MMO Weekly: Smugglers and their Enslaved Gladiators

28 Sep 2010 at 14:37:55 by Jeff Hollis

Hello my fellow MMORPG addicts, and welcome to this week's MMO Weekly.  In this week's edition, I'd like to share my most recent impressions – and impressed I increasingly am – of a potentially big MMO on the horizon, Star Wars: The Old Republic. 

The reason this is on my mind is that BioWare did something that really caught my attention this past week.  We've all known for some time that the smuggler was one of the Republic classes in SWTOR.  While we didn't know a lot about them, we knew they were based on Han Solo (of course), and that they used a lot of pistols and they hid behind cover.  There was a special mechanic built into the game, especially for smugglers, that enabled them to use cover in this unique way. 

Gotta be honest with you, folks.  Of all the classes they announced, the smuggler consistently drew a big “ho hum” from me every time a developer talked about them.  The whole idea just struck me as dull.  Boring, droll, bland, vanilla. 

That all changed quite suddenly this past week, when BioWare announced some specifics about the class.  I suddenly found myself wanting to play a smuggler.  The class had, in my meager mind, gone from zero to hero after watching the vid and doing a bit of reading up on what BioWare had in mind. 

Why the big change?  Well, BioWare gave us some juicy details about the two advanced classes that the smuggler can choose from, and they are....well, they're both intriguing, to say the least.  The first is the gunslinger.  While details are sketchy, a gunslinger is a dual wielding pistol-packing specialist.  Here's the official word:

Master of the trick shot, the first to dive for cover and willing to take advantage of every opportunity, the Gunslinger and his dual blasters are the perfect team. The Gunslinger can shoot out a man's legs to keep him from charging, blind him so he can't get to his weapons or inflict serious injuries for maximum distraction. There's a right target for ending every disagreement and the Gunslinger knows them like the inside of his ship.

My take on this is that he's a ranged DPS class, with lots of trick shots and debuffs at his disposal.  To put it into perspective, he's like a Marksman-specced hunter in WoW.  Overall, that sounds pretty darned cool. 

Of course, that's only one of the advanced classes available to the smuggler.  The other is the scoundrel, and he appears to be a stealth-oriented class.  While the scoundrel lacks the dual wielding capabilities of the gunslinger, he gains some tricks of his own.  Again, here's the official word: 

The Scoundrel doesn't have time for politeness or a fair fight. In addition to his trusty blaster the Scoundrel packs a stealth belt, a scattergun and a med pack--everything he needs to get in, knock the enemy for a loop and get out alive. Being invisible works best, but even when Sith fly through the air waving Lightsabers all they get to do is look surprised as the Scoundrel's scattergun sends them back the way they came. The Scoundrel always shoots first.

My impressions of the scoundrel?  A ranged DPS class with stealth abilities.  Basically, he's a pistol-packing rogue.  Invisibility, stealth, and the ability to attack from surprise are all the hallmarks of the traditional rogue, and the scoundrel's got those in spades.  Perhaps the most innovative part of this description is that the scoundrel is a bit of a healer, which is something we've seen in a prior gameplay video.  I think it rounds out the character nicely, and differentiates him from the dozens of other rogues we've seen in prior MMOs.

Perhapst the biggest surprise about the smuggler is that he's now a pet class.  Yes, you heard me right, the smuggler gets a pet.  Appropriately, his pet is a wookiee.  It seems that every smuggler gets the exact same pet, a wookiee named Bowdaar.  Bowdaar's got a bit of a back story, in that he's been a pit-fighting slave gladiator for the past one hundred and eight years, and that he's been in more than 10,000 fights.  In fact, his record is a whopping 10,000 and 0.  He's never lost, and...well, here's a bit from his official bio: 

In over one-hundred years facing countless opponents, Bowdaar has never been defeated. He has bested rancors, gundarks, Mandalorians and even a Jedi in single combat. Even more impressively, he often fights without the benefit of armor or weapons....Although his many victories have earned and lost fortunes for the gamblers and crime lords wagering on his fights, Bowdaar has never shared that wealth. Enslaved as a child and forced into the arenas against his will, he has served one corrupt master after another for decades. Bowdaar has no family, no friends and no home—only a warrior’s strength and an unbeatable will to survive.

Now my guess is that your smuggler character has somehow won Bowdaar in a bet of some kind (remember, Bowdaar's a slave), and I'm further surmising that you freed him and thus earned his undying loyalty.  As such, he's willing to do a lot of tanking or DPSing for you. 

One big question that popped into my mind, of course, was this:  a guy with a record of 10,000 wins and zero losses would be a wee bit overpowered, don't you think?  I mean, Bowdaar has 108 years of experience under his belt. Logically, when you and ol' Bowdaar team up, you'd be like level 1, and he'd be like level 700 or something, right?  Of course, I do realize that the issue is me trying to be all “logical” again.  Logic and MMOs go together like ice cream and cigarettes.    

There's more juicy tidbits on the official page about the smuggler, but overall, this class clearly now has me very interested.  One other thing I noticed about the SWTOR smuggler:  he's not entirely based on Han Solo.  It seemed to me he's based, just a bit, on another smuggler that sci-fi nerds have come to love:  Mal Reynolds.  Remember Mal, the uber-cool captain of the Serenity?  In watching the smuggler video that BioWare released, I could swear that some of the footage was inspired by some of the cool stuff Mal did.  That adds a bit of edge to the class, and I thought it was a nice touch. 

The main point to all this is that BioWare appears to me to be going in all the right directions with SWTOR.  It's not hard to make the Jedi / Sith classes interesting, and the bounty hunter is intrinsically cool and fascinating.  But the trooper?  The imperial agent?  The smuggler?  Each of those classes, when first announced, caused me to elicit a nice wide yawn.  However, when I first learned of some of BioWare's vision for the trooper, that class suddenly struck me as the coolest thing in the game, and I wanted to play one.  Now that I've seen the smuggler, I find myself suddenly thinking that class is the coolest thing in the game, and I want to play one of those.  I've now become pretty confident that once the details of the agent class are released, I'll think that's the coolest thing in the game, and I'll want to play one of those. 

Overall, this is a very good sign.  If BioWare is able to make people want to play all 8 classes – something they are definitely accomplishing – then the game is looking very promising indeed.  Let's hope this trend continues. 

If, somehow, you actually enjoyed these musing on MMOs, the universe, and everything, feel free to join us every day over at Coolorama.com, where we explore the meaning of our virtual lives every day.  For now, ciao!

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