by Raymond Knott
Star Wars:The Old Republic Beta Impressions
A New Hope?
As a seasoned MMO player, I definitely didn’t know what to expect from Star Wars:The Old Republic. On the one hand, I’m a shameless fanboy for all things Bioware: Baldur’s Gate, Knights of the Old Republic, Mass Effect, Jade Empire; they pretty much don’t make bad games. On the other hand, this is their first foray into MMORPGs, which for anybody who doesn’t know, stands for massively multiplayer online role playing game. Up until this point, all of their RPGs had been single player, based around grand storytelling, excellent characterization, plot development, and personal choices and interactions with the game world. My concern was how would this translate in a multiplayer environment? Apparently, very well.
From the onset, the first thing I noticed about The Old Republic is that it is gorgeous. The stylized graphics in the intro cinematic were amazing, that along with the excellent voice acting turned a pre-rendered movie in an MMO, something you would normally skip to get to the action, into something jaw-droppingly compelling. I could have watched it for hours, honestly, if they’d felt the need to include a full length movie in the game. It was obvious from here that Bioware was attempting something grand.
From here, I moved on to character creation. One problem I have is that the game is locked into the same Good vs. Evil, Order vs. Chaos, Light vs. Dark, Alliance vs. Horde dualist paradigm that most modern MMO’s seem to be embracing so readily, although admittedly the Star Wars universe has always been about this struggle, and being locked into one polarized side or the other is a little less awkward then say, the Horde vs. Alliance dynamic in World of Warcraft. I chose Dark Side, because I found the Bounty Hunter to be the most compelling class choice. One thing I noticed about character creation was there seemed to be no wrong way to do it. You choose your character, your class, your race, your appearance, but you don’t make any choices you might regret. No statistic allocation, no racially-designated abilities. I found this to be a pretty interesting design choice, considering that there have definitely been times where I made a character in a game, reached end game, and realized I had accidentally castrated myself because of a choice I’d made at character creation. No danger of that here.
After fiddling with some options, I ended up with a Cyborg Bounty Hunter who looked a lot like Vin Diesel. Fine by me! Upon entering the game, you’re dropped straight into the story. You’re placed in an instanced area, with characters only you can see and interact with. Most of the time, I’ve felt that instanced game play in MMOs was kind of tacky, usually used to protect other players from people like me murdering them while they quest, but in this case it felt very organic and necessary. The single player component of the game takes place in a separate instance from the main world every player sees, so in this way Bioware could still do their whole epic storytelling and character choice deal, without compromising the integrity of an MMO server. Pretty swank, right? As a bounty hunter, I was dropped onto a world called Hutta, which was controlled by Hutt Cartels. Hutt, as in Jabba the Hutt, are those big slug guys, and they’re essentially stand-ins for overweight mob bosses in a Science Fiction universe. You were to be competing in The Great Hunt, which, as the name implies, is a hunt that is great, and I suppose the best way for a bounty hunter to show that he can do all of the necessary bounty hunter stuff, turning him into a celeb so that he might receive contracts from Hutts to freeze smugglers in carbonite or whatever it is they need doing.
One thing I noticed immediately in this single player portion was how engaging the dialogue was. I am not the roleplaying type. I play MMOs to powergame, so that I can beat up other nerds, take their lunch money, and make fun of them from the top of whatever flavor of leaderboard the game showcases. It felt almost wrong for me to actually care about the dialogue, but here I was, getting into character, making decisions that I thought would best fit this guy. This was new to me. In most MMORPGs you play, they’re heavy on the massively multiplayer, light on the role playing game, with the character you create at onset being less a character within a world, and more an avatar for you to punch Internet dragons with. This was the first mmorpg I’d played where the roleplaying felt natural, necessary and compelling.
After talking to my bounty hunter team, and making all my necessary dialogue choices, I was sent to collect a bounty on a smuggler. This involved murdering waves of lesser bad guys to get to the mark, standard MMO dungeon fare. The game play was smooth, although if you’re looking for something outside of the classic EverQuest control scheme aped by every 3d MMORPG since, you’re not going to find it here. I’ve got no problems with that, considering that criticizing the developers for going this route would be about the same as criticizing every First person shooter after GoldenEye. The game play was fun, my abilities were interesting, quickly becoming armed with rockets and lasers and rocket powered uppercuts, I didn’t get bored fighting.
So, after a few hours of the game, I was left with a pretty positive impression of the game, and that was without really interacting with another player. I could certainly see the possibility of picking this game up even if you aren’t an online gamer, just to play the game as single player experience in Bioware’s masterfully crafted world. Do I think this will be a WoW killer? I think there’s a real possibility of that, considering that World of Warcraft just released its last content patch until the next expansion pack, leaving the game with more than half a year of downtime until The Next Big Thing. Star Wars, if the launch goes smooth enough, is definitely poised to take a huge chunk of the WoW playing population.
In my next blog, I’ll write about my experience in multiplayer situations in the game, including Player vs player combat, and multiplayer instanced dungeon crawling.