Hands On With Star Wars: The Old Republic

Five years. In five years you could take a year off from school and still finish college or even complete a majority of grade school. For five years, however, some of us have waited for one of the most highly anticipated massively-multiplayer online games of this year: Star Wars: The Old Republic.

Depending on how much you've followed SWTOR in the news, or if this latest trend has just piqued your interest: there's a lot to learn. In the coming days, I'm going to try and summarize my day-to-day encounters and experiences before writing a review. So be sure to check back here for updates.

Fans of Baldur's Gate, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, Mass Effect, and/or Dragon Age will recognize the developer name BioWare attached to Star Wars: The Old Republic. The company has set lofty (read: expensive) goals for itself: A fully voiced game complete with cut scenes. BioWare also hasn't left SWTOR without the company's signature touch for creating involved storylines for each character class, as well as dialogue options and a moral choice system that affects certain outcomes of your game (though it's currently uncertain how much in SWTOR).

Certain components in SWTOR are more or less what gamers have come to expect from MMOs like World of Warcraft. There's a crafting system, dungeons and raids (referred to as Flashpoints and Operations), Player versus Player battlefields, and character advancement options. However, unlike World of Warcraft, you won't be able to do much multitasking while playing SWTOR. There's an incredible amount of involvement between the cut scenes before each mission, and choosing dialogue options that possibly decide the fate of an entire race. This setup is different from most MMOs where you simply click a button to accept or reject a quest and run off to fetch this, kill X amount of that, or deliver this package.

Choose Your Journey
Between Beta testing and early access, many have already had a chance to experience SWTOR. For those who are planning on getting their copies today or are still unconvinced here's a little introduction.

Upon logging in, you'll have to choose outright whether you're for the Republic or Empire. After you choose your allegiance, one of three videos will play. This cinematic introduction helps set the stage for the state of the galaxy, as well as showcase some of the classes in the game. By the end of the video, I felt hyped to start creating my character. You'll be able to choose from one of four classes for each faction. Each class can later branch off into one of two specialized classes, but each one can be broken down into the basic healer, melee, ranged, and tank groups, just with cooler names, like Bounty Hunter with a Powertech specialization (translation: tank, ranged).

After class selection is race, and from what I can tell there's a small in-game bonus to selecting a certain race: each one is given a "Social Ability." I play a Zabrak, which have the racial ability to inspire loyalty in companions; I found that if I made a decision my companion objected to, I received fewer negative points against her overall approval/disapproval of me than if I hadn't played a Zabrak. It's a small bonus, but something that may help you in the long run.

The character customization isn't quite as advanced as in BioWare's previous games, like Mass Effect, where you can tweak everything down to the dimples in a character's cheeks. Body types for men range from skinny to fat, and on the flip side female body types range from supermodel skinny to Amazonian (bust and hips always remaining symmetrical, of course). You can make various cosmetic alterations to your character's complexion or even add scars. When you're satisfied with your avatar, the journey begins. But not before queuing some John Williams music and classic scrolling text for some character background.

Quests
Each character class has its own main storyline, as well as plot points that allow the story branch out, providing new scenarios and opportunities; giving SWTOR a high replayability factor. Though, at this juncture, it's hard to know how far your story can branch out—and if it changes on a minor level like in Dragon Age II or on a galactic scale like in Mass Effect. Side quests take on a similar nature: certain dialogue choices will extend the mission or allow a smaller story to unravel if you choose.

The process of accepting or rejecting a quest is incredibly engaging. You're pulled into a fully voice-acted sequence with an NPC that has personality, and quest with a story behind it. Dialogue options are available, which allow you to react to the task your given, ask further questions pertaining to the quest, or outright reject the quest.

However, the actual content of these quests isn't as glamorous as its cut scenes. You're still going to be fetching X item, like you would in World of Warcraft. There's no revolutionary gameplay going on here. But I have to give BioWare kudos to adding something called Bonus objectives within these missions. For instance, while you're going to infiltrate the place where X item is kept (usually guarded by enimes), a bit of colorful text will pop up reading "Kill 10 of these enemies." This bonus earns you more experience during the quest doing something you were already going to have to do in order to get to X item.

Near the conclusion of each mission, there will be a moral choice that ultimately contributes to your overall alignment to the darkside or lightside, regardless of what faction (Empire or Republic) you chose at the game's start. However, depending on what faction you've selected the choice between what is right and wrong can sometimes be indistinguishable.

One such mission I was given was to poison the water supply of a slave rebel group's camp. The Sith that gave me the mission had a bit of a sadistic nature, taking pride in the fact that the poison he'd concocted would make the rebels suffer before achieving death. I though down the line I would have a choice to help the slaves out and still get my credits. Instead, the big moral choice between getting darkside or lightside points was a choice of poisoning the water supply and having the slaves die a slow painful death, as was originally requested, or poison the water supply with a different chemical that would kill the rebels off quickly. An interesting twist to what I thought was going to be a straight-forward mission.

While the actual content of each mission can be boiled down to the usual FedEx quests players have seen in MMOs since the dawn of MUDs, the story portion is able to do something an MMO hasn't done for me in a long time: be engaging.