Game Review: Star Wars The Old Republic - Gameplay

The Old Republic has no structured tutorial. Rather, there's a tip system that offers help about an aspect of gameplay whenever the context calls for it. In any other MMO, that would probably suffice, but the moment you set foot in The Old Republic you are faced with quest-givers, future quest-givers with grey quest icons, class-specific story areas that you can't enter, vendors, dialog trees, half a dozen abilities and hostile NPCs who will attack on sight. That's a whole lot to take in within the span of about five minutes, and while many of the systems that The Old Republic uses are familiar to MMO players, I can't help but think how overwhelmed I was by my first MMO, and just how much more The Old Republic throws at the you from the get-go.

But BioWare, the company behind Star Wars: Old Republic, gives you an incentive to get over that initial hump by giving you a sense of purpose and the opportunity to breathe personality into your character. In the amount of time it takes to get through the first dialog bit, you may be tempted to proudly announce to anyone nearby that you're "the most evil Sith ever," or "a Bounty Hunter with a heart of gold and an eye for credits." From there, BioWare gives you hundreds more opportunities to reinforce your identity (or flip-flop entirely). This makes learning the complex game systems feel like more of a side-effect of role-playing your character than a requirement to move forward.

The complex game systems won't seem so complex if you've played an MMO in the last decade. Combat is based around selecting a target and using an ability to attack it. The Old Republic sets itself apart from many MMOs by removing the auto-attack that initiates when your character is set to beat up a target. Instead, each class has a basic attack that has to be activated manually whenever you want to use it. It requires no class resource, and in the case of the Jedi Knight and the Sith Warrior it actually helps build the resource, somewhat similar to Rage for the warrior class in World of Warcraft.

Of course, this is an online game, so AI companions aren't the only individuals you have at your side. When playing with others, you participate in conversations as a group, earning a currency called social points as a reward for consistent responses. You need to be with guildmates or other players to conquer heroic quests, which might require a full party of four. Heroic areas offer a nice difficulty curve. You could steamroll through earlier ones, only to find your party must make good use of crowd-control skills and heals later on. You can also join others for four-person dungeons called flashpoints, which give you a chance to exercise the power of choice as a group.
 
A few famous locations aside, the world-building effort has produced a procession of over-sized, cut-and-paste brown wastelands and purple jungles, populated with formless monsters and dotted with cavernous, empty, symmetrical buildings. Oh the disappointment when the moon of Nar Shaddaa -- purportedly a Hutt-run mix of Blade Runner and 1920s Shanghai -- turns out to be a few indistinguishable blocks of grey boxes behind the neon.

But then again, the magnificent sound -- including a spine-tingling musical score that expertly pastiches John Williams' original -- adds an incalculable atmosphere to the game. So do the simple cutaways of your ship arriving at a new planet, or the bountiful and effortlessly cool costume, vehicle and technology designs plundered from Lucas' portfolio and elegantly iterated on by BioWare's artists. It's not the world it should have been, and the tone of the storytelling is off -- but the ambiance is just right.

And as an MMO? Star Wars: The Old Republic is overwhelmingly competent, a studious and careful piece of work that rarely puts a foot wrong in imitating the best of the rest, and that just about manages to smooth the join between its ostensibly mismatched solo and multiplayer components. It offers a deep well of content, a spread of fun activities and a reliable service for as long as you want to explore its multiple storylines.

Closing Comments

With such an insanely resource-intensive production, can BioWare flesh out a compelling endgame fast enough? And would that even help? Under the surface and behind all that talk, The Old Republic is just that, old: a deeply traditional framework for an online game that is in dire need of a refresh and is currently struggling to sustain WOW. It's well placed for success right now, but it might not be long before The Old Republic finds itself just as vulnerable as its inspiration to a hungry breed of more innovative games.