Star Wars: The Old Republic Preview (some spoilers ahead)

Dav

So, for the last couple of weeks I've been spending as much time as I could playing Star Wars: The Old Republic. I've had a couple of glimpses at it at various EA events over the last 18 months and have been really looking forward to getting stuck into it more fully.

This post will contain some story spoilers, but not too many. I won't be using spoiler tags because it'll just look weird.

There were a few ground rules attached to this preview:

1. we were only allowed to talk about the Republic
2. we are only allowed talk up to a certain point of the game - I didn't get this far (yet!), but I think I've played enough to give a decent impression.
3. if it seems like I've left something obvious out, it's possibly because I'm not allowed to talk about it. The game's been finished for well over a year, but the beta testing has been and will continue to be extensive to make sure things are as good as they can be. As a result, we've been asked not to talk about things they're still working on.
4. I have never played any MMO before, so this was all very new to me and if it seems like I don't know what I'm on about, I'm sorry.
5. This is as a part of an advertising deal Boards.ie has with EA for this game but I promise you that they are not "buying" a good review or anything of the sort. There has been no restriction on my opinion - so if I don't like something, EA has no problem with me saying so.

OK, now that that's out of the way, queue the music...* fires up the Star Wars theme *

The game opens with the cinematics you'll have seen all over the tubes already (the trailers that is) - the Sith have returned to their ancestral home of Korriban, Coruscant was sacked through Sith treachery after offering peace on the planed Alderaan and the Republic was strong armed into accepting the terms of a shaky peace treaty offered by the Sith. The Jedi, their temple on Coruscant now in ruins, have also gone back to their roots on the planet of Tython. I don't mind admitting, I'd love to see a film made with the cinematics they've put together for this game. I got goosebumps the first time I saw a lot of them, but I am a total Star Wars fanboi, so what're you going to do?

I decided to start out with a Republic Trooper - there were a couple of reasons for this: I'd played about 2 hours of a trooper at the Bioware Offices opening in Galway not too long ago and I want to play as a Jedi Knight when the game goes live, so didn't want to spoil too much for myself. The game brought me to the planet Ord Mantell where a bitter civil war is taking place between Seperatists and those loyal to the Republic and the corrupt local government is powerless to stamp it out. Time to call in the big guns... You start off as the latest addition to Havoc Squad, an elite Special Forces unit with expertise in all forms of combat. Point of information - this is the same planet where the Smugler class starts their story too, but I haven't played that class, so I can't mention too much more than that.

I'm in a walker with my new commander, Haaron Tarvus, leader of Havoc Squad, when we're attacked and the walker's taken out of comission. The Commander sends me off to secure the forward area and the game gets started.

So, the Trooper is all about the "pew-pew-pew" with a heavy combat rifle which can shoot lasers or explosives. You have an ammo bar under your health bar which depletes with explosive rounds and "charged" attacks. There's the usual MMO abilities bar bound to the top row of your keyboard. Being a total MMO n00b, it's taken me quite a while to adjust to the controls, but I get them now and realise why they work (having the A & D keys to "turn" rather than "strafe" initially puzzled me, but I cut my teeth on FPS games, so go figure). As I levelled up, I gained the ability to smack people with the butt of the gun and got a sticky grenade which has an area of effect (like the explosive rounds from your gun). I also upgraded the shooting abilities with the gun including a "stand and blast for 2 seconds" which felt pretty cool and would take out most basic Seperatists with one volley. The combat is fun and plentiful as there are pockets of 3 or 4 enemies for you to tackle at any given time and even with a lot of other players wandering around, you'll find a gang to tackle. You can also attack characters already in combat with another player although you won't gain loot or as much XP.

Speaking of XP, you seem to get through the early levels pretty quickly. The first hour saw me hit level 4 and each time you ding, there's an NPC you can go and visit to learn a new skill or two although sometimes these are upgrades to existing skills. Each skill will cost a nominal amount of credits - money hasn't so far been a concern. With about 13 hours into the Trooper so far, I'm at level 11. After specialising, there is also a seperate skills tab that the trainer can tech me for my speciality. I'll get into some more detail of the specialising later.

I don't want to spoil too much of the story (which is actually not bad, but probably won't change your life), but the long and the short of it is, there's a bomb gone missing that's capible of destroying a city and you and the rest of Havoc squad need to find it. This quest will bring you to various parts of Ord Mantell and your main story will involve working with a local armed forces commander based in Fort Garnick who is, to be honest, a bit of a dick, but you can choose how you want to talk with him.

The conversations have option wheels that should be familiar to anyone who's played a Bioware game. Occassionally you'll have Light Side and Dark side choices to make (there's a visual indicator for this) - gotta be honest they haven't had a huge bearing on the game yet, but I'm assuming it affects how people deal with you as you advance. The converstaion choices will also afect how your companions view you or how much they like you - more on that later.

As well as your main story, you also have side missions. The game is pretty good at only offering quests in a certain area to you when you need to go to that area so you're not wasting time going out of your way to complete things. Typically it's assisting a fellow soldier or a refugee out and these tend to fall into the "collect X number of Y and bring them back to me" or "I've lost my <insert family member here>, can you find them" type things that anyone who plays RPGs is probably not all that fond of, but at the same time, they're good for XP and loot to help level up that bit quicker and, above all else, they're optional I found myself wanting to level up more aggressively and so I did as many of them as I could. I took longer to complete them than I probably should have, but I was having fun exploring the world.

The story line on Ord Mantell comes to a head when you finally discover the whereabouts of the missing WMD and have to storm the Seperatists main stronghold to find it and disable it. Most main story missions have a built in side mission that usually involves killing a specified amount of enemies (sometimes of a certain type) and you shouldn't need to go too far out of your way to complete these. Maybe when servers are very full of players there'll be less clusters of enemies around, but they do respawn pretty quickly, so there's no major delay. The final mission was challenging, but not impossible, having done almost all the side quests on offer, I was probably a couple of levels ahead of where I'd be without them, so it made it pretty straight forward to complete solo. I did team up with someone else before hand when they were on their run through the final mission and helped them out as I wanted to see how that aspect of the game worked. There's loot sharing and bonus XP for team work, so if you've got a group of friends on the same server it definitely rewards

I don't want to give too much of the endings of the main mission away as it's going to have further reaching implications for the Trooper's story. When all is said and done, you're the sole remaining member of Havoc Squad and you are taked with rebuilding the team, so you get your first companion. You're then told it's time to leave Ord Mantell and that you need to get to Coruscant. Time to jump in a shuttle and head to Carrick Space Station.

Before I talk about Carrick, I'll mention the companion. Obviously enough, they'll join you in a battle and help you out. You can also have them loot dead things whilst you continue to engage or you can send them off to gather resources for you to craft items (which means they'll leave your side and be unavailable to you for a time). You get an abilities bar for them too which you can move to be underneath your own bar to make combat easier to manage. I mostly left my companion to his own devices and he performed very well.

You get off your shuttle at Carrick Station which is a kind of hub where you can shop, trade and learn new skills. Upon my arrival, I was told that I could head straight to Corruscant by myself or go on a VIP ship with others which leads you to a Flashpoint. Flashpoints are areas where you're best served by teaming up with others and taking the "Raid" on. There were some on Ord Mantell, but as I had acquired my companion and a higher level when I tackled them, I was able to complete it solo. It would have been considerably easier with a couple of people. The missions were listed as "2+" which suggests to me that two or more people are recommended.

I took an opportunity to wander around Carrick as recommended by the NPC who greeted me and offered me the opportunity to take on the Flashpoint. I met some trainers and was offered the opportunity to specialise into either a Commando or a Vanguard. The essential differences seem to be that a Commando stands back and blasts things with a heavy assault rifle and the Vanguard gets a lot more up close and personal (someone tells me that in conventional MMO terms, these guys are DPS and Tank classes respectively). I picked Commando cause I really do love the look of the gigantic gun he gets Interestingly enough, my companion has a similar gun, but seems, from my combat with him, to be more Vanguard as he appeared to draw the enemies towards him which left me free to unleash the DAKKA.

From Carrick I went to Coruscant. I took a brief look at the Flashpoint at an EA event last year and it's fun, but my time's been extremely limited with work and life and taking some time to build a new PC. With the new gear by the way, I was able to bump all the settings and the game really is beautiful to look at. Coruscant is really quite a sight to behold. I've just been given a mission by General Garza to track down some black market types who're planning on selling the Seperatists a platoon of War Droids, so I'd best get back to it...

There's more to come from me on this preview. I also started a Jedi Consular character which I haven't quite gotten as far with (currently on level 8) which I will come back and write a similar preview for next week. I am really enjoying the game and whilst I usually get copies of games for reviews when they launch, I've gone out and ordered a Collector's Edition because I think I'm going to spend a lot of time playing this and I am, as I mentioned, a total Star Wars fanboi

I hope you've enjoyed the read, I'll do my best to answer any questions you might have on it.

irishmover

Commandos can heal aswell as dps!

Excellent well written piece though, have a thanks!

Blowfish

Cheers for the report. Couple of things.

First off, as a non MMO'er, how much does it actually 'feel' like Star Wars and do the MMO mechanics get in the way of that?

Dav wrote: »

There's the usual MMO abilities bar bound to the top row of your keyboard. Being a total MMO n00b, it's taken me quite a while to adjust to the controls, but I get them now and realise why they work (having the A & D keys to "turn" rather than "strafe" initially puzzled me, but I cut my teeth on FPS games, so go figure).

I've no idea why MMO's keep doing that, most people I know who play a lot of MMO's end up rebinding A/D to be strafe anyway. I think it's supposed to be that the concept of keyboard turning is easier to grasp for people who don't play games much at all.

With the new gear by the way, I was able to bump all the settings and the game really is beautiful to look at.

There's a good chance I'll be upgrading too. What sort of gear are you playing on and at what resolution? Also, is the rumoured 47gb install size correct?

irishmover

It's ~27gb as of now, but with the new build coming it'll be around the 40gb mark which will most likely be the launch size (don't quote).

Keyboard turning is a way to ease people into character movement in games like these but really you wont last very long the higher you go as the turning is always going to be faster with the mouse and reactions/proactive playstyle is usually the bee's knee's in mmo's. But I think MMO's use it as a stepping stone for people who aren't great with movement on a keyboard/mouse.

You're perfectly right the first thing I done when I logged into beta was change A/D to strafe left/right. It feels more natural to me, but to each their own.

It's Star Wars, you'll be shocked by how much Star Wars(e) it is. If you liked Kotor's and really any of the BioWare games you'll have an absolute ball with this game.

Edit: Also the graphics are very computer friendly, high settings with the type of viewing Dav said can be easily obtained with a decent computer.

GTX 470 twin frozr
i3 540 OC'd to 4.4ghz
4gb ram
Gigabyte motherboard
1920x1080 resi

Smooth for several hours on max settings.

ZeitgeistGlee

Trying to read that with the minimum of spoilers was bloody hard, but it was still definitely a solid review, cheers.

LanceStorm

this is good to hear, i'll be buying a new laptop specifically to run this game and was willing to spend up a few bucks to make sure it played at max settings, but sounds like it would be total overkill to get an alienware laptop for 2k!

Agent J

Want. Now.

Mr. K

Nice preview. And kudos for showing restraint in your class choice, I doubt I'd have been able to resist picking a Jedi or Sith class (still undecided as to which my first character will be).

I too have the CE preordered, that Darth Malgus statue is too cool to miss!

Methionine

Hi Dav, nice preview. One very, very, minor nitpick, the relatively common 2+ group quests are called Heroic Quests, not Flashpoints. Flashpoints are much bigger group quests that are instanced (basically take place separate from the rest of the Universe). Of course that probably means sod all to MMO newbies

Drakar

The number of sith jedi to be seen in pvp kind of hinted that this will be by far the most popular classes at go live unless something changes.

Kiith

It was always going to be Jedi/Sith in massive numbers. I'll definitely roll one, as i'm kind of thinking of the game as a single player game, in a multiplayer universe. But will roll a Trooper or Smuggle first.

nix

Thats the only thing thats annoying me about this game, the lack of classes, they could have atleast put in two more classes on each faction. Or made the non jedi/sith cross faction

I mean liek im sure there can be good Bounty hunters ;D

Holyhole

cheers for the review.

Are you still playing away? what was the highest level you reached?

Im just interested to know if the approx 1-2 hrs per level would happen all the way to 50. I wouldnt expect it to, but maybe you have the inside scoop

de5p0i1er

I can't wait for this game to finally come out. We've been waiting so long for this.

Pretty much every major MMO since WoW has failed miserably - many are still in the red from a cost point of view. I'm not getting excited about this despite loving my first MMO experience (SWG).

I fully expect this game will provide a content rich experience up to end game - whether they can balance PvP and continue to provide challenging content will be the question. I see myself getting this for the experience of levelling but I already expect my interest to cap there given the way MMO's have been going. Anything beyond this expectation is a huge bonus.

Also - if I do play, I'll be a Bounty Hunter and I'm going to destroy every Jedi I see.

Jim

Deleted User wrote: »

Pretty much every major MMO since WoW has failed miserably - many are still in the red from a cost point of view. I'm not getting excited about this despite loving my first MMO experience (SWG).

I fully expect this game will provide a content rich experience up to end game - whether they can balance PvP and continue to provide challenging content will be the question. I see myself getting this for the experience of levelling but I already expect my interest to cap there given the way MMO's have been going. Anything beyond this expectation is a huge bonus.

Also - if I do play, I'll be a Bounty Hunter and I'm going to destroy every Jedi I see.

If MMOs were in the red and the company didn't think it could make the cash back they'd shut them down. Most major MMOs released in the last few years are still going because they're still worth it for the company. They were failures in terms of their expectations for sure.

Ivan

Nice read Dav. Let me know if you need someone to take over for reviews, since you are so busy. It's not an issue I have and I'd be sure to give the beta a thorough playthrough - for the sake of the forum/community, of course.

marko93

I have serious hopes this will run on ethier the generic Acer desktop downstairs or my Acer laptop. If not. Time to save :cool:

Also, great preview. First time MMO'er myself.

Raphael

Also, if you're testing, you're still bound by NDA, so a review would be inadvisable - For people in the media, they had an embargo drop (that's why Dav could post his), but for normal testers, it's still Hush-hush.