the objective, and the team received many of the highest scores while failing to shoot down the Republic ship by a huge margin. But hey, we were having fun, and even when we lost, I still gathered a decent amount of experience when I scored all my badges (roughly two big quests' worth, by my estimation, but that is subject to change).

The BioWare designers said that, while they are aiming to make PvP fun, the role-playing campaign elements of SWTOR take precedence in their mind, and they hope players will still return to them. Still, I can envision melting Twi'lek faces as a pretty comfortable way of filling in any experience gaps on the way to the level cap.