[Star Wars: The Old Republic] Beta Impressions

I spent most of this weekend (Saturday/Sunday/Monday) playing this with a friend of mine, and now that I've given it a few days to kind of settle, I figure I might as well write something about it, as it's been a while since I've done one of these.

My Sith Inquisitor, Elvia, freshly created on Saturday morning.

First thing is first, this is an MMO, it is a good one of those, but it is totally still one of those, so if that's not your thing, you probably won't like much here. If you're kind of done with MMOs though, it may actually have something to get you interested again, depending on what you're burnt out on. I won't spend much time talking about what's familiar, I would rather write about what's different about this game for someone who knows their way around an MMO.

The most noticeable thing at first is there is no auto-attack, right clicking an enemy will activate whatever ability is in the number 1 hotbar slot, this is nice because it can be ranged or melee, depending on what abilities your character has, and you're not stuck with a weak ability your entire career. It's not as nice because you don't notice immediately, and wonder why you have to manually click to attack, and why your basic attack triggers global cooldown.

I don't even know what these things are.

In a somewhat sinister move, all quest dialog is voiced, in Mass Effect style conversations, where your character will actually speak back to quest givers. This helps immersion and story out a lot, but you spend about 10 times as long actually getting and turning in quests, unless you just spacebar through everything until a dialog choice pops up. This kind of sets a pace to leveling, especially in groups, so you're not consistently just mashing through text and missing all story on the way, it helps as well that the early story is also much cooler and more involved than most other MMOs.

Cinematic!

For the first 10 levels or so you're kind of stuck in this tutorial zone, where everything but some of the last quests being built specifically to solo. At level 10 the game starts to open up a bit though, you get your first companion at the end of your class story quest line. A companion is like a pet from other MMOs, you can set them to passive, or aggressive, and determine what abilities they will use on their own really easily, so they need very little micromanagement. Your starter companion will also fill a role you don't, which is really nice, getting an AI buddy who can tank for you as a mage style class, etc.

Me and my companion, talking to a hologram, thinkin' about lightsabers.

But combat isn't all companions are for, companions are also used for crafting, gathering, can go on missions of their own for xp, and can be sent away to sell your junk items for you while you quest. You can also chat with your companions, and in conversations with quest givers, they will show approval or disapproval of your actions, like my guy Khem Val hated weakness, so whenever I would just be a total dick to people, he'd happily give me a +15 affection point bonus.

Sending out my companion to collect some crystals to raise my Archaeology skill.

At about level 18, you get your own starship, which acts kinda like a mini-Normandy, for those familiar with Mass Effect. Your companions hang out there (you get a second companion who tends to your ship when you're not around) where you can talk to them and such, there's a Cargo Hold where you can store items from your inventory and acts like a bank, and there is a Galaxy Map, where you can fly around the galaxy checking out new planets for missions.

Flying to the Imperial Fleet from the Galaxy Map.

Also from the Galaxy Map, you can take on some space combat missions. Space combat missions are very simple, but fun, they almost remind me of a very simple Star Fox, with only mouse controls to move, left click will fire lasers and right click will shoot out missiles (which you have a limited number of). Your ship is just like your character, or your companions, and you can buy new "gear" for it to upgrade it, you can also earn some as rewards for space combat missions.

There's still XP for doing space combat missions.

Something else I haven't mentioned is grouping, I kinda wanted to get the rest of the stuff out of the way before I added the grouping modifier to it. How the conversation system works with a group is, everyone gets their own choices, but in the lower left corner of the screen, there is a dice roll to determine who actually gets to speak to move the conversation forward. Any light or dark side points are awarded for choices individually, so you can't troll your light side friend by being a dick and giving him dark side points, but if your roll is the highest, the dark side option is what moves the story forward, and that will stick for everyone in the group as the decision that was made when you turn in the mission.

The popup you get when you make a choice that will earn you dark side points.

The other thing about grouping and conversations, is you get social points for every dialog choice. If you choose the opposite of your teammate (the one who won the roll I believe) you will earn 1 social point per group member. If you manage to pick the same option, you'll get 2 points per group member. Social points tie into titles (social rank 1: Friendly [character name], social rank 2: [character name] the Outgoing, etc.), and can also unlock new social items to buy from special vendors. Light and Dark side points have the same kind of special vendors, but some gear in general will have a requirement of light 1 or dark 1 to equip it. For example, if you're neutral or light 1, you can use green and blue lightsaber crystals, but if you're dark 1, you can't use those colors at all.

Doing an Area quest with my group. The light beacons are loot to pick up.

I didn't do very much of the PvP, but the 2 matches I did play were fun gametypes. The first was attack and defend, I seemed a bit lost there, but still managed to have a good time with it. The second was Battlefield style control points, 3 points to control, each team has points ticking down to 0, losing points and dying makes them tick faster. Apparently there's a 3rd gametype, possibly more but i know for sure a 3rd, where you play some kind of soccer game, I didn't get a chance to play that one myself though.

A PvP scoreboard, medals are awarded for things like killing players 1 on 1.

Overall, I had a lot of fun with The Old Republic. As tired as I am of the MMO formula, there was enough fresh and neat and novel about it that I could totally see myself playing it. Like I said in the beginning, it's totally one of those, but it's a good one of those. For a beta it was surprisingly polished, and it's taken the right things from the games it took things from. I'm sure playing with a friend made it that much better, as with most games, but the story stuff is interesting enough I could see myself playing it alone, never grouping or raiding, with 8 different characters just to see all the class stories, pretending it's just another Bioware game.

Elvia, now a Sith Sorceror, on Monday night before the servers went down. Eyes now orange from the corruption of the Dark side.

Thanks for reading~