Star Wars: The Old Republic impressions
Like my piece at The Daily today says, Star Wars: The Old Republic is almost egregiously large. 200 hours per class, according to Dallas Dickerson, one of the leads on the design team at Bioware. And there are eight classes, so, um.. carry the 1.. that’s a lot of play.
At this point, a real review is impossible, considering the beta of near-final content lasted only a couple of weeks and the full-game preview only started Tuesday. I pushed forward to write an impressions/preview for The Daily this week, but when it was edited for space, my bosses removed, er, most of the actual “impressions,” turning it into more of a “what is an MMO?” piece for novices. That would’ve been fine, except I made some pretty big judgment calls on the game without critically backing them up.
The key paragraph that got nixed was the following:
If you’ve played WoW or other major MMOs, you’ll feel right at home. Perhaps too much so, honestly. Hardcore gamers will notice little tweaks to genre tropes like “player vs. player” warzones, character upgrades and item crafting, but SWTOR plays it safe in the nuts-and-bolts department.
It’s tempting to forgive Bioware for sticking so closely to the WoW skeleton of play, considering how successful their design has proven after years of refinement, and some of the tweaks do pay off. Companion characters have taken a page from Torchlight’s book, because they can run off to do grunt tasks for you, from finding crafting items to selling loot; and Bioware has found a sensible balance between WoW-style controls and character powers that feel unique to the Star Wars universe.
But the required time and cash investments in an MMO mean that players will need a new reason to stick around if they’ve dabbled in WoW at all. Maybe Bioware and Lucasarts just assume there are enough people who a) haven’t played WoW to death and b) want a WoW-like experience with a Star Wars skin, and those people will be willing to grind through all-too-similar quests and PVP battlegrounds for months on end. But, you know, WoW has had seven years to snatch up that exact playerbase.
The major difference, then, is the focus on fully spoken dialogue, which proved a lot more impressive than I expected when I first heard about it. Bioware has a knack for finding great voice actors who don’t wear thin after dozens of hours of play. But, again, an important point was stricken from my impressions article:
The game doles out points when answers reflect either the light side or dark side; it’s a cool twist at first, but it effectively punishes players for flip-flopping, which dampens the otherwise impressive script with a few predictable outcomes.
This very fact wouldn’t bring down a game that’s 10, 20, or maybe even 30 hours long. But the impotence of dialogue choices will make WoW-like play feel that much more redundant by hour 40.
Ultimately, I walked away from my test time with SWTOR interested in playing the game some more. It means I’ll start over with a new class, since I don’t wanna do my other classes’ sessions all over again, and that’s fine by me. Looks like there’s still a ton to do here that’ll be new to me. I started with the kind of negative expectation that would get me booted off a jury pool, and Bioware deserves credit for pulling off a world that, at first blush, seems worth hanging out in for a while.