Star Wars. It's a very polarizing topic. Some people can't get enough of those crazy lightsaber dudes and the Force. People like me, however, don't find anything about Star Wars even remotely interesting. So it may come as a shock to you that I've spent about 90 hours with a Star Wars game over the last 10 days. That's a lot of time to devote to something that you don't even really like. Good thing the Old Republic has other things going for it aside from the Star Wars thing. Not all of it is good but I believe that this is a very solid platform on which Bioware can build upon and craft a very servicable game.
As a Star Wars game, you can obviously play as a Jedi man if you want but there are options for adults, too. There are 8 classes in the game but that seems a little disingenuous if you ask me. There are a lot more similarities between the factional partners than classes in other MMOs like World of Warcraft. The trooper/bounty hunter, Jedi consular/ Sith inquisitor, Jedi knight/ Sith warrior and smuggler/agent all share similar gameplay mechanics. Even their advanced classes share some common themes. It's a pretty big bummer. There are differences in the classes but I found them to be mostly cosmetic. Like the consular has a channeled ability that lets him throw rocks at a dude while the inquistor has a channeled ability that lets him shoot electricity. The trooper has an ability that becomes available when your target is taking damage over time and the bounty hunter has an ability that becomes available when your target is taking fire damage. Virtually identical. That said, I think the classes are just barely unique enough to stand apart from each other. The main thing that separates these is, of course, the story. Each class in the game has their own unique story quest they embark on that will persist all the way until you reach the game's level cap of 50 and beyond. The class I chose to play was the trooper. I didn't really care for the story at all. It's the same thing you've seen over and over again. What are you willing to do to complete the mission? This question is asked over and over again during the story. And there's no real impact to your decisions, either. If you choose to kill a guy rather than take him in so he can stand trial, you might get a single line of dialog mentioning it but it never really comes back around. I have not finished the main story as of writing this so that stuff might come around but I killed people like 60 hours ago and all I got was a line of dialog basically saying "Hey, man. Not cool.". Sometimes it doesn't even give you the dialog, it will only pop up that companion notice saying "Your companion doesn't like that you killed that dude!". It stinks. Make my CO undress me L.A. Noire style or something. Why shouldn't I kill all these dudes? Give me a reason other than min/maxing the stupid morality bar. Another gripe I had with the trooper story specifically was the pacing. There were many occasions that the game tried to set itself up as an action game. It would create all this awesome momentum in a cutscene then drop me into MMO combat where I would slog through groups of mobs one by one until I reached the next frantic cutscene. It felt like I should be mowing these dudes down, not carefully waiting for that champion droid to patrol out of the way before I pull this group of Imperials. It's a MMO, I get it but it was a huge momemtum killer. The voice work is decent. There are a few flat characters and some of the readings could and should have been done again. Sometimes the pronouciations of words are done completely different. One coversation I pronounced the name of a dude I was hunting one way then in another conversation I pronounced it another and then in that same conversation I pronounced it the first way again. Sometimes the audio sounds different too, like they were recorded differently or something. But you have to kind of expect stuff like that in a game with so much goddamn voice.
The voice thing was supposed to be the thing that made Old Republic stand out. It does to a certain extent but it also gets extremely boring and at times infuriating. I don't care what kind of wacky scenario you have ginned up, at the end of the day, you still want me to go out there and get 5 power cores for you. At around level 40 or so I found myself skipping most of the side quest dialog because I found it all extremely boring. I should have done so much earlier. Bioware claims that this game is KotR 3-7. This is again a little disingenuous. If I played a KotR game that had me gathering power cores and cat teeth for 20 hours, I would be pissed. Maybe they're only referring to the class and planet stuff but there's still a lot of less than stellar story/voice content to sift through. There are a few stand out quest lines on each planet that are a cut above but the majority of the side quests are very, very throwaway and almost seems like a waste of time and money for them to voice them. Don't let them fool you with the alien shit, either. Those shouldn't be voiced. That is the single worst idea this game has. Those alien voices are recycled more than anything. I almost have one of the Twi'lek loops memorized at this point. They are practically text quests. How does my dude know all of these alien lanuages? And if my dude talks back to them in English(or whatever English is called in Star Wars) why can't they speak it back to me? They obviously understand me if they're replying to me. Another gigantic waste of time voicing these. In my view, the only things that should be voiced in this game are the class quests, the main planet storyline, your companion, and Flashpoints(minus all the alien stuff in there). That's it. Imagine how much time and money that would have saved. I undertand them wanting to add flavor to the world but you aren't going to win me over with 7 or 8 loops that repeat constantly. I even found one alien repeating another alien's loop except it was just distorted to all hell. Speaking of repetition. There's a guy in the industry whose voice is used a lot. He is used a lot in this game. He voices so many goddamn NPCs it's not even funny. He's trying his hardest to put on different characters that it sometimes takes me a few sentences before I hear that Drake creeping in and I just die a little inside. It's a Bioware game. There are romance options. I didn't indulge as much as I could have but I did sweet talk a lady friend. It was a little hokey and awkward. Maybe my blackened husk of a heart is incapable of love but it made me feel extremely akward to watch my character say soul-crushingly corny lovey-dovey dialog only to be one-upped by my lady. And you can have sex in the game. The screen just goes black and the person you sexed says some offhand thing referencing the event. It's so throwaway. Companions are romancable which I thought would have made a cool little side story considering the lady I romanced was my subbordinate. But they never really explored that.
The world of Star Wars is completely foreign to me. I can't speak to any errors they made with this planet or that. I don't know about any references that are being made to anything be that movies, games, books, etc. I can only comment of the appearance and flow of the planets. There are a good variety of environments in the game. Forests, deserts, Blade Runner, lava level. All of them make an appearance. Some of them are more well realized than others, though. Like what are these level 12 gang members doing on the Republic's main planet? One guard from the palace could kill them all. Whatever. I do have a problem with the feel of the universe, though. In more conventional MMOs you can walk from one side of the world to the other. In this you have a handful of instanced planets (each faction visits the same planets just not necessarily in the same order). This makes the game feel relatively small. The planets themselves are decently sized with lots of content in them but once you're done, it's back to your starship and off to the next one. There's no real smooth transition. They try to move you from place to place via the main story but all that ammounted to for me was "OK you're done that world so now we just so happened to get intel that this planet is where you should go next. Lucky for you it's right in your level range!". It's pretty flimsy. The zones themselves though are fairly well crafted with some of them having a really nice vibe and style to them. Tatooine and Hoth come to mind. Voss too had a really relaxed feel to it. Lots of fall colours. Hoth in particular made me stop in my tracks and look at a thing in the environment and say "That is actually really cool.". Sometimes your companion will chime in when you reach a specific area. Like my lady has a past and when I entered an area that is somewhat related to her past, she made a comment. Nice little touch.
Companions are a fairly large part of the game. At level 50 I have 6 companions. Only 5 of them are really useful in combat. The other is just a crafting bitch. So these 5 all have unique combat styles, personalities, likes and dislikes. One girl I have likes it when I tell people I will help them. Another dude likes it when I steal prototype weapons and keep them for myself. They meter out the companions over the course of the story and you generally get companions that would be most useful to your class first. For instance the Sith inquistor which is for all intents and purposes a mage, gets an abomination-like thing that tanks for them. The bounty hunter, with his heavy armor and more defensive gameplay gets a healer first off. Everyone eventually gets the three archetypes(healer, tank, dps) but it's nice to get the most useful one right up front so you're not running around as a healer with another healer companion and taking 4 hours to kill something while you have no other companions. Companions can also craft for you in the game. You simply ask them to go out on missions for one of your gathering skills which costs some money and time(during which they are unusable in combat) but they return with the material and a skill up. Sometimes the mission will fail and you get no materials but you always get the skill up. You can also direct them to craft items like armor, weapons and item modifications. Every companion has a certain proclivity for a crew skill. For instance one of my dudes has a +5 crit to armormech and +1 crit to underworld trading. And a girl I have has a +10 to Bioanalysis and +10 to Biochem. So when I make my armor I want the first dude to do it.Your companions can also make a vendor run a la Torchlight. You send them away for a minute, they take all of the grey vendor items and come back with the money.
Speaking of typical MMO things - crafting. You take on a total of 3 crew skills in the game. 1 gathering skill, 1 crafting skill and 1 mission skill. I won't list all of the skills here because it will be a giant waste of time but there's a good variety. If you want to make armor, weapons, armor mods, weapon mods, lightsaber mods, implants, generators, medpacs, stims, whatever, this game has your back. The skills are grouped together so that you can be entirely self-sufficent if you so choose. I chose armormech, scavenging and underworld trading for my skills. I would scavenge metals and compounds, send companions on missions to gather underworld metals and then craft armor. It works well. Once the item is crafted, you can reverse engineer it, too, to get some of the materials back that you put in and you sometimes learn a better version of the item that you can then craft. It's a really neat thing that works great. I kind of gave up on the crafting at some point because all of the stuff I got from quests was always better. That was disapointing but I was extremely glad to see that I didn't have to sit in town for 2 hours and watch a progress screen as I made the same gloves over and over for a skill up. Now my companion can do all that while I kill things. Great.
So I like to kill things. You had better like to kill things when you play a MMO. It's probably Old Republic's best asset. The combat has a good feel to it. It isn't flashy or pretty but I thought it felt really good. You are almost always fighting more than one opponent. It makes you feel appropriately powerful. There's really not much to say other than that. The space combat, on the other hand. Another useless thing. I did one space mission through my time. One. It's so throwaway. I hate everything about it. I can't really talk about it since I did 1 mission but I don't want to do any more. Same with PvP. I didn't do a single thing of PvP. Not my thing. The one thing I did endulge in to spice up my killing things need was Flashpoints. They are the typical dungeon from any MMO with some story and moral choices thrown in. The first Flashpoint I did was The Esseles, which is the first Flashpoint that the Republic are exposed to. It's a great peice of content with turns in the story and nice voice work. I was so excited to check out more of them. I did Hammer Station, Athiss and Mandalorian Raiders and was severely disapointed to find that they were extremely linear compared to Esseles and they have little to no voice work. One thing these Flashpoints exposed me to was the thing they do with gathering skills. They build shortcuts in to the Flashpoints that your group can exploit if you have the required skill level. One required some scavenging skill to repower a drill that cut a hole in the wall which was a shortcut to the first boss. Then there was a inactive elevator that could be sliced so that we could ride it down instead of making some precarious jumps to the bottom of a pit. Outside of the Flashpoint you'll find yourself in need of buddies when you encounter a heroic quest. These are quests that are harder than your normal quest and require you to get another person or more to complete them. Some require 1 more person and others 3. The rewards are obviously good for these quests but I didn't really see the need to do them as my gear was already good enough to kill things efficiently. And I was a lot higher level than most of the people playing so there weren't that many people around to group with.
There's a lot to do and see in Old Republic. I haven't talked about everything there is to talk about but there is only really one thing to talk about. The voice is good but extremely overused. Why did I just write all of that shit? If they concentrated the use of voice, I think it would have made it much more effective. There's the review. But what do I know? When all is said and done, this might read like a list of nitpicks and petty complaints. But that's all I got. I really enjoy the game and I'll continue to play it for a while yet. I'm interested to check out the Operations of the game and what stuff they add down the road. I would only recommend it to people who love MMOs, Star Wars or both. There are some new things in here but they're only apparent to people who are at least somewhat familiar with the genre.