PAX East 2011: Hands on With Star Wars: The Old Republic

While in line, I was passed an iPad that had all of the available classes on it and their abilities. This helped us break up into groups of four and decide who was playing what. I choose to play as the smuggler as I like rogues. Once I made this decision I learned that the smuggler would actually be the healer in the group today. I stuck with it since I had played healers in World of Warcraft before.

Once the lovely Bioware folks had me in their lair, I was led into a black room where I was showed a video highlighting the instance we would be running, and how to go about playing it with the classes we were given. We were then herded over to groups of four Alienware PCs to sit down and play.

We each had a cheat sheet taped to the station we were at that explained the abilities we had, and how to use them. We were playing as level 32 characters, so we had access to a nice set of skills. As a smuggler I had a set of healing abilities, grenade attacks, stealth, and some buffs. An interesting thing about the smuggler is that it is a cover based class. I had to hold down shift in order to see cover nodes around me, and by hovering the mouse over one of these points and pressing R the smuggler would take cover. This is actually really cool playing as a healer, since you can’t be shot at if you’re hiding.

Our stalwart party walked up to a Yoda looking dude and clicked on him to get our quest. I could not believe how different this dialog system was from a standard MMO. There was no box of text in front of my eyes, no list of what i needed to do to get loot, and no way to just skip the dialog and get to the quest. The dialog is important to the game, and it’s really well done. They don’t sound like NPCs, they sound like characters. Just sitting back and taking in the story is amazing, and makes it hard to go back to text based MMOs.

Each player in the party gets a chance to be part of the conversation. We each got to pick a response to what the Yoda-clone was saying, and by performing a die roll (just like a loot roll in WoW) the game determines who gets to speak. This might not seem that cool, but just remember that you’re all going to be disagreeing over what to say. My Smuggler was a dick and told the Yoda man to shut up about all the force crap and get to the point. The Jedi Knight was being noble and voicing his concern for people, you know “save the orphans and puppies”. It was actually a fun dynamic and it adds a mini-game to talking to NPCs. Everyone wants to be the guy to talk, and it’s cool to be able to engage with the NPCs in this way as a group.

In WoW you each get your quest alone, group up to play the quest, and then go off to your separate corners to turn the quest in. In TOR, your together as a group all the time. You need to be together to get the quest, do the quest, and turn in the quest at the end. It makes you feel less like a group of people getting together because you all need to kill the same thing, and it lets you become a real party; a group of adventures who are in this together.

Four man raids. That’s what I said. Four man raids. It’s what we did, and it’s what you’ll be able to do. You might not care, but listen: this is cool. You can essentially play through the game with a party of four. There will be larger stuff for bigger groups, but the leveling process looks like they want you to have some buddies. If your playing an MMO it’s probably because you like being social while you game. TOR let’s you group up and play together as a group, talk as a group, and kill things as a group. You are a group. Group. Should I say it again? How about I go back to the beginning and say “Four man raids” again? I really want you to grasp this concept: you create your party, and you play the whole game with this party. It’s very much like a single player party-based RPG. You have the Smuggler, a couple of Jedi,  and the Trooper. You all have uniquely voiced characters, and each has a different personality that you help to create. This dynamic is incredibly fresh feeling, and makes it stand out from other MMOs in a major way.

I know your all thinking, “story is great and all, but how does the fighting feel?” It feels good. It’s not groundbreaking MMO combat, but it sure plays well.  It’s fast paced. Rather than having endless pools of health and mana like in WoW, you have a smaller pool that regenerates quickly. I never once ran into an issue as a healer where I couldn’t heal because of low mana. Granted, I was playing smart and not using my biggest spells all the time, but even once depleted it becomes full in under a minute. There are no potions, so that eliminates the need to drink crap while your fighting monsters. It acually plays a lot like Knights of the Old Republic It may not change a whole lot, but it changed enough to make it noticeable and have it be enjoyable to play.

Visually the game looks great. It has an art style very similar to the Clone Wars animated series, but it’s much more mature looking. It’s artistic, but not quite cartoony. It looks like it should be able to run on any machine that can play WoW, but with everything cranked up on the Alienware rigs we were playing on and with 240hz monitors hooked up the game looked pretty damn hot.

I got to play for about an hour in all, and we almost downed the last boss but couldn’t due to time. It was easy enough to pick up and play, and I really enjoyed my time with the game. I was skeptical with all the hype surrounding this game, but after getting my hands on it and playing it I am now convinced the game is worthy of all the buzz.  Bioware is really bringing it with this game, and it looks like they won’t dissapoint. If you like MMOs, are a Star Wars fan, a fan of Bioware games, or even if you have never played any of the above you’ll probably like this game. I’m excited for this game, and hopefully it’ll be “wicked good” (just a little PAX East humor).