Let me start off by saying this: I hate Star Wars. Seriously. I used to love the hell out of it, i.e. before the prequels came out. Now, because of those horrible movies, I can’t even watch the originals without nitpicking and griping. So I’ve basically given up on everything related to the series. I enjoyed The Force Unleashed, but not enough to play it again or buy the second one. The only thing I enjoy about Star Wars is the pre-movies time period, like Knights of the Old Republic, a game I played to death and back, to the point that I often attempted going solo, which was incredibly difficult but quite awesome if it worked.
The Old Republic is a new MMO from Bioware, makers of fine games such as Dragon Age, Mass Effect and, coincidentally, Knights of the Old Republic. It takes place some 200 years after KotOR, so still well before the movies, thank God.
I won’t really give anything away plot wise, considering I didn’t get really deep into any of the classes’ plots but the classes I played were excellent. Every character, including the player, is voice and voiced well. Much like Mass Effect and Dragon Age 2, the player chooses a simplified version of what they want to say, and the character rattles off a sentence or two that gets that message across and makes it feel like the npc and the player are actually having a conversation.
I played on my laptop, which isn’t usually the best idea for gaming, because of the integrated graphics card, but TOR actually takes that into consideration, and my computer meets all the requirements and actually exceeds even the recommendations. Having said that, the game ran kinda jerky and seemed kinda jumpy at times. But at the same time, the whole point of this beta test was to stress the servers, and stress them we did, because often, the servers were completely full. Saturday, I got on at 7:30 CST and I still had to wait about
10 to 15 minutes to get on.
There were a lot of people on, and the starter areas were rather crowded, leading to a lot of waiting around for stuff to spawn for quests and stuff. There were very few “go kill that thingie over there” quests, in fact most were just bonus quests while you were questing in other areas. I dig that. Honestly, to level up, they were necessary quests, but I think it was nicely implemented. If you’ve read my previous rant about WoW and how they say they’re “in tune with nature” or whatever and then they make you go kill hundreds of animals, TOR handles it much better this way.
Really, it’s hard for me to do a positive review; it’s much easier to find stuff to bitch about, but honestly, even though this was only a beta, it felt damn close to finished. I enjoyed playing it immensely and I cannot wait for the 15th of December for early access. I was skeptical when I first heard about it, even despite knowing Bioware was working on it. But on the basis of just this 4 day trial, I’ve pre-ordered it and waiting intently for launch.
May the Force be with you, I’ll see you in game!
Update
Something bugs me about this game. I'm not sure what it is either. Maybe I burned myself out on it, because for about 3 months after it came out, it was pretty much the only thing I played, but I stopped playing. I've recently returned to it and I find myself getting bored again. Now it's entirely possible that I'm bored with TOR because I just got Assassin's Creed 3 so I'd rather be playing it. I'm not sure though.
Update
Something bugs me about this game. I'm not sure what it is either. Maybe I burned myself out on it, because for about 3 months after it came out, it was pretty much the only thing I played, but I stopped playing. I've recently returned to it and I find myself getting bored again. Now it's entirely possible that I'm bored with TOR because I just got Assassin's Creed 3 so I'd rather be playing it. I'm not sure though.
