Cross-faction Communication

Good news for all us RP'ers, apparenly cross-faction communication WILL be possible in TOR according to a recent interview with Sean Dahlberg and Hall Hood:

Ask A Jedi wrote:

AAJ: Will you be able to communicate with members of the other faction?

HH: If by communicate you mean shoot at them, then yes! There are many forms of communication. Are you asking if its like WoW, where you can’t understand what the other faction is saying? I don’t think we would want to go in that sort of direction. I can’t really speak to exactly how the communication would happen between factions, but I think you’re on the right track.

The next one is translated from a French site and even suggests a slight possibility of teaming up with the other faction:

Quote :

How will the communication between the faction take place? Will it be possible to communicate between faction, to partake in certain instances or quests with players from the other faction or even to create a guild that unites players of both factions?

Sean D: It will be possible to communicate between factions. Certain, very specific quests, whether or not instanced, could rarely and exceptionally be done together by the factions.
But that will be very rare and it will happen with a specific goal. Multi-faction guilds are not possible, guilds on both sides will want to compete (*I do not understand this sentence fully!!*). But who knows, maybe that will be possible in an add-on, it’s still under discussion.

It even goes on to confirm that we'll be able to use characters from both factions on the same server:

Sean D wrote:

We’d like our players to want to create new characters; to want to discover the multiple classes of the game on both sides.
So yes it will be possible to create a character of each faction on the same server, in function of the server rules which haven’t been established yet.
It will be possible, but everything depends on what server, and what we will have decided for the function of that server.

As glad as I am to read this, I can't say I'm massively surprised.

Continuing the WoW example that Sean D mentioned it made sense for Blizzard to restrict characters across factions from communicating. Long before it was a useful tool to stop exploits between players, it was part of Warcraft Lore. Each of the major "world powers" had their own language and most were far too arrogant to learn other peoples. Even night elves and blood elves (who were both essentially still 'elves') had seperate languages which had evolved apart for hundreds of years.

Star Wars is quite different and it makes sense that TOR reflects that. In the Star Wars universe the language known as "Galactic Basic" was designed to be universal. It was a form of progressive trade-language which allowed for the largest amount of species to be able to speak it, and almost all to read it. Even those races without the capacity to speak Galactic Basic (Wookies, Jawas and the like) could understand it when it was spoken to them, further increasing its value as a universal language.

BioWare would have had to come up with quite a bizarre reason why people who had been able to understand each other for thousands of years suddenly lost the ability to do so just to make things convienient for a game mechanic.

Still - great news

To be honest there is only one real concern I have over this, and thats the element of PvP. I really don't want there to be general chat amongst two factions purely for the fact that you just know that if there's PvP, there will be griefers. It's just a fact of MMO's. If I completely pwn some 10 year old kid, I don't want said idiot bitching about how I cheated or how me or my team ganked his sorry @%&# when in reality he's just a bad loser! If there's just a seperate tab for people to chat in /say only then I think it's a brilliant idea for the roleplayers among us. Otherwise I fear I'll be using the /ignore function on a regular basis!

lol i always liked chat in pvp when i played swg it was pvp rp that got me into rping in that game. still remember the first time, i was sitting in a cantina and an imp came up behind me and instead of taking a shot he sat down and we had a little chat first xP. understanding your target's words imo was what set it above an npc, people seem to be more cordial when they can actually understand one another and in most cases people will try to have a neat little back and forth before they go at it ^^

I think you'll be able to chat using the in air "Say" function but wont be on the general chat boxes around