Recently, Bioware and Lucas Arts released a developer guided walkthrough of Star Wars: The Old Republic’s gameplay allowing us to view their versions of newly exposed environments, character classes and cinematics. Read my opinion and watch the videos.
My main goal at watching the developer lead gameplay videos was to assess SWTOR as best I could from the gamers perspective as possible since I am not in the Alpha testing and, even though I have applied to beta testing, I’m not sure that I’ll make the cut.
After watching the Deceived trailer, which was totally effing awesome, I wasn’t sure what SWTOR would offer in terms of gameplay. Was it going to be more along the lines of a single-player game, like Knights of the Old Republic, only with characters that looked more cartoonish, like The Clone Wars mixed with WoW-sized armor, or would it be more along the lines of Star Wars Galaxies? As it turns out, it’s quite a bit of mixing previously successful Lucas concepts with new innovations.
Ican haz flmthrower?
The new feature that BioWare seams to most want to sell to players is SWTOR’s supposedly unprecedented level of interaction for an MMORPG. One aspect of said interaction is that absolutely every NPC in the game will have a verbal response for you and will be voiced in English or some existing Star Wars universe language. This wasn’t exactly unexpected, though, since the progression of player-NPC interaction has come from textual, to textual and body language, to MMOs having generic verbal responses for genders and races you may encounter. In fact, I can’t think of any current subscription based MMO that doesn’t have verbal responses to player interaction. I guess that BioWare is telling us that every line we’ll read in text from an NPC will also be voiced? They weren’t very clear about it in the videos.
Another feature relating to the level of interaction a gamer can plan to experience are the weighted decisions that each player will make as they progress through story-lines and quests. It looks like there will be many opportunities for players to speak with NPCs and choose responses that cannot be undone and will affect faction standings, quest rewards and even level grinding methods. Furthermore, while in a group, it appears that each group member experiencing the same interactive cut scene will be given the opportunity to respond to NPCs, but whether or not one team-mate’s actions will affect another’s in terms of factions standings and rewards is unclear. Most likely, I expect this part of the game will be fine-tuned after the game is launched and player response is weighed in.
I can hear the sound effects and music, already!
In terms of graphics, world map composition, and even basic character movement and struture, SWTOR is very reminiscent of both SWG and KotOR. To be more specific, the game looks, moves and feels like SWG, but with a few battle system, as well as, character and structure model enhancements that look to be influenced from a development standpoint from KotOR. Using the dev videos are representative samples, the environment, characters and effects don’t look to be anything spectacularly beautiful or even coded the same as games like in LotRO and FFXI, but will be like SWG was: very hardware intensive, requiring much of the typical system’s resources to render graphics that are not as good as they could be. That is to say that the resources used to graphic quality rendered ratio looks to be as inefficient as it was in SWG.
Getting to the battle part of things, BioWare and Lucas Arts are both very upfront and honest about their intentions concerning a “heroic style of combat.” They want any player to be able to easily handle several targets at one time. From the MMO player standpoint, this feature of SWTOR will allow for the feeling of invincibility and badassedness, but will severely take away from the team-based aspect of the MMO. In advance, I’m sorry to keep referring back to SWG, but the two games just look to be so similar! In SWG, the ability to defeat an entire dungeon full of the highest level mobs, including bosses to farm loot is what killed the game for me. Why keep playing a game who’s main attraction is, let’s face it, combat, when my character can kill anything by him/her-self? Side note: dual lightsaber weilding, cool, a lower level force user force-choking a Jedi Master, not cool.
Really? If you can force-choke another force user, you might as well be able to mind control them, too. Ridiculous... D:<
As far as classes are concerned, so far there look to be four developed classes, but the videos focus on Bounty Hunter and Sith Warrior. SWTOR doesn’t look like it will operate on a typical MMORPG team-play strategy where there is a tank, healer, crowd control and damage dealer. Combat survival will depend on each players’ equipment, stats and talent specialization, as usual, but in a world where every mob is not melee tank & spank, the deciding factor will be the player’s knowledge of their class and their ability to improvise based on what other people they may have with them. If SWTOR classes were to be classified in classic MMO categories, anything with a lightsaber, Sith and Jedi, or heavy armor, commandos, would tank, but also probably be the main damage dealers, while classes like Bounty Hunter would be more for soloing and role-playing. If previous Lucas Arts and BioWare titles are any clue, there may be a medic class in the works, but, most likely, every class will have self-healing methods including both items and class specific abilities.
As a general opinion of SWTOR, no matter how negative my review of the dev videos may read, I really want to play this game. The most attractive feature of this MMO is that it is in the Star Wars universe, which, coupled with the games interactivity features allow players, even ones that do not typically role-play in games, to easily immerse themselves into the story and develop their avatar as an actual character. If it is made with a few of the key elements contained in SWG, I will most likely lose myself in this MMO for many, many months. The features I speak of are ever expansive environments for my character to travel across including planet surfaces and space. I want there to be many planets to travel to, many NPC run ships to board, player built cities, player homes that are decoratively customizable, space ships, both star fighters and cruisers in which several players can roam or operate systems, outer space to explore, lots and lots of Star Wars lore including iconic figures we would know from this point in the time-line, faction based PvP, various land vehicles, droids for personal use, whether medic, combat, flight, data or whatever, and an environment that is both easy and fun to role-play in. If it gets all that and even more, you won’t get a review or even so much as a rating out of me because I’ll be too damned busy letting SWTOR suck my soul into MMORPG oblivion.
If you are unable to view the following YouTube versions of the gameplay walkthrough, you can view them on IGN.com’s website.
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Thanks for this well-written review
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