Star Wars: The Old Republic Preview and Video Interview

G4 managed to infiltrate LucasArts’ headquarters in San Francisco last week, and have brought back both a hands-on preview and a two-and-a-half minute video interview covering Star Wars: The Old Republic. The interview features lead writer Daniel Erickson talking about the progress they’ve been making on the game recently, their commitment to allow players to solo through the game from start to finish, fulfilling “the Star Wars fantasy”, and more, while the preview focuses entirely on the Trooper class:

Though I only saw a small snippet of the full Trooper story (all 8 classes have their own epic storyline), it treads on ground more morally ambiguous than say, the Jedi Knight or Sith Warrior, with many opportunities to assist or forsake separatists and other factions in opposition to the Empire. As the game progresses, the Trooper rises higher and higher in the ranks of the military, but our demo was set at level 6, which is probably somewhere around the rank of Imperial peon given the speculated 50 level cap. I was told that the further you progress in the Trooper’s story, the more pivotal your position in the Republic’s military is and you’ll be quite concerned with how you’re viewed in the galaxy.

What I didn’t see (tough in a short demo) was too much of the RPG elements. I had a short interaction with NPCs for a main mission and side quest in which I did have dialogue choices that seemed important. I was also blocked from more of the MMO-sy elements of the game, choosing my own EQ for the character, meddling with anything not on my given HUD, playing with many others (save Morgan Webb sweeping into my game and shooting everything before I could) but all with good reason as the point of the demo was to see how well gunplay worked in the world (and MMOs are sometimes not the easiest genre to hop right into from a random point).