Are you ready for some Huttball?! Director of Content Cody Bye is, and he got the chance to try out this Star Wars: The Old Republic PvP mode at PAX.

From junior high until I graduated from college, I was fortunate enough to be able to participate on football (American-style, of course) teams of varying degrees of success. Organized competition has always captivated me, and I was certainly intrigued when BioWare announced one of their organized PvP modes - “Huttball” - at Gamescom this past month. Although many of us, myself included, wondered why they opted to go with a seemingly new branch on the Star Wars IP rather than do something closer to canon, it was exciting to see that Star Wars: The Old Republic wasn't going to be ignoring its competitive gamers.

So during my short time at PAX, I took some time to hop in front of a PC and take a turn at this feature of BioWare's upcoming MMO. Each side featured eight combatants, and one participant, as you've probably seen from BioWare's Huttball video, picks up a glowing sphere and attempts to run it to the other side of the arena. He or she can pass the “ball” from person to person, or have their teammates rip them a hole through the opposing forces.

Want to know more about my play session? Then keep reading after the jump!

In many ways, this game was very much a stylized version of Capture the Flag; pick up the object that you need to secure and take it to your base. However, the SW:TOR developers have thrown in a few hurdles. The quickest path to success is via a series of raised platforms that players can ascend from various parts of the arena. Once on these, players can quickly navigate to the goal line... if they can avoid all the traps in the way.

Shooting fire and bubbling acid await players in several locations, and with all the “pushing” abilities on a number of the character classes, that makes for quick kills if anyone happens to catch them while their cooldown is off. Since I'd never played one before, I personally took control of a Jedi Shadow and obliterated my opponents while they were firing upon my teams' ball controller. It was a relatively good tactic, but my teammates (not that I blame them) couldn't quite manage to find their way up onto the goal platform area.

Death is relatively painless in these team-based scenarios, and all that really occurs is a short period of waiting (very short, from what I remember) and having to respawn back in your command center for lack of a better word. Pretty standard fare for arena combat. The voice work that was done by the in-game announcer was fairly well-received, but it got a little repetitive once the fifth person from the “Frog-Dars” died from the fire trap (which was pretty much an insta-death if you stepped in it).

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