Star Wars: The Old Republic Preview

MMORPG.com managed to get some hands-on time with Star Wars: The Old Republic’s Imperial Agent character class during a recent press event in San Francisco.

“[The Imperial Agent] experiences the underbelly of the empire,” we were told during a presentation by Jake Neri, a Producer with LucasArts, and Blaine Christine, a Producer with Bioware Austin.

The class seemed to be a combination of an RPG rogue and control class. It takes advantage of the Smuggler’s cover mechanic, which allows it to jump into predefined positions within each level to avoid immediate detection and fire off some salvos with more security. The first couple of encounters they tried showed that Agents better be ready to do some fore-planning.

For example, one ability let them toss a bomb at an enemy undetected. The trick is that it wouldn’t go off until that enemy took damage. Then, they could mesmerize, distract or otherwise incapacitate (in our demo, they had a sleep dart) the second guard before turning the blaster onto the first guy, who would promptly explode.