Star Wars: The Old Republic Beta Impressions

I have been loosely following the development of The Old Republic since it’s announcement back in 2008. With the launch date of December 20th creeping up there is definitely a lot of excitement. I got a chance to spend some time with the game during the recent Beta weekend.

First, let me explain a bit of where I’m coming from. I played Knights of the Old Republic back when it came out and it was amazing. It deservingly won numerous game of the year awards. I am a big Bioware fan. From Baldur’s Gate, to Knights of the Old Republic, to Mass Effect and Dragon Age and everything else I usually end up very impressed (though there has been some recent questionable events). I have also also spent quite a bit of time with MMO’s. I spend many hours playing Ultima Online back before anyone was even using the term MMO. Since then I have played money others including of course World of Warcraft.

I started playing without any expectations. I was fairly certain that the game would be high quality based on the fact that Bioware has spent so much time and money trying to make sure this isn’t just another crash and burn MMO. My initial reaction was very positive. Watching the introductory cinematic followed by the additional cinematics when you choose Republic / Imperial were amazing. Bioware has definitely beefed up their cinematic department for this game and it looked fantastic. They were jam-packed full of exciting action including awesome lightsaber battles. You also met characters who surely will play a large role in the game. Then when you start the game it has a clip of the text going into space like the beginning of all the Star Wars movies. Right from the start I got this huge feeling that the game is 100% Star Wars and I was desperately excited to play.

The character creation process offered more customization than most other MMO’s allowed. This is great because it allows your character much more opportunity to be unique. I especially liked the option on changing your body size/shape. One problem that a lot of games tend to have is that once everyone is decked out in armor, all characters of a given race look the same because all of their unique features are covered. Allowing different body shapes and sizes allows you to still retain some differences between how characters look even when you are all decked out.

When playing the game it became immediately apparent that World of Warcraft was definitely used as the model. Pretty much all gameplay mechanics as well as just the overall feel of how the game plays is almost exactly like WoW. The reasons for this are obvious: WoW is obviously the benchmark for success in the MMORPG genre so might as well use it as a foundation. The immediate benefit is that if you’ve ever played WoW you’ll be able to jump in with no problems and if you’ve never played WoW then you’ll find that the gameplay is very smooth and intuitive.

One of the things that Bioware continues to stress that is different in The Old Republic is the emphasis on story. This is one of the major pillars of games and I was excited to see what they had done. I would have to say that overall my expectations were not met. This easily could have been due to out of whack expectations on my part but it just didn’t really seem all that different. It seemed like the only substantial difference is all the voiced dialogue. There was a main quest line that I was following that to be completely honest wasn’t exactly exhilarating.

What was dissappointing was that it seemed like the further along into the game I got the higher percentage of my quests seemed to be “go kill x” or “go talk to y” or “go get z”. I just felt like I was playing the same old pattern where some main quest would take me to a new area where there would be masses of people ready to send me on tedious tasks. What surprised me was that it even got to the point where I found the audio dialogue to be tedious because I didn’t want to sit there and listen to someone’s “blah blah” story about why I needed to go kill x number of something. So while story development was definitely better than something like original, vanilla WoW years ago, with the exception of the audio dialogue I didn’t really find it much better than current WoW expansions.

When the weekend was over and I was reflecting over what I had played I realized that I wasn’t really sure what the plot of the game was. It seemed like there was the obvious Republic vs Sith antagonism, but where was this wonderful story headed? Sure they had created a beautiful galaxy full of exciting characters and people, but I still had no idea what the end-game was. Who is going to be some big bad boss that I will need to kill?

The biggest thing holding me back from jumping right into The Old Republic is that I am still trying to figure out what the endgame situation is. I am a busy person with a lot going on. If I am playing a game largely because of it’s story and plot, I only want to play it if I know going into it that I will be able to get through the story and plot. My biggest frustrations with WoW was that to get through end-game content you are entirely too dependent on other people for my liking. Setting up raid schedules with your guild just really isn’t feasible for me, let alone enjoyable. I don’t want to spend hours upon hours in a game only to get to a point where I decide I cannot finish getting through it because my schedule is not conducive with other people playing the game. While I obviously cannot get a taste of how the endgame works some quick searches online reveal conversations with Bioware employees about various systems in place to keep you busy while waiting to find a group for various endgame scenarios. This just is not appealing to me.

As I was talking with someone else about The Old Republic they brought up the notion that with the money and time Bioware has put into this game they could have made several full-featured AAA single player Star Wars games which would have been awesome and sold really well. Just the idea that its an MMO makes me hesitant to dive in because I’ve put a lot of time in MMOs and that’s just not really what I’m looking for right now. It just kind of makes you wonder how impactful the story in the game could be when it takes place in a persistent world where you already know that there’s not really a whole lot that can change. I’m not writing the game off completely – I actually think the game will be a lot of fun – but I think this game definitely warrants a wait and see approach for the time being.