I had an opportunity to take Star Wars: The Old Republic for a test drive this weekend. Since my interest in World of Warcraft has waned of late, I was eager to see EA/Bioware’s upcoming entrant in the MMO wars would be worth the subscription fee come December 20th. As a fan of the Star Wars universe (yes, even the prequels), Bioware as a game studio, and MMORPGs, I figured it would be a decent fit.
I put in about 10 hours over 3 sessions of play with 3 different character classes. While I was playing the beta, with launch being about 3 weeks away, content is pretty much set at this point. I didn’t get to see any high level content, so these relatively spoiler free impressions are based on my experience from level 1 to level 10.
For the uninitiated, SW:TOR is set a few thousand years before Vader, so you won’t see any of the characters from the movies. But you still get all the trimmings of a Star Wars story: space travel, light speed, droids, bounty hunters, Jedi, etc. The only difference between then and now is that instead of a handful of monks with laser swords, there is a shit-ton of them. This goes for the bad guys too – instead of just the emperor and one “Darth,” there are whole planets full of guys with pale skin, bad complexions, and horrendous asthma, who apparently have been ordered to wear only black, and that lightsabers must be red.
If you thought that last paragraph was amusing, good for you. If it pissed you off because I belittled the Star Wars mythos (and if so, stop jerking it to “Slave Leia” pics, you freak), this next sentence may make you go Boba Fett on me.
Star Wars: The Old Republic is just World of Warcraft set a long(er) time ago, in a galaxy far, far away…
This isn’t meant to be a knock at the game. EA & Bioware made a very smart decision; like it or not, WoW is the gold standard that all MMORPGs are held to, based on their subscription numbers. 11 million people can’t be wrong, right? So instead of trying to re-invent the model, they took what makes WoW work, and tweaked it. You won’t be killing 10 boars while searching for a book that was left in that deserted farmhouse, but you will kill giant man-eating slugs while searching a Sith Lord’s tomb for a holocron. Go back to the person that was to weak/lazy to do it themselves, get a little money, rinse/repeat until its time to move on to the next questing zone.
Travel has been tweaked for the better. Once you’ve visited a terminal at a quest hub, you can fast travel to it from anywhere else on the map. In terms of WoW, its like having a hearthstone with multiple destinations.
Combat feels familiar, but a bit more frantic. Single enemy pulls are almost non-existent; even if your target appears to be alone, in all likelihood he is part of that next closest pack, so 4 on 1 fights are common while questing.
During my playtime, I was given a companion to accompany my Sith Warrior. This character will accompany you during quests and will fight alongside you during your journey. It works similarly to hunter pets in WoW, only you actually get to have conversations and build a relationship (good or bad) with this character over the course of the game. You can also send this character back to town to sell all the useless shit you’ve acquired while adventuring.
I didn’t have a chance to get too far into the crafting system in the game, but the production skills are referred to as “crew skills.” Basically if I take archaeology as one of my professions, I can send my companion out to do all the digging, and I can continue to quest. After a while, he/she will return, and I’ll have materials for one of my production professions.
Where the game blows away most of the MMOs I’ve played is presentation. I’m not talking about graphics, although they are quite nice for this type of game. Story is where this game basically hits it out of the park.
In addition to the game’s opening cinematic, both factions (Republic and Empire) get their own intro movie. Each character class (4 per faction) gets their own Star Wars text crawl and their own class based story missions.
The biggest step forward is the voice acting. Every single quest giver is fully voiced, as are your character’s responses. And the voices are not phoned in – each performance rings true to the source material. This, coupled with Bioware’s signature conversation wheel and light side/dark side choices, it makes the whole experience more immersive and it seems like you are the impetus for the story instead of a player on the fringe of it.
When I first fired up the game, I played for a solid block of 5 hours, and the time just flew by. I was completely sold. After character creation (which is more complex than I care to go into), when the John Williams score kicked in, and the opening text crawl started, I felt like I was 10 again. I was caught up in this world, and was amazed by the voice acting. I was ready to call up Blizzard and tell them I needed some space. Its not Wow, guys, its me...
On Sunday, I put in another couple hours, and the game started to feel very familiar. I even created 2 new characters, to see the beginnings of their stories. Again, the stories are fully realized and done very well, but the largest portion of the content is the same basic structure as any other MMO on the market. The setting is new, the polish is shiny, but the product is very similar.
My final thoughts are this: if you love Star Wars, and are a fan of the current MMORPG formula, this should be an absolute buy for you. If you think games like WoW ruined the genre by making it too accessible to casual players, you’re going to have to keep looking for the “savior” that reinvents the game.
