Star Wars: The Old Republic Overview Continued
Combat
The combat in TOR is fast and furious. At no time do you feel like you are just sitting there, hacking away, even while fighting Elite and Champion creatures. The combat animations, sounds, effects, and fluidity of combat make it a lot of fun.
Your powers all have unique animations that help you to see when they are executed so you can line up your next strike. Monsters have tells to alert you when they are using their big and nasty attacks.
Like most MMO’s, TOR uses a click-and-wait style system. The powers look good and are fun, but they still fall within a turn based system with cool down timers, resource management, and a specific order of use.
The combat is eye-catching, but it doesn’t take too long to learn the most advantageous combinations of powers, making combat very repetitive. Click 1, Click 2, Click 3, loot. Combat looks great, but it doesn’t take much thought once you figure out what your powers do. Grouping helps this repetitiveness some and playing with friends always makes a game better.
There does seem to be some line of sight enforcement but for the most part, you jump into battle, plant it, and mash the keyboard until things die. I know they did it because it is “easy to play” but I would love to see an active combat system much like DDO. Dodging, flanking, line of sight and more strategy in battles could make TOR wholly entertaining.
One thing that does spice up TOR combat some is the companion system. Starting at level 10ish you will get a companion to help you on your journey. The exact time you get your companion depends on your specific class storyline but most players get to that point around 10th. This companion will help you in battle through a variety of means. You can also have your companion sell your junk loot, craft items for you or go on companion only missions.
Worlds
For the most part, TOR utilizes large open public areas to access most of the game world. Open wilderness areas and ruined command centers allow many players to wander about together. TOR utilizes instances, and each instance seems to have a low population limit. This means even during off hours there can be hundreds of instances of a single area. This choice aids in keeping lag down and camping to a minimum. A few people can explore the area instead of hoping you will be the lucky one to actually be around when a Flesh Raider spawns.
There are private micro instances spread throughout the game. These are all attached to your quests, especially your class quests. This is great as it allows you to fully enjoy and explore the most vital parts of your story. There is nothing worse than finally getting to that big bad mean guy you have been hearing about, go through the dialog or finally make it through the lair, only to have it ganked by a high level griefer 2 seconds before you hit attack! This won’t happen in TOR, thank the maker!
Flashpoints are Star Wars: The Old Republic’s versions of private, instanced, story-based quests. These are very exciting and can be a ton of fun! The stories are well written, the dialog fits well and the dynamic events add to the fun of playing through these. If you play DDO you will be quite familiar with these as most quests in DDO are very similar. I would say that the Flashpoints in Star Wars: The Old Republic are on par with the most intricately scripted DDO dungeons. They are lots of fun, don’t pass these up!
Star Wars: The Old Republic Overall Review
There is no doubt I will be playing TOR when it goes live. I am a huge Star Wars fan and love the universe and the mythos.
The graphics are great. Even on my old machine they are fantastic and smooth (8800GT SLI). The worlds are beautifully crafted and there is a mystic feel to the variety of locations they have created in TOR.
The combat, which is always a huge part of any MMO, is lacking and can get quite boring once the flashiness of it wears away. I have always loved trying different things in combat with DDO and the ability to really shine just by tactics and not just by gear is one of my favorite things about active combat.
The lack of character customization is going to be hard for me to swallow. In Galaxies, I loved the details behind character creation in that world. DDO has such a complex and fun character creation system; I could spend years just playing though more builds. Unfortunately Star Wars: The Old Republic is severely lacking character building. Effectively, everyone is a clone with the same stats and abilities, slightly tweaked by gear and skill trees.
What will keep me playing in the long run is going to be the deep, rich, character storylines. Star Wars: The Old Republic forces you to get into your character at a personal level, investing not only time but a real interest in the character’s successes and failures. The quality of the stories and the crispness of the voice acting makes you part of the world and the events that unfold around you. Having the choices in these cut scenes to pick the light side, dark side, or something in the middle is great!
The choices and actions of your character have lasting and real effects on the game world. These effects stick to your character and this makes you carefully consider your choices and where you want your character to go. There are no do-overs in TOR and this keeps you in the game and caring about each step.
The few problems I have with TOR, are diminished by the quality of the character interaction and the breadth of the universe. It’s already a rich and full world which will take most average gamers some time to explore. Hopefully the developers can get many more Flashpoints and raids into the game. I would love to see them add more quests, especially repeatable Heroic 2+ quests that would foster more grouping and a better feeling of working and playing together.
In closing, Star Wars: The Old Republic kicks some serious butt. It is finely tuned and in much better shape than many MMO’s at this late beta stage and even some live games! Its main push, a deeply interactive personal story, hits the mark dead on. The core of Star Wars: The Old Republic is sound and a blast to play.
See you online in a month!
Play smarter, not harder!
~Karranor aka Meriki on TOR
I just finished the beta stress test for 11/26-11/28. First of all I played WoW for 7 years so I have a good feel for these types of games. Your article is right on the mark; however your being a little harsh on the game as it stands right now. With WoW it was fun the first or second time to level up a new character, but it got real old, real fast when I started leveling a third toon. For us seasoned players it was a race in order to do end game content, and once there most of us realized the pain in not getting the gear we needed or worse yet not being able to get to finish those instances we needed to finish when Blizzard made us overlook instances in order to do the latest and greatest. With SWTOR I hope we all get to enjoy completing whatever they have to offer and they don’t do a Blizzard, coming out with new instances every 2 months, or it seems so. The 2+ Heroics in SWTOR are a lot of fun, plus you can run them again the next day for different loot. As for the cut scenes during quests I could see being able to hit the spacebar as long as you don’t need to chose what you have to say, but if you do then they can’t allow you to avoid the cut scenes. Bottom line is the game is set several thousand years BEFORE the Star War movies, so the developers have a lot to work with in terms of the star wars universe. Remember, what you and I played is Beta and companies like Blizzard have introduced lots of patches over the years. SWTOR will be no different. Besides if there is a issue, let them know in their forums.
Thanks for your thoughts on TOR. I am pretty familiar with MMO’s as well and I am glad you liked the review. I do want to say though that this was the Preview Review. :) I have played quite a bit of the game over the last few months and it definitely is a lot of fun. There are areas it shines, the quest stories and class series, and other areas it doesn’t. I know Blizzard puts out a great game, they have one now in TOR. The space bar is a great tool to skip by scenes you know and you can hit ESC if you need to back out of the scene. Both I find to be very useful. Especially when someone decides to blast mobs on the NPC I am talking to. Hit esc, and wait to start again so I can hear.
Overall it is a great game. I can tell you from experience that replaying the newbi areas gets old, even with skipping. But I am hopeful that they will release more content to bust up the grind. It seems to become the standard to “bust out the grind” in MMO’s through the first 80%+ of the game once you have capped someone. However, that doesn’t make it right. :)