SWTOR's Trooper development and morale abilities

BioWare's lead combat designer Damion Schubert discusses creating the Trooper class today over at the official Star Wars: The Old Republic website. It's not too difficult to understand the heart of the Trooper: he's got a huge gun and makes everything in his path explode. The difficult part of the Trooper was making it something that could go toe-to-toe with Sith both in the actual game and in players' minds. It had to be cool, exciting and a whole lot of fun to play.

Of course, as Damion points out at the end of his journal, the Trooper isn't all about massive amounts of firepower. The class packs an assortment of morale-themed party buffs too, which are able to strengthen himself and the party. While this feature was assumed on our part, this is the first we've heard of morale-based class abilities. Consider us curious to find out more in the future.

In case you missed its debut over the weeked, we've embedded the dev video on The Trooper after the jump.

Star Wars: The Old Republic Screenshots

Reader Comments (12)

Good luck to them. Gonna be tough sell when folks are rolling their toons.

Your choices:
- Jedi Knight
- Sith Knight
- Soldier with big gun

4 class choices is small, but I doubt it stops there. I bet you can spec your class a certain way.

In KOTOR, as the Jedi, you had to pick Guradian, Consolur and Sentinal(right?). Each was a diff type of Jedi. A offensive LS user, a Def LS user, and a heavy force user. I'm sure each class will spec similar to that.

Just look at the different armor types for the Trooper.

I think you underestimate the draw of cool looking armor and big guns. I know a lot of guys, me included, who would jump at the chance to play a trooper or bounty hunter over a Jedi. Now don't get me wrong I will have a Jedi alt but I am more existed about the Troopers and Bounty hunters.

I know that at Dragon Con there are a lot more Stormtroopers their then Jedi.

Don't forget that in SWG, many people turned away from combat and worked on dreams of being a crafting with a vast merchant empire across several planets. The best crafters on my servers would be on friend's list and be someone you recommended to everyone(or hoarded so only you had the best weapons).

Not to mention the people who just loved to play the social game and just dance/play instruments in cantinas all day talking to players.

So yeah, not everyone plays to be a badass Laser Sword or Gun guy. I just hope BioWare can introduce a crafting class and give an engaging storyline like the others. Doing an engaging storyline without delving into combat is something never done before either, and I'd like to see BioWare take on that challenge.

And not everyone digs the glowy pigsticker thing either... lots of folks will be looking to carry big-ass blasters and wreak a more conventional kind of havoc.

As many Jedi as there were in SWG, for example, there were plenty of the other classes as well.

As any other SWG vets will tell you, the Officer class in SWG had similar group buffs like run speed and snare breaks, gotta say the morale angle is cool but again it was featured in SWG as when the officer died you got a de-buff. Shaping up to be a cool mix off Officer and Commando.

There will be 8 classes in the end, according to the forums, two of those will be Pilot and a Spy class.

Can you provide a link to this post? That sounds more like speculation than confirmed facts.

who said there are only four classes? Smuggler, BH, Jedi, Sith, Trooper. This is already five, and there will be more of course

my bad, BH and TR are same.

Actually if you read the Demonstration from yesterday, it looks like BH and Smugglers are parallels to each other. Both are ranged-oriented classes with some unique up-close melee skills(flame throwers for BH, kneecap shots and stuff for Smuggers)/

This will be my class.

I know it isn't SWG, but I still want to be a combat medic and throw stimpacks from 65m away.

SWTOR's Trooper development and morale abilities

Star Wars: The Old Republic Screenshots

Reader Comments (12)

Posted: Jun 5th 2009 3:32PM Pingles said

Posted: Jun 5th 2009 4:12PM (Unverified) said

Posted: Jun 5th 2009 6:33PM Firebreak said

Posted: Jun 6th 2009 12:54AM RogueJedi86 said

Posted: Jun 5th 2009 4:58PM Platypus Man said

Posted: Jun 5th 2009 9:16PM (Unverified) said

Posted: Jun 6th 2009 12:45AM RogueJedi86 said

Posted: Jun 5th 2009 11:02PM (Unverified) said

Posted: Jun 5th 2009 11:05PM (Unverified) said

Posted: Jun 6th 2009 12:44AM RogueJedi86 said

Posted: Jun 6th 2009 9:36AM Jesspiper said

Posted: Jun 7th 2009 12:02PM ultimateq said

Info

Description

MSRP

Release Date

Genre

Developer

Publisher

Rating

Breaking News

The Secret World launch delayed to July 3rd

Featured Stories

The Tattered Notebook: The passing of Ribbitribbitt

The Firing Line: PlanetSide 2's Matt Higby on the MMOFPS revolution

WRUP: Kingdoms of Amalur was pretty cool edition

Engadget

Joystiq

WoW

TUAW