Now that Bioware has lifted the NDA on their still-in-beta Star Wars: The Old Republic MMO, testers are now free to talk about their impressions.
Of the two sides, Jedi and Sith, I played exclusively on the Sith side of things simply because the Jedi in the The Old Republic era are rather boring to me.
Here are some thoughts off the top of my head, in no specific order:
I’m not going to go into any storyline-specific details because I’m sure there are a lot of folks who want to play through it cold, but I will say this: when the quests are good they’re great, but otherwise they’re pretty meh.
I’ll limit my comments on the feel of the game to my experiences on Korriban, but the game work feels remarkably antiseptic and empty. For a world that has 10,000+ years of history and habitation, it just doesn’t feel like it. World of Warcraft might have a static game world – less so since the advent of phasing – but it does feel feel lived it and, in places, gritty. Korriban feels like a museum that’s pretending to be a ruined world, if that makes sense.
The combat just doesn’t feel right. I was continually reminded of the combat in Lord of the Rings Online in that it really was just button-pushing without a sense of power or feedback other than numbers flashing on the screen. There a lot of room for improvement in this aspect.
The graphics are, by and large, quite good, but they begin to stumble when it comes to character animation and things fall over completely when it comes to the UI. As with combat, the UI needs a lot of attention because it’s not intuitive and a lot of the icons are simply indecipherable.
Other random thoughts:
- The Sith leaders are all fat. I don’t know if it was a graphics glitch but they were all morbidly obese, which did lend a certain amount of unintended humor. One of the Sith leaders, who becomes your mentor, has an Old Republic version of armor like Darth Vader’s but it just looks silly when the guy’s 300 pounds to begin with.
- The lightsabers feel more like wiffle-ball bats in combat rather than the doomsday weapons they actually are.
- On Korriban at least, there’s a huge amount of back-and-forth running across the same place for the first fifteen levels or so. A better implementation of fast travel is really needed.
- Quest givers are damn near impossible to find. They have this little gear-looking thing over their head but it blends in with everything else all too easily. The bright yellow ! and ? that World of Warcraft used over NPC heads on the maps really was a good idea and is sorely needed here.
It’s not all downside, though. Bioware did get a couple of things really, really right:
- The voice acting really is very good and does a fantastic job of making the quests feel immersive.
- Their approach to instances is quite unique and works well. In short, you have group instances and solo, storyline-driven instances and the entrances to the former are colored red and the latter are colored green. It makes finding them much easier than WoW, for instance, and is one of those nice quality-of-life improvements the genre needs.
- The character creation process is really quite enjoyable. Normally, I’ll just accept a preset look, grab a class and go, but I found myself spending about an hour tweaking my crazy hot, purple-haired, one-eyed Sith chick.
All in all, my experience with Star Wars: The Old Republic in beta was that it’s a mixed bag as-is, with some great ideas and a lot of things that need work. It’s a beta so it deserves to be cut a lot of slack as MMOs are always works in progress throughout their lifecycles. That said, any talk of it being a WOW-killer strikes me as being rather silly. If I had to bet, I’m guessing that it’ll end up taking its place alongside Lord of the Rings Online – a good game with a mid-size but devoted audience.
