Star Wars: The Old Republic Preview [PC]

09 Dec 2009 at 15:08:53 by Tim McDonald

Star Wars games are kinda shit.

Oh come on, it's true. I love Star Wars games, but it's been quite some time since we've had a genre-advancingly good Star Wars game that we'd sit down and play solidly for hours. LEGO Star Wars was entertaining, sure, but it was no X-Wing, or Dark Forces, or Super Star Wars. No, the last really brilliant Star Wars game was probably Knights of the Old Republic II (after patching, admittedly.)

This is one of the reasons why The Old Republic is worth looking forward to. Developed by BioWare, it'll hopefully send all thoughts of Galaxies to the place where nightmares go when they vanish - not least because SWTOR might just be a genre-advancingly good Star Wars game. It's like being back in the early 90s.

“Genre-advancingly good” is not a phrase I like to bandy around lightly, not least because it's incredibly awkward on the tongue, but from what we've seen SWTOR is doing some very, very exciting things, not least by bringing RPG conventions into the MMO space. First and foremost among these are actual conversation trees, which is such a bizarre thing to see in an MMO that even when actually trying them for myself, it still felt odd.

Odd, but good. Based solely on the short dialogue trees we've experienced (they're dialogue shrubs, really) it's impossible to overstate how much of a difference it makes. Having quests explained to you bit by bit, with your own conversational gambits eking out more detail, not only establishes the NPC you're talking to as a character in their own right, but also your character. You're not a faceless avatar. You're a living, breathing person in this universe, who interacts with other characters, as opposed something that has to move close to people so that you can quick-accept quests and then check your log to see where you can find the five rabbits you need to kill. And then again and again, because only one in three rabbits has an ear.

Our quest took place on what looked suspiciously like the Sith world of Korriban, where our Sith Inquisitor – one of the two newly announced character classes – was tasked with finding and activating an ancient artefact called the Red Engine, buried deep within an even more ancient tomb. Along the way, if we fancied killing off some escaped slaves and destroying some robots, that would be just darling of us.

The Sith Inquisitor, as a class, is based around the use of the dark side of the Force. While the Sith Warrior focuses on strength and skill with a lightsaber, the Inquisitor is more of a support/ranged class with some painful-looking lightning powers at her disposal. Healing and Force regeneration are made equally easy through the use of Dark Meditation, which functions a little akin to food in most other MMOs, although we imagine similar powers will probably be available for the other classes to minimise downtime between fights. The Inquisitor can, however, heal – the dev team explained to us that, in an attempt to avoid the “need tank” and “need heal” of other MMOs, classes will be capable of fulfilling most roles on the battlefield.

The upshot of these powers is that the Inquisitor is a force - pun wholly intended - to be reckoned with. Spotting a group of escaped slaves and renegade soldiers, we stunned one with a Force Whirlwind, which had the upshot of hurting him with lightning while being completely unable to fight back. We then dashed in and used Overload, blasting everything in the area with electricity and knocking them down, before finishing off our felled opponents with our lightsabers.

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