Explorers and achievement hunters should be very interested in Star Wars: The Old Republic‘s newly announced codex system.
BioWare recently announced a new addition to Star Wars: The Old Republic that should please anyone that wants to explore the game’s worlds and learn more about their inhabitants. The Old Republic codex is basically a repository for lore, but also doubles as a partial achievement system.
First and foremost, the codex is meant to bring more of the game’s story to its players. When players reach a new area, they’ll get a codex entry explaining its background or other interesting information. Old Republic principal lead systems designer Damion Schubert reveals that the codex currently features 120,000 words, more than the average Star Wars novel.
But Schubert explains that the codex is more than just a big electronic book. His goal with the codex was to have it impact gameplay to give certain types of players, particularly explorers, a new avenue to have fun. Certain codex entries are given away for free during the game’s main storyline or during quests, but others need to be sought out or acquired through a very specific task.
For example, to acquire the entry for the K’lor’slug, players have to journey deep into a tomb where the toughest of K’lor’slugs resides and kill it. Other entries can only be unlocked by doing quests for certain species or by examining specific artifacts. Most codex tasks are designed to be challenging, but not overly tough.
However, the codex will feature one particular section that Schubert and BioWare are planning to wrack players’ brains with. The section keeps track of glowing cubes called Datacrons located around the lands of Old Republic that increase players’ stats permanently when found. These might be hidden, or they might be in plain view, but in either case won’t be easy to get to. The codex will keep track of the Datacrons players have found, and Schubert hopes this will encourage “intrepid explorers” to seek out the paths to them first.
As explained here, the codex isn’t an all-out achievement system, as it doesn’t appear to be the type of thing that awards players for taking down 500 Salky Hounds. It’s more for the explorer that wants to see and find everything interesting on a planet or in a particular category of creature or object. However, it logically hints that achievements will eventually make it into the game at some point for those that just like to hit stuff.
Source: Old Republic Blog
