Star Wars: The Old Republic Delivers the Adventure and Excitement
How would you like to live in the Star Wars universe? That was the offer made in 2003 to gamers purchasing Star Wars Galaxies, an online game set in a galaxy far, far away.
However, like a Faustian bargain made in The Twilight Zone, the offer proved too accurate. The problem with simulating life is, if it is too real, it’s not interesting. Living in Galaxies proved to be mundane. Sure, you could eventually gallivant around the stars like Luke Skywalker and Han Solo. But you had to pay your dues in menial tasks like delivering letters and hunting space rabbits.
In the end, Star Wars Galaxies was about as exciting as doing your taxes. The game was lauded by some for its depth and complexity. You could choose from many professions, stake out a homestead, and even join a player-controlled city with trimmings like politicians, taxes, and law enforcement. The problem with all that art imitating life was, after coming home from real life’s daily grind, logging into a game to meet similar obligations on another planet just seemed redundant.
A decade later, we have a new online Star Wars game which succeeds where Galaxies failed. Star Wars: The Old Republic, like the film series on which it is based, wastes no time yanking the player out of this world and into an action-adventure with high stakes and familiar themes. Most impressive, the game is accessible to the casual gamer and those who have never played its type before.
The Old Republic is a massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG), which is a fancy way of saying that lots of people play in the same virtual space at the same time. The most successful game of the genre to date is World of Warcraft, a title noted for peaking at over 10 million monthly subscribers and ruining marriages.
The way these games work is by vesting the player into a character of their own creation, and laying out a steady diet of quests and achievements to keep them playing (and paying) month-after-month. The player gains experience points by defeating enemies, finishing quests, and exploring the game world. These points eventually earn promotions from one level to another, which opens up new quest lines and access to new equipment and abilities. Many tasks require cooperating with or battling against other players, which creates a social element often as alluring as the game itself.
I have personally seen a marriage end over the amount of time a spouse spent playing World of Warcraft. (No it wasn’t mine. Thanks for asking.) Famously, a Sorth Korean gamer played an MMORPG for so long without rest that he keeled over and died. Those are the extremes which demonstrate how addictive these games can be. Nevertheless, for those of us with a modicum of self control, an MMORPG is the digital equivalent of a bowling league.
Veteran players of MMORPGs have a term for spending hours in-game earning experience points and chasing levels. It’s called grinding. Indeed, that is what it felt like in Galaxies, a mindless obligatory grind. Quests were bland tasks with no real context or effect on the world. The player essentially had to provide their own context, their own reason for doing whatever they were doing. In this way, again, art imitated life too well. Left to find a motive for hunting space rabbits, I found I had none.
The greatest innovation of The Old Republic is its focus on character and story, which provides context to what would otherwise be a grind. The game is fully voiced. Every single character the player encounters has a story to tell, a reason for being where they are, and a motive for sending the player on a quest. Each of the eight character classes which the player can choose from has a unique story arc for that class. Players also get companion characters to interact with, fight alongside, and send on missions of their own. These story and character elements provide a stronger motive for pressing on than a simple level grind. The game’s developers claim that each class has up to 200 hours of game content. With eight classes in-game, that translates to 1600 hours of potential entertainment at launch.
Of course, the game is far from perfect. There are glitches and deficiencies which, depending on the eye of the beholder, range from unfortunate to frustrating. To the developer’s credit, much has been done to address complaints through software patches. In addition, a forthcoming major patch will add a significant amount of content to the game. Such is expected with subscription-based games.
One problem which has not yet surfaced on the developer’s radar is the need for some kind of grouping tool to help players find others who want to run the same quest. As it stands, finding a group involves spamming a global chat channel, pleading for others to partner with. In the months since the game launched, server populations have decreased and dispersed, making grouping difficult. It’s kind of like going down to the union hall to wait for a job. Sometimes you get one. Sometimes you don’t. But in the context of a game, not getting to play ruins the whole point of logging in. A casual gamer may often have little more than an hour to play. Spending that time looking for others to play with is a waste.
Other MMORPGs have queues players can join for a given quest, enabling more efficient use of game time. But dealing without such bells and whistles is a consequence of early adoption in MMORPGs. They rarely start well, and often take years to mature.
That said, despite a few flaws, Star Wars: The Old Republic finally delivers on its predecessor’s promise to let players live in the Star Wars universe. Only this time, it’s in the way we actually want to, as swashbuckling adventurers on a personal mission to save – or conquer — the galaxy.
it took me a year to detox from wow
although i have gotten the urge to try tor i will have to pass for fear of the same lifesucks i encountered in warcraft
to each his own
(fwiw i would have rolled a scoundrel)
Players who enjoy THE OLD REPUBLIC may want to try the MASS EFFECT series, also done by Bioware, the developer of TOR. The MASS EFFECT trilogy is a space opera in its own setting, not the Star Wars universe, and is a fully enclosed series rather than an open-ended MMORPG, but shares the same story set-up with fully voiced character interaction and moral decisions which frequently have very long-term game consequences. Actors who contributed their voice talents to MASS EFFECT include Claudia Black, William Baldwin, Keith David, and Lance Henriksen.
Meh. I’ve seen enough gameplay footage and read enough reviews (professional and earnest layman’s) to know I am not interested in this. Aside from the fact that it’s another crowded “amusement park” MMO (in itself, plenty counter-immersive), most folks I’ve seen discussing this say that the play value dies out quickly, that the different characters are only superficially so, and that they grew bored with it and quit in disappointment. Of course, this IS the “big thing” for Star Wars fans, but one might hope for a better showing in that franchise.
BTW, fans of the ARPG genre (think Diablo) might wanna take a look at Path of Exile, a F2P indie currently in Beta. A lotta folks (myself included) who are disappointed in how Diablo 3 has turned out have found in PoE a worthy successor to that franchise. =^[.]^=
I have Diablo, Hellfire, Diablo II and Torchlight and I’m looking forward to Diablo III. Didn’t got a new game after Skyrim (wife forbids) and I was looking forward for Bioshock 3 but I’ll switch for the new Diablo. Hellgate London is also a nice Diablo style monster killing (albeit with a lot unfixed bugs).
Not a big fan of online multiplayer, the only game I play is Wii Sengoku Basara 3 sice it is impossible to finish it on hard dificulty without help.
Yeah, I’ve read those negative reviews too. I think it’s a difference in perspective. If you spend a large chunk of your life playing video games, than anything gets boring quick. By virtue of the fact that the people calling this game boring have played through multiple classes tells me that they are power-gamers who spend over 8-10 hours in front of a game each week. I’m a casual gamer. I’m an adult with a family, multiple jobs, and multiple real-life activities. For me, the question is whether I get a fun and engaging experience for the couple hours every two or three days that I get to sneak in some playtime. The answer is yes.
Played TOR in the open beta and was not particularly impressed. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a decent enough game but feels so slow-paced compared to WoW and Guild Wars. It’s skill set was fairly simplistic and redundant, as well, with mostly one primary attack that you spam over and over with a few extras to spice it up with from time to time. Sure, the rotations on WoW get stale after a while, but spamming one attack gets stale from the get go. Overall, I give TOR 7/10. Worth playing if you have nothing else to spend the money on.
As a player of Star Wars Galaxies, WoW (including a six month stint when raiding seemed like my second job), and TOR, I’ll it’s not bad, but it’s not great either. The biggest problem with Star Wars Galaxies is pretty much the same as TOR, nothing to do at max level. PVP is monotonous, End Game dungeons are too easy for anyone with a scintilla of raiding experience, and dailies are, well, dailies. TOR tried too hard to copy WoW, which was Galaxies downfall by the way. If the Galaxies team would have put a little more time in polish and adding end game content, rather than releasing paid content seemingly every six months, they wouldn’t have lost subs to WoW as easily as they did. WoW was a paradigm breaker in that it brought MMOs mainstream with a much easier leveling experience. Conventional wisdom prior to that point was that leveling should be a significant time sink. WoW changed that, but also offered challenging end game content that functioned, for the most part, pretty well.
I’m waiting for someone to finally shift the paradigm again. I think the ultra successful MMO of the future will be a hybrid of the theme park and sandbox models, but risk adverse companies like EA and Sony are not the ones who are going to provide it. They rigidly tailor their business models to draw out as much cash as possible from the consumer. I would have preferred BioWare made a Mass Effect MMO to a Star Wars one, but Star Wars is still seemingly solid gold as an IP.
How’s crafting? Not much of a raider, so I don’t particularly care about end game experience, but I do like crafting and playing the economy.
Crafting works differently than in wow, you don’t actually stand around and craft things yourself. Once you have companions you send them out to complete crafting missions (to gather resources) or to specifically create a certain item. You’ll end up with 3-4-5 companions, one with you to help fight and you can constantly be sending out 3 others to do crafting for you. Overall i enjoyed the game because i’m such a SW fan but ultimately the game play (understandably) wasn’t what wow is and combined with the lack of a group/dungeon finder I’m now back to wow. I may come back to swtor once these are worked out. Worth playing if you love SW.
I’m enjoying TOR (and as former execdir and current press volunteer for https://torproject.org I had no choice but to follow the game from first announcement via Google search anyway – might as well play it!). But then I loved SWG and Eve and various sandbox games for the community, which the reviewer obviously never found. SWG also had an innovative crafting system and an amazing skill system, a housing system that still hasn’t been matched in MMOs, and a good many ither features that the reviewer missed due to focusing oddly on questing, which is not central to a sandbox game. I suspect he got into the game post NGE, when SOE gutted the skill system and many of the sandbox features, post-WOW, in order to try tocompete for market share, dooming the game to a slow painful death.
Regardless, TOR is indeed on rails and a themepark. It’s like playing KOTOR with friends and was designed specifically for altaholics, which means crafters are incidentally benefitted if you are one of those sorts (like me!) who wants one master in every tradeskill. They make it actually useful, if expensive, and the upcoming patch (4/12, Legacy) includes adjustments that aim to make endgame player crafting vital – also, crafters can make bind on acquire items that are very nice, like medpacks that never run out, or really extra nice equipment in your craft just for your or your companions’ use.
The psychology of the crafting – that your companions or henchthangs actually run around doing you craft-bidding, felt odd to me for a bit, but I got over it.
I got in late, and have a life, and alts, so I have a main at 33 (of 50) and a bunch of teens. But I’m enjoying it, and the community on Lord Adraas (the larger east coast US RP-PVE server) is pretty pleasant. Can’t recommend the PVP servers – tried it, fled. 53, female, used to hanging with mil types, rough language, gamers, but not gratuitous ignorant immature jerks.
Star Wars galaxies was a much better MMORPG. Star Wars galaxies had player cities, a player economy and meaningful pvp. SWG was cut off at the knees by Lucas Arts who pulled back from the sandbox concept. The “new game enhancement” LA forced on Sony wiped out an online community that took years to form.
LA strikes again in TOR. The Republic and Empire are at peace. Space is beyond stupid. Crafting is pointless. The big failing for TOR imo is no playable races other than humanoids. I read LA wont allow Wookiees to be a playable race because they got picked on in SWG. What a load of BS. Wookiees got picked on in the movies.
I got a sniper to 50 and just can’t play any more Hutt ball. LA ruins it’s MMORPG’s. I don’t blame Sony for SWG and wont blame EA when TOR rolls over. LA is a bunch of bay area care bears who wont let Star Wars actually have a War or conflict. Change the name to Star lovin.
To say the factions are at peace in SWTOR is an overstatement. They are at peace the way the Palestinians are “at peace” with the Israelis. That is a huge story element which provides background for the missions and scenarios.
There’s no accounting for taste, but SWG was a horrible game from start to finish. When it started, it was simply too ambitious. It promised the moon and delivered a wide open nothing with no guidance or goals. I wanted to like it desperately, and frequently returned to it out of nostalgia. But I never played more than a few days without getting utterly bored out of my mind.
All that fluff in SWG – housing, player cities, crafting, etc – was like having a whole other set of chores on top of real-life’s grind. Why would I want to log into a video game and mine for minerals or pay for maintenance on my house to keep it from disappearing? How is that fun?
To each his own, I guess.
I played regularly for about a month and enjoyed it for that month. The “grinding” (there still is grinding) is pretty decent, since it incorporates your classes’ story. However, the story missions are still generally “Go to Place X and kill 20 of Y.” I played a Sith Inquisitor into the mid-40s, and tried out a number of alts that I never got past lvl 20. By the end of the month, I hit a rough patch where there were no more story missions I could successfully complete- the majority had end quest bosses which were too difficult and required me to level up 2-3 levels at best- this required more grinding without story missions, which was boring and frustrating. The space missions are pointless too -its a shame they can’t figure out how to incorporate actual space combat into a Star Wars game (the space missions are basically an on rail shooter, which you do over and over again). I didn’t have much luck meeting people online, as I had in the past with games like Wow, presumably since I really didn’t need a second to complete most of the missions, till hitting that rough patch in the mid 40s
Pros- Great use of Star Wars license, interesting classes, better (though far from perfect) leveling grinding, good graphics, fun with lightsaber varieties)
Cons- not really alot of social interaction(its basically a single player game), poor space battles with significant restrictions, still a grind, lack of late game and end game combat.
If you’re a Star Wars fan and either can tolerate or have never played an MMRPG, you should check it out. For my part, I canceled my subscription today.
Overall the story telling of TOR was a new pleasant aspect for an MMO. But in the end the game play has a sameness to it that just doesn’t jive with long term play. I played for three months, but found myself going back to Turbine with LoTRO and DDO more and more often. In the end I just was not playing the game enough to justify a subscription.
After the unique setting wears off, it’s just another grindfest MMO with the same immature, insulting, infantile player base as WoW. Take some time to read their forum pages to get an insite into some of the dregs of society who live in the alternate realities of MMO’s.
Well this article (to put it as the Gree would) turned my orange obtuse day purple parallelagram. I find some of the comments from other “past”(?) players rather typical of those who no longer play. Overall the game plays very well (some bugs/glitches but nothing game ending) and has extensive content up to end game. You can spend a very extensive amount of time completing the full go through to the end of your characters “class story”. Although not quite up to the MMORPG “monolith” standard of World of Warcraft it is much better than every other previous MMORPG at its beginning (ESPECIALLY World of Warcraft).
The game creators have been working rather hard on making free content. They already added a new end game operation and are adding another, a new warzone and improving character customization with the Legacy system and fixed some complaints about the crafting system and “balance”. If you are willing to be patient, like the Star Wars universe (I know one contributor to the site doesnt), and dont burn through a game in 2 days I think the game might be able to entertain you.
On those who dont seem to “like it” I find its typical that most go through the game’s content VERY quickly and are expecting something that is “better” than World of Warcraft at its release (Star Wars: The Old Republic is FAR better now than World of Warcraft was at its release, but World of Warcraft has had 10 years of income and developement to improve). I also notice many seem to have what I might describe as “MMORPG fatigue”. While people used to be more patient in seeing a game flaws fixed, to try to “complete” a game, and that a game would not start out as all that it is ever expeted to be, many people dont seem to feel the same way.
I have played lots of games and my expectations are kinda high , now i dont really play just anything , this game doesnt look that good to me , and the graphics …. i think they could of done better.
The graphics could always be better, but then only a small percentage of computer owners could actually run the game. If there is on lesson from WOW it’s that the way to really make money forces you to program to the lowest common denominator of hardware in the field, so as to have the highest number of customers available. Sure it looks like a cartoon, but it’s still the world’s largest babysitting service.