Star Wars: The Old Republic Beta Impressions

[Supertegwyn]

This weekend I was lucky enough to get into the The Old Republic Beta. I built up a character and jumped into a server. First things first: The game looks amazing. The world is beautiful and all the character models look fantastic. The gameplay is pretty good as well. You use WASD to move and left click on enemies to target them. I haven't played WoW but I assume this is a similar system. Quests are posted on your map at the bottom right of your screen, with an indicator on the side pointing you in the direction. Quests are fun and full of interesting characters, and you can easily track them using the quest bar at the top of the screen. There is just one problem.

The Old Republic does not need to be a MMO. There is nothing about it that screams MMO, and it could have been an RPG with little change. In fact, if Bioware had concentrated on KOTOR 3 instead of this, the game would have been far superior. Unfortunately, we are stuck with The Old Republic. A great MMO, but it could have been so much more.

 

[Sixcess]

The Old Republic does not need to be a MMO. There is nothing about it that screams MMO, and it could have been an RPG with little changing.

Unfortunately this is all too true. I enjoyed the first 10 levels but then I got my companion and... having NPC companions who you'll probably interact with more than you will with other actual players seems to be missing the point of an MMO.

I've played several MMOs, and although I solo 95% of the time within them it still feels to me that Bioware has taken that just too far at the expense of what differentiates MMOs from single player games.

It's also extremely linear, and thus far the opportunities for exploration and rambling around away from where the main questline directs you to go appear to be almost non-existent.

I'd call it a good game, a good single player game. As an MMO it's a missed opportunity to do something interesting with the genre, and I really really wonder what it has that will keep people coming back to it for years.

 

[Sp3ratus]

The Old Republic does not need to be a MMO. There is nothing about it that screams MMO, and it could have been an RPG with little changing. In fact, if Bioware had concentrated on KOTOR 3 instead of this, the game would have been far superior. Unfortunately, we are stuck with The Old Republic. A great MMO, but it could have been so much more.

See, this is what I'm banking on. I was in the beta as well and I pretty much agree with what you're saying, beautiful worlds, quests that have a bit more meat on them(as in actually having a bit more story) and so on. I'd much have preferred a KotOR 3, but I'll be getting TOR anyway, just to play through the story of a variety of different classes. That part is, at least, very, very well done. Now they just need to iron out the last bugs, before the ship in less than a month. I don't so much care for the whole MMO part, I have WoW for that.

 

[Supertegwyn]

The Old Republic does not need to be a MMO. There is nothing about it that screams MMO, and it could have been an RPG with little changing. In fact, if Bioware had concentrated on KOTOR 3 instead of this, the game would have been far superior. Unfortunately, we are stuck with The Old Republic. A great MMO, but it could have been so much more.

See, this is what I'm banking on. I was in the beta as well and I pretty much agree with what you're saying, beautiful worlds, quests that have a bit more meat on them(as in actually having a bit more story) and so on. I'd much have preferred a KotOR 3, but I'll be getting TOR anyway, just to play through the story of a variety of different classes. That part is, at least, very, very well done. Now they just need to iron out the last bugs, before the ship in less than a month. I don't so much care for the whole MMO part, I have WoW for that.

I don't think I'll be getting it. The game is solid enough, but I'm just not a big MMO fan. I hope it turns out well for you.

 

[Caedus]

I've played 12 hours straight without getting up for an afk bio or to eat or anything.

I really didn't see those 12 hours because the game is really great.

Plus, there's Opod in it.

 

[Cavan]

For the hardcore MMO crowd it will probably seem too single player orientated.
For the single player crowd it will seem too much like an MMO.

It brought along a lot of the things which made me stop playing WoW, and although I enjoyed the conversations which were a lot more frequent that I was expecting. I have run out of steam to continue the beta after about 10 hours over yesterday and this morning.

It is solidly made in almost every aspect, the graphics look quite nice without being too intensive thanks to their stylised nature, the servers looked like they were holding up to the stress test almost perfectly, the animations are fluid and help to dispel some of the WoW standard "click button until one of you falls over" issues, the voice acting seems pretty well done and the customisation on your character is far better than you'd expect from an MMO.

It does manage to be pretty good as both an MMO and as KotOR 3, but there's something about it I find incredibly meh, and what I think this is is that as somebody who has played WoW to death you can still see the standard quest roots and get this feeling that you've done it all before. Ifind the UI a little alien to use efficiently, and the chat window also annoys me. There are a lot of nice little touches like being able to filter what shows on your minimap or tell your companion to go sell all the junk in your inventory at once.

 

[Azure9]

Kotor, this game, and dragon age are all games i would love to play but the RPG slow combat really turns me off. I love the frosting on these games but the real gameplay meat of it is boring and repetitive

 

[MrTub]

I would love Swtor as a rpg but Im not really sure if it will be good as a mmo..


While I was playing I kept hitting F5 for quick save.

 

[Ekibiogami]

I would love Swtor as a rpg but Im not really sure if it will be good as a mmo..


While I was playing I kept hitting F5 for quick save.

HAHA I thought the same thing any time I got near a boss, or went through a Green Screen. "Better hit F5... Oh yeah.."

 

[putowtin]

The Old Republic does not need to be a MMO.

and that is why I won't be playing it, I longed for KotOR III, and now I morn that I will never get it

 

[isometry]

The Old Republic does not need to be a MMO. There is nothing about it that screams MMO, and it could have been an RPG with little change. In fact, if Bioware had concentrated on KOTOR 3 instead of this, the game would have been far superior. Unfortunately, we are stuck with The Old Republic. A great MMO, but it could have been so much more.

My thoughts exactly. They just made it an MMO as an excuse to add impenetrable DRM and charge more money. Considering that "they" is EA in this case, I have to regrettably decline to buy it no matter how good the game is, since the business side is going to be such a screw job.

I don't just mean the micro-transactions (EA's subscription warhammer MMO sells level-ups in the store!) and near-mandatory expansions (Look at The Sims 3!), but after the game launches they'll be hard at work patching it to dumb it down and sell-out as much as they possibly can.

 

[Tragedy's Rebellion]

I don't get this graphics hate for TOR, it isn't THAT bad and it has its charm. It can't be TOO "realistic" because it already is quite demanding on the CPU and GPU side. The graphics are fine for an MMO (just look at WoW).

Anyway, I was able to test it as well - I went in expecting a horrible, unplayable mess with boring "go there and kill" quests, stiff animations and just a feeling of pointlessness from it all, soooo yeah, quite pessimistic expectations and, to be honest, I was surprised at how it isn't any of these things. Although I only managed to play the first 10 or so levels of the sith inquisitor I had a blast all the way through. The heroic quests are challenging enough so that you can't solo them (at least not as inquisitor/warrior), the only flashpoint I managed to do (Black Talon) wasn't quite revolutionary, but it was at least functional and that is all you can ask for, really. It was fun healing even though I only had 1 heal at the time, but that meant I could help with dps-ing and cc-ing enemies. Also, at the end of it I got a bunch of commendations which can be used to buy some of the drops from the instance which alleviates the need to constantly run the same instance for that single item and it never dropping. I felt it was a nice and convenient touch.

The animations are fluid and great. They weave into each other perfectly which I wasn't expecting. The global cooldown is short enough so you never stand there doing nothing and seeing your character stiff as a board, even when you use instant spells.

The quests are fun and imaginative enough to keep me interested at least until the second sith planet (Dromund Kaas, I think) and the voice acting is superb, which adds another layer of immersion to the whole thing. There are absolutely no "go there and kill" quests per se, but there are "bonus" quests which tell you to kill a specific number of creatures, but those aren't mandatory and from what I could gather they don't give much xp or rewards anyway.

I can't talk about pvp since I didn't go to a battleground, but from what I heard it's a broken mess. The melees are really disadvantaged against ranged opponents and the battlegrounds can get repetitive. They could probably fix pvp at some point, but look at WoW - 7 years of "balancing" and it's more broken then ever.

Crafting is, well, unfocused. It is way too slow, at least at the start, because you only have 1 companion and the process is frustratingly sluggish. The gathering of materials is 3 minutes and crafting an item is 1 minute and it adds up very quickly. Maybe it gets better if you have multiple companions, I don't know.

My only concern is end game. I read there are only 2 raids at max lvl and only a few battlegrounds which aren't enough, obviously. They will, of course, add more with patches, but that could take a while and some players might get bored before they manage to do it.


All in all, I enjoyed it. It isn't perfect, but who is? There are still some very minor bugs, but those will get resolved before launch. I will probably be getting it, because the stories alone are worth it. Yes, it would've worked better as KotOR 3, but we can't do anything now and EA is pulling the strings after all.

 

[Jasper Jeffs]

I was doubtful about the focus on a story before playing it, but it works well in-game. The speech options are kinda annoying, any response results with you sounding like a dick to varying degrees. The story itself was interesting, it did a lot of "go here, collect important shit, come back" which I don't dislike, any game can boil down to that format and they actually made what would otherwise be boring shit interesting, although I'd put that down to the conversation system; I felt like it was actually something of consequence. What I liked even more is how they frequently changed it up by doing something like providing me with a quest to chose the fate of three prisoners, or kill my leader. All of which I could chose what to do, I could kill the prisoners or leave them, I could save my leader and just take his hand or kill him etc.

The combat is fun, I played a Sith Warrior and it felt good. A lot of MMO's just handle bad, TOR doesn't make that mistake thankfully. The variety of skills I was given at such a low level was definitely impressive too, I had a huge charge, an AoE stun, a disorientate etc. The PvP was kinda lackluster however, or at least it was at my level. It was too frantic, it all came down to mashing abilities, from what I can tell there was very little room for skill and it reminded me a lot of Rift which was basically spamspamspamdead?nospamspamspam. Maybe it'll be different at max level, I just hope they don't try to do the same thing as Blizzard by making PvE the priority and balancing PvP as an afterthought. WoW's PvP fails for that reason. (also lolDK's)

Graphically I found it to be decent, it didn't run great (which I would expect on this) but it still ran at a somewhat consistent FPS and the art style was nice to look at, although every fucking cave in that Sith zone looked almost identical. I dislike how they're so linear, I hope the PvE content isn't designed like that. The progression of the map itself was slow, I'd imagine that's down to it being a tutorial zone but I can't imagine it being an open world with such a big emphasis on story quests. It's a shame because as people have said, even though it's a good game, I don't really know why it's an MMO. It could be tons better as a single player RPG.

 

[Zack Alklazaris]

I would love Swtor as a rpg but Im not really sure if it will be good as a mmo..


While I was playing I kept hitting F5 for quick save.

Same here, thats the bad part about this game is that it FEELS like a single player game.
Yet, by that same fact it makes for an interesting MMO. I actually want to see what happens next. Where other MMOs I've played its been GRIND GRIND GRIND w00t barc speeder, GRIND GRIND GRIND, yes clone armor. GRIND...

I bought it, I'll play it till I get bored or I run out of stuff to do. ME3 comes out soon so I really am excited with Bioware ether way.

 

[Nightwolf214]

Yeah, I've been in the SWTOR beta for about 4 or 5 sessions, and an upcoming weekend test, and I must say, I may have had doubts at first, but I admit it is by far a different MMORPG. For most who wonder what it's like, the story structure is 8 different stories, one for each class, and the conversation is in a Mass Effect-ish structure, although your choices in the conversations are randomized until you get to the moral choices. While the graphics may deter people at first, I can guarantee it actually makes the character look alive. I love the design of the game, as it's design allows both single-player and group play. I've only played as a Bounty Hunter (4 times now), Smuggler (once), and I've played a small bit as a Trooper. I love the Bounty Hunter story, the Smuggler is like a mix of Han Solo and Malcolm Reynolds, and I don't particularly like the Trooper. Too stereotypical patriotic soldier-ish. And each class gets two specializations btw.

 

[TitanAtlas]

For me the animations still look horrible, and the dialogue system is stupid imo

Also not a big fan of the cartoonish looking designs.

Other then that seems ok... still would prefer a KOTOR 3. Hell... in my choicesi would have in Number 3 - battlefront 3, in number 2 - Jedi Academy 2 and in number 1 - KOTOR 3. I feel like i ended up with a choice i did not want, but ill have to get along with it till one of my original 3 wishes becomes reality...