Star Wars The Old Republic: Beta Impressions

The release of the Bioware€™s juggernaut MMO is nearly upon us and, as is the way with these games, a large beta invites thousands of players to help the developers iron out the kinks before the game hits the shelves. I should stress - especially with the Battlefield 3 beta debacle the other month - that this is indeed a beta and not a demo of the game and many things I find over this weekend are subject to change before the official release. Fortunately, unlike EA€™s treatment of Battlefield 3, Bioware are making no bones about the fact that this is a beta and as such are publicising this as anything else. Phew. So, onward and upward. 10:00 CST - my allotted login time - strikes and the €˜PLAY€™ button lights up on my login client. I€™m in. Kind of. I€™m treated to a wonderfully engaging cinematic, filling me in on some backstory and setup for the game. All the usual Bioware excellence and polish, but it doesn€™t hit me in quite the same way as World of Warcraft€™s first opening cinematic did. Still, impressive. One similarity it does share with WoW, which becomes apparent very quickly, is the early congestion. Immediately after the cinematic, I€™m presented with a list of servers of multiple European languages, all red and showing the status €˜full€™. I choose the shortest waiting time, six minutes, and go make myself a coffee. Thirty minutes later, I€™m finally at the front of the queue. Pretty sure that€™ll be sorted by release (in fact, it€™s sorted by the next time I log in). Typical faction select screen you see in any modern MMO. Sith or Republic? Red or blue? With my time playing Alliance in WoW leaving a bitter taste, I decide to go for red. Straight on to the class select screen. Here, I have four choices: Sith Warrior, Sith Inquisitor, Bounty Hunter or Imperial Agent. The tooltips tell me that the warriors is a fearsome melee combatant capable of single and dual-wield specialisations (chosen at level ten). Single saber combat is for tanking, dual is for dealing damage. The Inquisitor seems like the usual mage deal at first, but reading further they€™re also capable of tanking, as well as single and dual-wield saber combat. Bounty Hunter seems pretty interesting; described as a bit of an all-rounder, they train €˜mind and body for every possible job€™. Seems like a long range class. Finally, there€™s the Imperial Agent, masters in sabotage, stealth and assassination. Realising I€™m spending too long trying to figure out how the game works from the character select screen, I choose the warrior, hoping it€™ll be familiar from my days as a tank in WoW, and move on. Four races to select from: human, sith, cyborg and zabrak. They€™re all humanoid and, in fact, all look pretty much human. Sith look particularly mean. Not much variation in the races, but fair enough - they€™re going from previously established fiction. Graphically, they€™re impressive, even more so than the lush visuals Rift had to offer. Each race has a unique social ability, including rallying allies, scanning targets and inspiring loyalty. I go for sith, allowing me to punish my allies for their failure. Sounds interesting. A quick mess with my features (a level of customisation that falls somewhere in between WoW and Rift) and I€™m onto another cinematic. The classic Star Wars scrolling text, another setup telling me I€™ve been summoned to face my dark side trial. Or something like that. The game fades in. A rocky, Mars-like environment and a cutscene. Very Mass Effect, but without the moving camera tracks during dialogue. Dialogue trees look almost exactly the same, though there€™s the occasional lag on the selection and I€™m waiting up to ten seconds on one occasion. My character sounds like a British aristocrat. I€™m talking to an overseer who seems to want me to serve him in return for glory. I go the subservient route. The info panel in the top left tells me I€™ve entered a €˜Story Area€™ and I€™m the owner. Seems comparable to WoW€™s phasing. Walking out into the first main area I€™m treated to a bit of exploration EXP and an entry into my codex. I€m delighted they€™ve kept the codex for this. I run around for a bit, following the quest marker and come across a bunch of other newbies crowded around an NPC. This must be the guy. Rather jarringly, a cutscene begins and all other players seem to disappear around me. Still, if this amount of detail is given to each quest I€™m going to be pretty impressed. This one is just a typical €˜learn to use your blade by whacking giant rats€™ quest. Or, in this case, giant, clawed slugs. Time to test my saber. Although it doesn€™t quite look like a saber; I think perhaps I have a very low-grade version, as it looks like I€™m just holding a flourescent lamp with no power to it. Just when I€™m beating on some slugs, a tooltip pops up and I€™m told I can earn social points by entering conversations with other players and winning €˜conversation rolls€™. By the looks of it, I need these points to purchase and use certain items. The first few hours of my game go pretty much in this fashion - following all the quest instructions, reading tooltips, exploring a little, talking to people on general chat. It€™s not a difficult game to get into, predominantly because there are a host of similarities with contemporary MMOs that will make this game incredibly accessible to anyone who has played an MMO in the last five or six years. The key bindings are all exactly where you left them in the last one you played. Characters auto attack and you fill in the gaps with skills. The green, blue and purple hierarchy of item value is in effect. Warriors fight with rage points, quest markers pop up above NPC heads, pets can fight and level up with you and occasionally you€™ll team up for an instance. The core gameplay is something you€™ve experienced before. The points where it departs from other popular, currently available MMOs, however, are the points that make it potentially interesting. There are some great tweaks to the familiar gameplay here. For example, professions are still pretty much the same as they ever were, but now your pet can go and collect the resources for you if you don€™t want to run over and farm it. They€™ll even teleport away and sell your grey items for you. Every class can have a pet - now referred to as a companion - and you can even choose their armour and weaponry. In addition, they act pretty much as your teammates do in Mass Effect and Dragon Age; you€™ll be able to go through missions with them, chat with them at the cantina, give them gifts and build friendships. My companion, Vette - a plucky, treasure-hunting slave released into my custody - has a lot of the typical Bioware bravado you€™d expect from a companion and adds decent value to the single player, role playing element of the game (even if you do see countless iterations of her following other warriors around). One of the largest features of The Old Republic is the voiced questing and story system. Every single character you get a quest from has his own story to tell you in a short cutscene. In typical Mass Effect style, you converse with characters through the use of the aforementioned dialogue tree. When you€™re in a party, your friends can join in on the conversation and you are awarded a form of currency (social points) for participating. Voice acting is, on occasion, sublime; some of the more menacing members of the sith hierarchy come across as genuinely unsettling and sadistic and it€™s refreshing to see such great performances in an MMO. These cutscenes seem to aim to make you feel as though you€™re truly part of a unique story being told in a slightly different way for each player. In a sense, they do achieve this; I€™m far more compelled to listen to these characters than read wall-of-text quest logs in many other games. However, it doesn€™t take long for the illusion to start cracking when your character begins to reply with repeated responses such as €˜elaborate on that€™, or €˜I€™ll make sure to get it done€™. Perhaps that€™s my issue with it - the dialogue sequences all feel so much like a Bioware RPG that I expect them to be as intricate. Irrespective of this, however, such sequences are a fresh and welcome change from how MMOs have attempted to handle narrative so far. The massively multiplayer side of the game can be a strange thing. As mentioned earlier, many areas are divided into story sections. These sections are accessible only by your character€™s class, unless you invite a party member to participate, presumably to gain more social points and to see a cutscene they would otherwise be unable to access. The problem is that these story areas massively divide the zones; there are many areas that are inaccessible to you, barred off with big, red barriers and, as a result, the world can occasionally feel rather small. In addition to this, each area has several instances on a server, even the cities. When playing in one instance, you can only communicate with players from another instance through the general chat and are, of course, unable to see them. As a result, zones can often feel slightly underpopulated, especially large city areas where you expect masses of players. Dungeons - referred to as Flashpoints - work much the same as they have before; you collect a few of the repeatable quests, find a group and farm it for a few levels. I only reached a level high enough to play through one of the dungeons - The Black Talon - but it was an impressively action-packed state of affairs which saw me and my team fight our way through an ambushed Imperial transport ship and smack bang into the middle of some good old space warfare, all amidst some pretty great story and multiplayer dialogue which saw my party leader continuously choosing, much to my dismay, to mercilessly kill every NPC he was given the option to. After the dungeon had finished, however, my party and I split ways and I went back to running around what seemed like a slightly underpopulated city. I played for a few more levels and then, looking at my watch and realising I€™d been awake several hours past my bedtime, I headed to sleep. There€™s nothing quite like playing through a Bioware story. Even as someone who is relatively ignorant of the Star Wars franchise, I still found myself fully drawn in by the world they€™ve created. The main problem is that it I€™m not convinced they€™ve managed to bring together the world of the single player RPG and that of the massively multiplayer online one together in a convincing way. Both the multiplayer and single player elements of the game work well individually, but that seems to be despite their counterpart, not because of it. They feel like two things gaffer taped together that aren€™t quite sticking. This isn€™t to say that The Old Republic isn€™t worth playing, however. Not by any means. Even if you€™re just looking for WoW, reskinned and in space, you€™re easily going to get a month€™s playtime out of it. If, however, you€™re coming as a Bioware fan, there€™s a chance that you may feel - as I did - that their fantastic storytelling is often hindered by the constraints placed on it by an MMO. Either way, I€™ll be playing the game when it hits the shelves: any game that has the ability to make me forget that I need to sleep is worth a shot. Star Wars: The Old Republic is released on December 20th.