Star Wars: The Old Republic Previews

An embargo on Star Wars: The Old Republic has been lifted, evidenced by the flurry of previews that has just been released on the net by various publications, some of which have decided to dedicate multiple articles to various aspects of BioWare’s MMO.

We start with IGN which has an info hub, a companions and crafting article, another article dedicated to PvP and warzones, one on the trooper class and finally some video beta impressions.

So what’s the general impression? Well, it’s really solid. From what’s been seen, there’s a lot of early-level content, ranging from quests and dungeons to exploration and politics. Crafting introduces an interesting random element that makes it like an addictive slot-machine, and the dialogue and story sequences are pretty darn cool. There’s some neat group content in there too, both in the form of interesting boss encounters and story situations where one person’s choice affects everyone’s path.

GamePro has a single preview, and seems more skeptical than IGN:

Playing through the beta with my character Flyer the Smuggler, I feel like the Old Republic’s biggest problem is that feels less like a fully-fledged universe and more like…well…an MMORPG.

Little things are constantly breaking the immersion. At one point, I partied up with a trooper who happened to be wandering through my area. We killed a few bad guys, and all seemed well until I ran into what looked like a force field.

I was greeted with this message: “Only smugglers may enter this area.”

The Escapist:

Thankfully, the combat is true to the overall style of Star Wars. Jedis leap into combat, swinging their lightsabers left and right as flesh-eating aliens fall around them, or how Smugglers crouch behind cover, using thermal grenades and blasters to take out robot sentries and bounty hunters. I have to say though, having started with a Jedi class, the smuggler and trooper are just not as dynamic. Sure, the cover system and ranged combat work as designed, but I didn’t feel that the combat for the ranged classes was as active or strategic as the combat for the Jedis. Once you find a spot of cover, you just start cycling through your attacks until it’s time to move on to the next bit of cover. Sure, as a Jedi you’re equally focused on hotbars and cooldowns, but at least you get to move around a bit and watch some exciting animations.

1UP:

Instances, PVP battlegrounds, skill bar: sound familiar? While the core of the gameplay is nearly identical to WOW, the addition of story sequences and the ability to fill multiple roles with a single character means that I’m hooked for the time being. I’m not sure if it’s enough to keep me playing all the way to the level cap with one character, let alone multiple ones, but the changes are enough of an improvement to mean that I enjoyed my time with the game and will play through more of TOR than I did in all three of my attempts to get into Blizzard’s MMO.

MMORPG.com:

Overall, I had a great time playing the Trooper and the game seems to have come quite a long way since my trip back in April. The biggest thing to worry about at this point isn’t whether or not Star Wars: The Old Republic will be fun, but what friggin’ class to go through with on your first go-around! I realize many of you out there (including myself) are possibly settled on what class they want to play but honestly, if you try out the other classes, you will probably end up pretty conflicted.

Massively has two different hands-on, Larry’s and Jeff’s, here’s a sampling from the latter:

At the end of the day, TOR surpassed my expectations a wee bit. I loved the world design and enjoyed the leveling gameplay for what it was, but I found the story elements unnecessary at best (and downright distracting at worst). Ultimately the early portions of the game are well-made and it’s likely going to keep Star Wars nuts and themeparkers happy for a while. For those of us who realize that MMOs were meant to be more than casual combat games, though, I’m afraid Sir Alec Guinness said it best when he said this is not the MMO we’re looking for.

GameSpy talks about Origin worlds, the title’s similarities to Blizzard’s World of Warcraft and of four particularly interesting features:

Some of these responses are admittedly a little vague. While I was tampering with a courier robot to secure some dirt on an allegedly corrupt Coruscanti senator, the “light side” path had me giving some bogus documents to the person who assigned me the quest. The “dark side” option would have allowed me to give the real documents to the quest giver, who came off as some youthful idealist. One can only imagine what Julian Assange would have thought of this. To be fair, SWTOR’s options are always marked with a handy “light side” or “dark side” icon which simplifies these things, but quests such as these would have caused no small amount of headaches in a “normal” BioWare game.

BioWare’s big claim that each class has a different story is also a little misleading. Sure, each class has its own companions and interactive cinematics, but questing leaves you with the impression that there are only two truly independent experiences for the Republic with some added fluff for each of the four classes. On the Republic side, for instance, Jedi Consulars and Jedi Knights share many of the same experiences on Tython; and Smugglers and Troopers share many of the same experiences on Ord Mantell. And by the time you arrive on Coruscant, most of the quests are shared anyway. Regardless, SWTOR never fails to deliver a great story experience, whether it’s in the copious codex entries that impart lore about almost every aspect of the Star Wars universe or in loading screen that reminds you where your character stands in the story line.

RPGFan:

The most important thing Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic got right was that it felt like Star Wars. Lightsaber battles. Music to match. Getting to actually say things like “Join me, and together we will rule the galaxy.” The game remains a masterpiece because it captures so much of the spirit of Star Wars.

There are moments where that happens in the MMO. Sometimes the dialogue hits perfect notes. Sometimes the choices you have to make invoke classic Star Wars themes. And sometimes, just sometimes, the action feels just right. There was a moment when performing a certain quest where I approached a group of three flesh raiders with my Jedi Consular. Taking them all head on might have been a difficult fight, but instead I force lifted one of them to immobilize him, immediately followed up by force pushing the second one, and then used the force a third time to hurl a boulder at the last one. That felt like Star Wars.

But… then there are moments that do not. Shortly after that my force meter had run out and the fight devolved into me whacking things with my training saber over and over, each time waiting for the cooldown to run out so I could swing it again. The feeling disappeared. Sometimes the dialogue consists of tired old choices like either demanding a reward or saying you did it for the good of mankind. Other times you wonder about the storytelling logic just contained in the quest you are on the reason I was fighting flesh raiders at all was because Padawans were being captured by them, and yet I, another Padawan, was being sent out to rescue them. Also, it is a sad day indeed when force users can be imprisoned in wooden cages with thin planks.

Ars Technica:

SWTOR is very light on instancing, a concept that WoW flooded its world with in recent years which allows two players to see the same space with different features. It may be difficult to implement so widely, but there are some minor parts of SWTOR that could use it.

During NPC conversations, the world will continue moving around you and the NPC, which can introduce some frustrations, such as another player stepping in front of one of the camera angles so all I could see was his back instead of the quest-giver for parts of conversations. At another point, a quest-giver was talking about how he could not move a rock with the Force, but as he spoke to me, the rock was lifted and dropped. Really? That rock right there, it can’t be moved? Turns out the next step in the quest is for the rock to be moved by other means, and another character at that step in the quest was moving it.

To conclude, GamesRadar offers a brief hands-on piece:

In The Old Republic, the same care that goes into the first few levels of a typical MMO goes into every mission we encountered, from the early, plot-specific missions to the random missions picked up by strangers standing on the side of the road. We found ourselves not just not skipping the dialog, but enjoying it, and searching it out.

Hearing actors explain the context of the mission makes it more important to us, and being given the occasional branching dialog options (that can reward players with positive or negative morality) had us feel as though we were honestly, truly involved, as we do in singleplayer RPGs like Knights of the Old Republic.