Time to voice my opinion on the newest MMO – Star Wars: The Old Republic. I was not one of the people excited about this title. I’ve never been one to go nuts over anything Star Wars…so I was not part of the hype train for this game, but others in my gaming circle were, so I bought it a few days before the release. My current high character is a 38 Commando Trooper and I have a level 28 Shadow Consular and I have played all 8 classes to at least 10.
All in all, it is just another RPG MMO with leveling and killing stuff for quests. What makes it special is that every quest has full two-sided voice conversations, which adds something special. You see each other’s faces while talking and the characters have emotional facial expression and body movement for what they are saying and how they react to your answers. Each time you are required to respond, you pick from 3 answers, very similar to Dragon Age and Mass Effect. Some answers are funny, some serious, some mean…. The answer for most quests will not effect what quest you get or what you have to do but those answers will change how your companion feels towards you. Now and then there will be answers which effect your light or darkside reputation and some really will change the direction of the quest and your path through the game. I am enjoying being a blunt good guy…watch video below.
There are 4 starting areas, two for light two for dark with 2 of each class sharing a starting area. The storylines are well done and are basically continuous through the game. Each class has its own unique storyline which takes you through each of the planet areas. While most of the side quests are the same for the classes, your class will change the dialog a bit. If you like to complete all quests in an area, you will be able to skip some planets which will leave fresh material for your alts but you will still have to go to those planets to do a few quests that your storyline needs you to do there. Nice to see they put in enough quests and areas to let you choose incase you hate questing somewhere.
Combat is one thing I am not in love with. After going through 2011 playing many action based non-targeting MMOS (Hellgate, Vindictus, Dragon Nest) it is hard to come back to a tab-targeting based game. I was loving the 5 to 8 button hotbars or not using hotbars at all. But SWTOR has decided that is what people want. So I now have 34 or more buttons to push and remember what they do. I’m not quite sure why these companies think this is fun. Switching to an alt character is hard if you didn’t play them for a while because you sit there and try and remember what these new 34 buttons do.
My next complaint is the layout of the mobs. Its almost always packs of 3 things standing around, maybe one paces back and forth a tiny bit. If it is a harder mob, there might be just one. But the game is just start combat, kill a pack, stop and heal, move to the next pack, start combat, kill, heal. Don’t always have to heal, but you may have to wait for power, force, cooldown, or reload. It is way too much stop and go and not enough non-stop combat fun. Play one of the above games I mentioned and you will see what I mean by non-stop fun.
The Companion system is a nice thing. You get 5 + 1 companions you can use, picking up 1 here and there as the game progresses. They are a nice way to compensate for an area you are weak in, so if you are tanky, you might want a healer/DPS, or if you are DPS, you might want healing, or something to tank for you. Companions can also be sent off to sell your grey items for you while questing (Like Torchlight) and they can also go on gathering missions and they are the ones that craft items for you. There are a few crafting materials that can only be gotten from sending out your companion. I kinda don’t like this feature as it makes it very hard to get something you want quickly if you even have the skill to do it.
Next gripe: Travel! The cities in the game are needlessly HUGE. Its nice looking, but 50 foot or more ceilings….huge long hallways and rooms…maybe they are planning ahead for very tall aliens in the future. This design makes things very far away from each other on foot. They do let you use a speeder but you can’t use one in space ports or in some buildings and both of those are rather large usually. And to top it off, to get to another location where a friend is, you have to run through your current town to the spaceport, run through the spaceport to your classes ship hanger, run through the hanger to your ship, get in your ship, run through your ship to the Nav station and fly to the planet. THEN run back out through your ship and exit, land in an orbiting station, run through your ship hanger to an elevator, down, then run through the orbiting station to the shuttle, take the shuttle to the planet, run through the shuttle bay to an elevator, down, run through the next hallway out your class exit port and now you have to run through that space port to get outside and THEN you can use your quick-travel item (if you have visited the place you need to go) or hop on your speeder. Absolutely huge waste of time and totally useless traveling. One additional thing to add to that time are the loading screens when you change zones….UGGGGHHHHH – go to the bathroom and go get a snack.
The game released with a few bugs that probably shouldn’t have been in the release, I’ve sent them about 15 bug reports ranging from receiving in-game emails from quest people I let die, to strange graphic glitches, or quests that won’t let me abandon them. Some of the bugs I can see slipping in cause they would have needed many people to discover like guild chat issues.
So, to wrap it up, would I recommend Star Wars: The Old Republic?? I guess I would, but if you have MMO burnout from WoW or Rift, this will not be any different for you. It feels like a single player RPG with co-op ability. It has a bunch of well done storyline quests and isn’t a huge wall of text to read for each quest…you actually don’t read anything except the responses you can give and even they are tiny one sentence summaries of what you will actually say. One last point is the population…when you are in major towns, you feel very alone, with mostly NPCs and a few players here and there…maybe. I think they went too far splitting up the servers, but maybe they had to. So – BUY if you want a new game and are not feeling MMO burnout. Don’t get it if you are burnt out…play Skyrim instead.
