Star Wars: The Old Republic (beta)

[Niloc]

I got into the beta test for Star Wars: The Old Republic. It's made by BioWare, who have a very good track record with RPGs (Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, Mass Effect, Baldur's Gate, and to a lesser extent Dragon Age) but this is their first MMO.

Very early impressions as I just got it running after a 22 hour download & install process (though no doubt Time-Warner cable & my 3.5 year old PC are partly to blame for it taking so long - it's about 38 gigs) and then the server promptly went down for maintenance less than an hour later.

It's set an indeterminate "thousands of years" before the movies. Two factions, Sith Empire or the Republic. I chose the Sith to start with, there only seem to be 4 classes to choose from on that side - Sith Warrior, Sith Inquisitor, Bounty Hunter or Imperial Agent. 4 or 5 races to choose from, but that seems to be just aesthetic, at least for now.

Sith Warrior seems to be a straight up warrior/tank class. Inquisitor seems to be more of a battle-mage hybrid. Not sure about the other two, one of them is probably a rogue/thief type class but they seem to be dumping the stereotypical MMO roles of tank/healer/DPS. I didn't see any class that would qualify as a healer.

I made a big, thuggish looking Sith Inquisitor to start out with. There's a lot familiar here; The controls mostly work as you'd expect them to if you've played World of Warcraft or pretty much any other MMO or PC-RPG in general. It's Star Wars so pretty much what you'd expect there - basic humans, Twileks, whatever the hell Darth Maul was, etc. are in there and the setting I already know & like helps it go down easier.

There is a lot of speech in this game, which has become a signature characteristic of BioWare RPGs. Even your own character talks, which can actually be a bit off-putting since you don't have control over exactly what they say, just a choice of 3 emotional tones for the responses, very similar to the system used in Mass Effect. Sort of takes some of the "role playing" out of it.

The graphics are OK but need polish. They're more detailed than WoW but that's to be expected - WoW is now 7 years old, though it has had some pretty big upgrades graphically.

It's very much in a beta stage right now, definitely rougher than WoW was when they had the beta test for that in 2004. Huge amounts of lag with every action. Supposedly TOR is being released this fall - if so they've got a lot of work to do before then. I suspect it'll either be pushed to next year or there will just be a lot of disappointed gamers. Leaning towards the latter since with MMOs it's always "get the subscription fees THEN fix it (or not)" and BioWare is a division of EA, so there's that.

Still, it's already 100% better than Star Wars Galaxies ever was. I still remember trying that one out - I made a Wookie character, had to go fight giant butterflies to start out, and the butterflies kicked my Wookie ass. I lasted about 2 days in that one before giving up in disgust. I hated to waste the "free" month of gametime that came with the game but there was just no way to stomach that one.

TOR handles the starting zones a bit better - you fight creatures that are actually dangerous looking (if rather weak) but it's easy to start out as the first few levels/tutorial should be. One thing I think WoW does better is that the very early lvl 1 & 2 enemies don't even attack - they just respond to the players attacks. This is very helpful for both new players and experienced players getting their bearings in a new game - just setting up the key bindings and such. A nice, low stress way to learn the game. In TOR the level 1 enemies are supper aggressive, though easy to defeat.

Overall if they put a LOT more work into this it could compete with WoW - and something needs to in order to move the genre forward.

[number six]

I was just talking to the guy at work that's a big WoW player and told him KoTor probably has the best hope of unseating WoW. So far the closest to come even close to issuing a challenge is Rift right? I don't know, I only watch from the sidelines. A Kotor MMO sounds cool but I know i won't play it because of the monthly fee. I'm a very on/off player. I'll play a game for several weeks pretty hard then drop it for 4 months before I come back to it. I did Dragonage like that.. beat the core game in about a month then was off it for 2 months then went back a few weeks ago and beat Awakenings. But that's a normal game so I'm free to do that.. if it was a MMO i'd have paid $30 for those 2 months I didn't play it once and that would just piss me off. That's why I like magic online. I haven't played that in about 10 months but new expansion is out so i'll probably get back into it.. since no monthly fee i haven't wasted anything.. all my cards are still there waiting for me.

Plus I've got enough monthly bills as it is. I also don't like how these games become some engrossing to where it's literally all people will talk about.. and there's nothing more goofy that hearing some dude tell you he can't go out on a friday night because there's a raid on some goblin cave or some shit.

BUT if i was going to play one of these it'd be this one. Bummer there isn't an offline mode.. and unfortuntely i guess this means no Kotor 3 anytime soon as I doubt they'd want competing products out there.

[Niloc]

Actually you don't generally have to pay for an MMO if you're not playing. The way it works in WoW is you can go month-to-month for $15/per - you character doesn't get deleted even if you leave the account dormant for years. They want to keep people coming back.

I understand about not wanting to pay a monthly fee though, it puts me off as well. The thing is that an MMO can be the best deal in entertainment when you're playing like a maniac - then it turns on a dime to a complete waste of money when you hit a wall and lose interest in it. TOR is supposed to be mostly solo-able too - though you've still gotta pay the fee.

I don't get the long-term addiction to MMOs either - when they run out of content, that's it for me. At first with a new one, or an expansion, it's great. There's the exploration of all the new areas, my favorite part. That runs out quickly. Then there's leveling, but that runs out fairly quickly as well. Then gearing your character to a decent level, building up sub-skills like trade professions, etc. and earning some specific loot rewards. After all that though, there's not much left to do but wait for another expansion. I know there are people who want to get the best loot from the toughest bosses in the game - but to what end? It's all about progression, and once you have the best stuff the progression is over. The best weapons in the game are rendered obsolete by the low-end stuff with each new expansion anyway, so that sword you worked so hard to get is now cool-looking but useless and no one cares about it anymore. It's not even good for PvP because that has it's own set of weapons (with different stats), which are generally easier to get - you just have to participate, not necessarily win.

As for Rift I suspect it's another flash in the pan, though I haven't tried it myself. That seems to be the reaction I'm reading though - at first it's a better WoW, because it's a much more recent game engine, but it quickly runs out of steam. Same thing happened with several other MMO launches since WoW - I think Age of Conan was one of them and that just went free-to-play, never a good sign.

The problem is everyone is trying to beat WoW at it's own game - a fantasy MMO. I guess they figure if Blizzard could decimate Everquest then someone can do it to Blizzard too. The tricky part is that WoW just absorbs most good features and ideas from competing games and adds them, and at this point it's already so polished, runs so smoothly, that it's nearly impossible to compete.

Going with a completely different setting - a sci-fi setting (well Star Wars has always been fantasy really, but fantasy with space ships and at least it's not the umpteenth Tolkien rip off, that territory is well covered) is a good idea and probably the only way to take down WoW - at least until World of Starcraft.

I know what you mean about people not wanting to talk about anything else - when I worked for Dell it was basically 500 computer nerds packed into an office and every single one of them wanted to tell you, in great detail, about their level 70 paladin.

[number six]

My problem with the monthly fee is I know that I won't be able to manage it as far as only paying while i'm playing. The game i'm into really flits around so i really don't know when I'm going to want to play game X (or not) and even if I did i have a hard enough time remembering where my keys are let alone canceling/starting an account. I'd be OK with a yearly model that wasn't stupid expensive.. like $50 for the year or something.. but this $15 a month (the defacto standard??) is just too much on top of the other piddling reoccuring monthly bills I already have. Plus honestly I don't enjoy the MMO aspects that much as I just don't have the time to keep up with having the best gear or teaming up with random internet dorks to raid this castle or that.. so I'm cool playing a normal RPG. It's a lot cheaper.

Speaking of gear.. my wow friend (who yes, won't shut up about whatever his hunter or whatever is doing most of the time) was telling me about how the gear progesses. I guess at a certain point you have to mega-grind for gear? He told me about how he had to camp out in one spot for like 17 hours (real life hours) for this spectral bear to materialize. I guess it only appears every 48 hours or something (he got lucky i guess?) and you gotta be there to catch it otherwise its another 48 hour wait. To me that's insane. Then he was telling me about some ice armor or something that required tokens and how you might get a token a week and it takes a few tokens to buy a cod peice or whatever so the whole armor litereally coudl take you six months. I realize they do that to keep the insane people occupied but dammit i'm not that insane nor can I ever see myself doing that.

It was interesting how Everquest was just theeee game there and WoW ate it's lunch. I'm assuming it offered a lot better experience.. i never played EQ to know. I figure Blizzard is just waiting right now to see what happens. I gaurantee World of Starcraft is under some sort of pre-production at least. If something does come around to knock off WoW i think you'll see WoS released pretty quick.. but no sense in competing against your own product and right now the MMO addicted are spending enough time (and money) in Aserograth or wherever.

Seems like most of the games that have come out suck though. The star trek one was interesting as i like the star trek combat games but the reviews pretty much said it was awful. Thats the other side of the coin.. what happens if you invest your 500 hours getting your spectral targ only to realize nobody cares because the game sucks? Or what happens to that spectral targ when they eventually shut the servers off? Another reason not to invest 10,000 hours in a damned video game.

[Niloc]

He told me about how he had to camp out in one spot for like 17 hours (real life hours) for this spectral bear to materialize. I guess it only appears every 48 hours or something (he got lucky i guess?) and you gotta be there to catch it otherwise its another 48 hour wait. To me that's insane.

Yes, there's definitely stuff like that, but it's nothing you have to have to play - it's just rare so people want it. The intention is that you randomly stumble across these rare spawns while you're just out and about doing something else - and lucky you, you get a rare mount or whatever.

In reality people either never bother with those, or they go to insane lengths to research, camp out and wait for them as you described. I never bother with that crap.

Then there's the daily quest stuff - it's the same tedious thing over and over again, and you're limited to how many you can do in a day, and you need like 200 value tokens to get something good. I agree those are a completely transparent way of trying to get people to stay subscribed long term. Doesn't work for me, not fun at all. I tend to play MMOs for a month or two, putting in a lot of hours, then stop completely. I usually don't even subscribe, I buy the one month time code and then take a couple days off when that expires to decide if it's worth another month. I don't think I've ever gone more than 3 months in a row on any of them.

[Naf]

My Darth Revan prop which you can see in my pics gallery is based on the Old Republic...Yes, it's 3,000 years before "A New Hope"....Definetly will be getting this!

[Niloc]

I gaurantee World of Starcraft is under some sort of pre-production at least.

I'm pretty sure you're right. It'll be interesting to see how that works out though - it would be cool to have an MMO with 3 factions rather than the standard 2, but it wouldn't make a lot of sense story-wise if you can play as the Zerg since they were a hive mind type deal.

You did play as a "cerabrate" (or something like that) in StarCraft 1, separate from the hive-mind, but that was supposed to be something rare. Having a million different players in that role would make no sense. No doubt they'd just come up with some bullshit to make it work though, I suspect players may be less forgiving of such fudged explanations of the lore in a sci-fi setting though, unlike the fantasy setting where any inconsistency can be explained away by "because magic!".

Actually though Blizzard has said they are already working on their next MMO and it's not based on any of their existing properties. Who knows if that's true though, or if it'll ever come to fruition. I'm pretty sure we will see World of Starcraft eventually, and World of Warcraft 2 as well - they've got to reboot WoW at some point, the characters have already gotten stupid-powerful both compared to lower level chars (lvl 40 has about 400-600hp, lvl 85 has 100,000-160,000hp) and to the game world in general. They've already got them killing "old gods" as raid bosses, so it's... where do you go from there? Need to reset everyone at level 1 eventually, though I'd guess WoW has at least 3 more major expansions before they even start thinking about that. Supposedly the player base has plateaued at this point and probably started to shrink. Still in the millions though.

[flecom]

as much as I want this game to be awesome theres 2 problems

1) I don't pay for games with monthly fees, sorry
2) EA is involved so its going to suck unless you pay extra money for crap you need to "win"

[Niloc]

as much as I want this game to be awesome theres 2 problems

1) I don't pay for games with monthly fees, sorry
2) EA is involved so its going to suck unless you pay extra money for crap you need to "win"

EA is so big that it's stamp on a game is meaningless. Some EA games are great, some are crap, most are mediocre. It hasn't effected BioWare (the more important brand here) games in the past, EA is just publishing this. Activision is the same thing - both companies are out for your money, no question, but they're both so big and produce so much that their names have become no indicator of what you're likely to get - you have to look at the actual developer - Bungie, Bioware, Blizzard, etc., the publisher doesn't mean squat.

[Niloc]

My problem with the monthly fee is I know that I won't be able to manage it as far as only paying while i'm playing.

Oh yeah, forgot to mention - WoW now has an unlimited time free trial up to lvl. 20. Level 20 is pretty low, you can easily get there in a few hours (leveling speed has been greatly increased since launch) but it does give a good taste of the game. I think there are other limitations as well - can't use the in-game mail or use the auction house, may not be able to join a guild (not sure about that one). I think you can participate in PvP battlegrounds and probably get into the first few instanced dungeons though and those are some of the major attractions.

It's like the drug dealers from the 80's anti-drug pamphlets "the first taste is always free" - funny though, this is actually the first time I've come across that, in my experience real drug dealers never give a damn thing away for free.

[Niloc]

I've played a bit more of the TOR beta now and it performed much better. Must have been server-side problems the first day.

I haven't gotten too deep into it yet but it seems more solid than I first gave it credit for - still have to see about the group stuff though, instances, etc.

The Republic side, unsurprisingly, also has 4 classes - Jedi Knight, Jedi Consular, Smuggler or Trooper (yes, Storm Troopers, or their equivalent are on the good side here - just like in the prequels). Later on there are supposed to be "advanced classes", where you specialize more, but I haven't gotten that far yet, assuming they're even in this build of the game.

The interesting thing is that the Sith side is outright evil. You're definitely playing a bad guy there - early story missions have you torturing someone to get information out of them. In WoW both factions see themselves as the good guys - and the Alliance, the more stereotypical good side, have definitely acted like complete dicks on many occasions. The only ones that really skew towards evil are the Forsaken (undead) faction of the Horde, and even they don't see themselves as evil, they just think that everyone - allies and enemies alike, should be undead too.

It's also funny, but not surprising, just how much like WoW it is. One example - there are some "elite" enemies (tough ones that it will probably take a group to defeat) and just like in WoW they've got a gold decoration around their nameplate to delineate them - but of course in TOR it's a "high tech" looking decoration.

Anyway, it's looking like it could evolve into a solid game but it definitely still needs a lot of work and polish - if anyone is interested in this I'd suggest waiting 6 months or so if it launches this Fall, both to give them time to work the bugs out and to avoid the initial server crash problems you get with most MMO launches. I think you can still sign up for the beta test on BioWare's page as well, it's a good way to try it for free.

[Niloc]

If something does come around to knock off WoW i think you'll see WoS released pretty quick.. but no sense in competing against your own product and right now the MMO addicted are spending enough time (and money) in Aserograth or wherever.

It's interesting that they will be competing with their own product with Diablo 3. In a lot of ways WoW is an MMO version of the Diablo games on steroids.

StarCraft is a different story - different genre of game, different audience and it's way less of a time-suck unless you're a really competitive player. Diablo 3 on the other hand... the overlap with the WoW audience has got to be nearly 100% there. I guess they're just going to release it in a window where there's nothing going on with WoW - no expansions or major patches. Possibly some crossover stuff too - introducing new items from Diablo 3 in WoW versions, etc. - they've already got vanity pets from the Diablo games in WoW.

[number six]

Yeah there's a chance Diablo 3 might syphon off some WoW players but I guess they had to do something as other than Starcraft 2 they've been relying on WoW for the last 5 years right? Not that its such a bad thing considering how much monthly revenue WoW must generate. I think my co-worker told me they had something like 3 million subscribers.. well times $15.. yeah not a bad chunk of change when your only upkeep is keeping the servers running. You can't even really count the cost of developing expansions into the overhead because those are like normal games in that they charge $40 or $50 for them when they come out and they probably take significantly less to do than a new IP that would still sell for the same price. They must be swimming in money over there.

ANYWAY yeah I'm sure Old Republic will be cool but just can't wrap my head around the fee-based gameplay. I have noticed several games are now free, or free to a certain level. I've been meaning to install Champions online to my work laptop just to see if i can waste some time in it.. it's also free until level 20 or something like that. But it will probably take a week to get there then it's $15 screw you. And are any of these games cheaper? THey all seem to have latched onto the $15 model.. I guess that's the price point right before people will stop paying.

I tried to play some of the pure-free ones. I played D&D Online for about 3 hours and got horrendously bored with it. There was that korean FLYFF game that was fun but then you ran out of stuff to do. Haven't logged back in awhile maybe there's more content now.

[Niloc]

my co-worker told me they had something like 3 million subscribers

I've seen figures as high as 12 million subscribers worldwide. That was at the peak though, and no idea if it's accurate. It's slowed down a good bit since then at any rate, pretty sure it's still something like 7-8 million currently though, so yeah, over $100 million every month is a conservative estimate. It's like a big summer movie that just keeps having that massive opening weekend over and over for years on end.


As for free MMOs I've never found one that has kept my interest. Runes of Magic is a free WoW clone, I may re-install that one, last time I messed with it was a couple years ago. At that time it was a fairly competent clone but somehow it lacked that "one more level" feeling WoW and other good games seem to generate and keep you playing. May be more polished at this stage.

There's also Forsaken World on Steam. Free to play as well, just got that one installed recently, seems to be the same deal though - WoW clone with stuff you can buy in game. Not sure if it's required to progress or just convenience & vanity items though, haven't put any time into it yet.


I'm hoping Skyrim (Elder Scrolls 5) is good and not pushed to next year. Single player only (as far as I know) but it should have 40-80 hours of gameplay, and more with DLC. I couldn't get into Elder Scrolls 3 or 4 though so I'm wary of this. Loved Fallout 3 though so hopefully it's more like that, and even if it's not we should get Fallout 4 based on this new engine eventually.

[flecom]

so I was in WorstBuy the other day and saw a mention of a pre-order for The Old Republic special edition... price tag? $149 LOL NO THANKS