SWTOR: Ilum Open World PvP Detailed

At Bioware’s Austin Studio, the first day of the second Fan Site Summit was held where new details to how Star Wars: The Old Republic open world PvP system would work. Up until know, BioWare only briefly talked about the Ilum zone at PAX Prime with a short video and some screenshots, however today we learned the following courtesy of AskaJedi.

• 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 view the PAX Prime Ium world video below.