Malec's verdict : Old Republic Beta

Due to having to work pretty much the whole weekend I had only time to try imperial agent for few levels and sith warrior up to lvl 11 and here's some thoughts on my time in the beta.

Gameplay

I'm not exactly sure what I expected when logging on the first time but from the start it was blatantly clear that Bioware wasn't planning on re-inventing the wheel on TOR. Movement, controls and viewing is pretty much the same as it was in late 90's with Everquest and since then with almost all MMORPG's so all WoW players should be more than familiar with it.

You have your cookie cutter spammable attack which costs no energy/rage/force/heat and it serves as your "auto-attack" in a sense, now you just have to spam it. And then you have your abilities that costs your classes specific "mana", some with cooldowns and some not.

Thankfully you don't need any consumables to reduce down-time since every class has channeled ability (which is not useable in combat) that restores your health rather quickly between mobs. Also death is not a big issue since you can either choose to go back to last restore point of sort or call a droid to res you after the combat is done which puts you to stealth with minimal hp so you can backtrack to safe location to recuperate. Also all classes can res you after combat is over just by clicking your corpse.

The combat is fluid and somewhat slower tempoed than in most MMO's since global cooldown (at least feels) to be quite long.

At least in beta you can't customize your UI except for adding some hotbars and playing with 1920x1080 resolution I was left missing the ability to resize the UI and edit the layout.

So gameplaywise there isn't much we haven't already seen in dozens of games so far. It's been proven time and time again to be working and when (or if) they decide to allow adding own mods and addons we propably will see lot improvement in the UI and general functionality.

Story and questing

Now the big change in TOR is the quests. Yes you still go and kill X number of enemies and collect Y amount of rat tails but oh boy how they have done it!

The first difference is that instead of small screen popping out explaing you the quest details you get an actual conversation with the person involved with the task. As everyone should know by know they are all voice acted and while it doesn't seem that big a difference, but combined with zooming in on the characters and choosing the dialogue options it really makes a huge impact on immersion.

And your choises matter! In addition of receiving light or dark side points your quest can end very differently depending on the choises you make.

Those who have played Bioware games will immediately notice there isn't much of a difference between TOR and mass effects, KOTORs, Dragon Ages, etc. In an essence you have (hopefully) great single player game packed in MMO which at least to me makes it veery appealing. If I can spend 50-100 hours in single player game where things to do ultimately will end, I assume the MMO aspects will make it a great overall experience.

Lastly, I was positively pleased for the lack of grinding and farming involved in the quests. Altough all the servers were constantly full and 95% of players in the starting areas I had only one quest where we had to wait for some time for droids to be killed to spawn. All interactable quest objects spawn within seconds and there's generally plenty of mission mobs to kill and they don't stay down very long either.

Graphics

I have to admit graphics were quite disappointment for me. Altough I don't pay that much attention to graphics (hey half the games I play are over 10 years old!) the visual output is quite a bit below of what I expect from a game this new. Of course it's not fair to compare MMO's to Crysis, Metro or Skyrim but I instantly got the feeling it was Knights of the Old Republic which was released in 2003. Now of course it looks bit better than that but there isn't much comparison between that or WoW, Warhammer Online or even Everquest 2.

Everything looks quite blunt, mostly lack of good lightning effects and lack of shadows(I had every detail maxed and bloom enabled, I think it's not working). The level of detail like foliage, special effects, light reflections, etc. are adequate at best and texture detail really is from 2003. View distance is great and animations looks good.

I think it would be fair to compare TOR to another upcoming MMO: Guild Wars 2. Go check some videos of both games and you'll see interesting difference.

So Bioware can't boast with the graphics but then again it's still beta so all features are not enabled (like anti-aliasign) and have to wait for the release for final verdict.

Sounds/music

I've always enjoyed John Williams' Star Wars music and the devs and composers did great job combining the good ol' recognizable star wars tunes to new, very atmospheric songs. Up to where I played music was generally well used to suit the situation and mood.

For sound effects: blasters sound like blasters and light sabers like light sabers, what more can you ask? :)

Flashpoints

This could be named group content but Flashpoints are the dungeons of TOR. They are instanced as is customary nowadays and you still have tank, healer and dps roles to fill in order to get through them.

BUT, they are not always the same. We played The Black Talon flashpoint yesterday with Darker and Loraen and it went differently with Loraen compared to last time he played it.

As I said about the choises they can have big impact on the missions and it appears that flashpoints can be done quite differently depending on the choises the group makes. For instance we didn't have to fight 4 jedis or other stronger opponents at all in our run, propably because we decided to kill the captain of our ship and so on :P

Since conversations are big part of the story and questing it might be bit harsh on someone when doing them in group. Let me give you an example of how it goes:

You have a conversation with three options.

1. Kill the guy you are supposed to save (you get dark side points)

2. Let him rot in the prison

3. Free him (you get light side points)

Now you have 3 member party, everyone chooses different option. What happens is that everyone gets their light/dark side points (except the guy who chose number 2) but since everyone had different answer everyone makes a roll and the story continues to direction of who got the biggest number on the roll. Everyone will get 3 social points.

If two guys chooses 1 and third guy picks option 3 option 1 will be chosen (majority rules) but dark/light side points will be distributed by individual choises and members 1 and 2 makes a roll who gets 6 social points (the rest get 3) and who's character actually speaks for the group.

As you can see it doesn't always go the way you want but fortunately the dark/light side points are awarded according to your choise anyways so IMHO it's not such a big deal. You can always call your friends wusses on who took the "wrong" option in teamspeak ;)

PvP

I had time to do one warzone which is your general battleground, scenario, etc. where republic twats engage the furious might of imperial heroes.

Currently there's only few different warzones ranging from domination or capture and hold objective based to rush style attack and defend and huttball. Huttball looks very interesting, there's a arena filled with traps and objective is to pick up the ball in the middle and take it to enemy base, sounds simple right? But there's plenty of huttball articles and videos on the net so won't go into details of it.

PvP feels much like it was on Warhammer Online. There isn't that much CC going around and it's not too effective. You can't keep one guy locked out of combat for long because there isn't that many CC abilities per class and you get immune to CC's rather fast if you're targeted with them.

Fighting seems more slow tempoed as it is against NPC's and at least on lower levels there isn't that much burst damage available to one or two shot a guy in short period of time. Everyone seem to be able to soak up decent amount of damage, even jedi consulars and sith sorcerors who wear only light armor are not your generic healer types who will be silenced and smacked to death in a heartbeat.

As there isn't, or at least in lower levels, that much CC going around kiting is not that easy and properly choosing your fight area properly with ranged seems more important. Melee classes have option to catch up with the ranged but choosing where to engage makes the big difference.

In the end I was quite pleased with my short PvP experience and even more pleased with the xp rewards. At level 11 I needed around 20-21k experience to reach next level and that one warzone netted me around 5k. So it seems plausible to level up entirely on PvP IF the xp reward scales well enough.

You also get valor points which are your general honor/reknown/merits and used to buy pvp gear.

Crafting and companions

I decided to test cybertech crafting since information regarding that profession was most eluding. So I chose scavenging and slicing along with it. If you didn't know, you can pick 1 crafting skill and two others from gathering/mission skillsets.

The reason I took slicing is it also provides materials for cybertech and supposedly it's the big money maker in the game.

Now you don't actually do the crafting and don't have to do the gathering either if you don't want to get your hands dirty because that's what companions are for!

You get your first companion at around lvl 8 and when you get your crafting skills (after the initial area) you can send him/her to do crafting/gathering or missions.

So since I'm cybertech I sent my companion to do some gathering (all actions costs credits btw) and after 3 minutes she returned with some metals I could use for the crafting.

Crafting skills goes from 1 to 400 and at least in the beginning I was getting skill increments of 3 from those short few minute missions. Also with gathering skills you can interact with dead bodies, crystal nodes, plants, etc. on the field which will yield indegredients as well as skill gains.

Oh and cybertech seems to be like... well in WoW terms mix of engineering and jewelcraft. You get to make some weapon/armor modifications as well as earpieces (trinkets or so) and some toys like engineers do.

Now slicing, as it's been said it's the money maker I was left bit puzzled. At the beginning you can send your companion to missions to find a lockbox or some random ingredients. The lockbox mission costs 95 creds and if it's successull (yes the missions can also fail) you get a small lockbox which yields 60-95 (95 was my best) credits, so... maybe the cost/payment relation goes up as the level goes.

The thing with leveling the skills with one companion is that you are left alone on the field when he/she is on the mission. They are not required for normal quests but can be immensely helpful for they can provide tanking, dps or healing depending on their role. Once you get more companions this problem disappears of course, but even then you have to figure out what kind of companion you want on the field and who to send to what missions because they have different kinds of bonuses for each crew skills.

So... uh long story short. I've played literally dozens of MMO's and every time I start one I'm immediately hooked. Some games lasts for few weeks, some years but the initial rush of exploring a new game always leaves my judgement clouded.

But, I can very carefully recommend this game if you are not completely bored on theme park mmo's or don't like single player rpg's. If games like KOTOR or dragon age are not for you then you'll be left with confusing missions (since you will just propably skip or rush through conversations leaving you utterly clueless on the story) on very general theme park MMO with twist of Star Wars. And it's bit too early to see how PvP will turn out, right now the open world pvp is only available at max level.