Star Wars: The Old Republic first impressions

For Star Wars: The Old Republic, this past weekend marked the opening of the public beta to everyone who had registered as testers. At 18:00 on Friday, the servers went live for the first wave and almost every one of them read as “Full”, with a queue ranging from 3-minutes to 3-hours.

Excitement and expectations were high. A coin toss determined that I would side with the Empire; my character a Sith Inquisitor.

The graphics are great but by no means Crysis, and anyone expecting that needs to remember that this is an MMO; not a benchmark. The animations are fluid and the effects are done well. The atmosphere and landscapes are gorgeous.

Character customisation is intricate without being overly complex. You’re unlikely to come across anything that would really be an eyesore and no two characters would look exactly alike.

Dialogue in Old Republic is fully voiced and can be selected using the Mass Effect style dialogue-wheel. While hugely engaging, it has the nasty effect of often causing your character to say things that are unexpected, out of place, and not always as intended or imagined.

Star Wars The Old Republic

As you’d expect with a beta, there are a bunch of bugs ranging from the rare typo to the soon-to-be-infamous “yellow pixel of doom.” Stability isn’t a problem and most of the kinks are likely to be ironed out by retail release.

Latency is what you’d ordinarily expect being in South Africa—anything from 250ms-350ms—and playability is good.

A point I’d really like to touch on is one of the things that makes Old Republic “different” to other MMOs, and that has played a significant role in its hype: choice.

As with the original Knights of the Old Republic games, players have a morality scale. Perform beneficent actions and your morality goes toward the light-side. Perform malevolent actions and your morality goes toward the dark-side. Pretty standard stuff.

A cover mechanic is also implemented which adds to the variety of combat. Although at the moment this seems to only help players avoid blaster fire, as force powers seem to ignore cover altogether.

Star Wars The Old Republic

Dialogue choices play a role in what happens later on. Unfortunately I haven’t been able to spend enough time with the game to see how far-reaching these effects are but the fact that there is even some semblance of consequence for your choices and actions in an MMO leaves me quite pleased.

Players will have companions who can craft, gather and fight alongside them. They also have their own personalities and occasionally speak up during dialogue. Players can gain or lose affection with them which can always be mended by the odd gift.

As a partied group, every member can select dialogue but the speaker is selected by a random “dice” roll. Moral choice rewards will still be given to a goodly character even if the selected speaker pulled a dick move that resulted in the loss of innocent life.

Most quests that aren’t “story-related” are pretty standard: kill such-and-such and collect this-and-that with the odd grind along the way. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing and the grind is rewarded by Bonus Missions which give extra experience, item rewards and currency.

Star Wars The Old Republic

Story-quests flawlessly transition your group into a private instance and it’s primarily through this mechanic that choice and consequence is effected and that a character’s story unfolds.

The optional space-combat mini-game consists purely of shooting enemy turrets and ships while dodging obstacles, but manages to be an enjoyable distraction. Upgrading your ship with extra armaments and performing missions can be a fun way to earn experience and commendations.

Dungeons, known as Flashpoints in The Old Republic, are what you’d expect: a bunch of hard-hitting bosses, lots of killing, great loot and all-round fun.

The Old Republic looks to be a wonderful mix of the qualities BioWare is known for, and many of the addictive (but possibly tired) mechanics that’s current MMORPGs share. We’ll have to wait and see how things shape up after release on the 20th of December 2011.