It’s interesting that, in most MMOs, classes are normally race and/or faction specific and no one bats an eyelid or complains, yet when it comes to TOR, people often want to make exceptions.
For example, when you play Age of Conan, if you want to be a Necromancer, you MUST be Stygian (that’s a race in the game and, if you like, a faction). Or in EQ2, if you want to be a Necromancer, you MUST be evil.
And, in many cases, if one faction gets ‘x’ kind of character, the other faction(s) will also get ‘x’ kind of character, albeit with some different skills and a different name, to ensure some sort of game balance.
Yet when bounty hunters got a bit of a mention in relation to TOR recently, there seemed to be a lot of confusion as to how this would all work out, in terms of factions. For example:
- Will bounty hunters be tied to one faction? For example, the Sith faction gets bounty hunters, while the Republic faction gets… I dunno… smugglers, for example? Similar, yet different, specialties.
- Will bounty hunters be allowed to choose either faction, ie: Sith or Republic, even though we must assume that most classes will NOT have this ability, ie: no one will be rolling a Republic Soldier for the Sith.
- Will bounty hunters be able to change factions at will, to simulate how they can work for different masters? This would be an even more controversial ability that the previous point when you think about it.
So what do you think will happen?
In shorthand, this post runs: TOR will undoubtedly have faction-specific classes. No one will be rolling a Republic Soldier for the Sith faction or a Sith Lord for the Republic, etc, etc. Given that, will bounty hunters be tied to one specific faction, have the choice of either and/or be able to change faction#?
Over to you.
# Remember things like the betrayal quests in EQ2… this sort of thing is, in theory, possible in an MMO.