Veterans of the MMO genre may suffer from deja vu but newcomers should definitely consider this their first stop.
- Stories make you feel invested in your character.
- Voice acting does improve questing.
- Excellent for casual players.
- Easy to pick up and play.
The Bad:
- Extremely unpolished and buggy.
- Lack of endgame content or difficulty.
- Poorly balanced classes and population.
- Lack of voice actors lead to repeated dialogue.
- Will feel extremely familiar to veteran MMORPG players.
Set 3000 years before the Star Wars films and 300 years after the Knights of the Old Republic series, The Old Republic is BioWare's first attempt at dipping their toe in the vast (and dangerous) sea of the MMO genre. "TOR" is an interesting concept that succeeds in many areas but falls flat in many more. Veteran MMORPG players likely won't do more than enjoy a quick splash around but casual players and those new to the genre may find themselves swimming in the pool for a while longer.
If you look up any interview on The Old Republic the most lauded feature is "the story", something that most MMO developers neglect like a poor orphaned chimney sweep. Stories are unique to your class and are basically one long quest that spans the entirety of the 1 to 50 levelling experience. These stories are the effort of different writers and as such the quality between them can differ greatly. Which story you enjoy the most will also come down to personal preference. For example the Jedi Knight storyline is essentially Knights of the Old Republic 3, all about becoming a powerful, being known as the saviour of the galaxy and all that jazz. On the other hand the Jedi Consular is a much slower affair into politics and the mysteries of the Force. The Smuggler has great, witty, often humorous dialogue but the plot itself is thin and contrived. You will find lovers and haters on both sides of the fence for each. The quality of the story should not really effect which class you intend to play however since the main plot wraps up around the level cap. BioWare are actively encouraging players to create alts in order to experience the different stories however in order to continue these main plots you are required to level through the same planet content as everybody else which quickly makes this a chore you are liable to not bother with after a couple of times. Although additional incentives to level alts are pegged to be added in March (patch 1.2) this will not solve the "been there, done that" issue that plagues levelling any new character. At the end of the day the main problem is that stories are there to make the levelling experience more tolerable, instead of trying to solve the problem of levelling itself being repetitive.
Almost every quest (called Missions in TOR) begins will talking to an NPC character (fully voiced) who will give you the assignment. Certain missions - usually the more difficult ones - are given via terminals but these are few and far between. The novelty is there at first but as you gain levels it falls into the loop of a military official telling you of a group of enemies that will surely doom the whole campaign unless you go and stop them. The most insulting part of this is that many of these NPCs are done by the same voice actor in the same tone and a meme has already been made out of the special (out of place) generic "I'll get on it" lines each class has you will hear again and again. This is a nitpick, but one that stands out and comes across as lazy in a video game advertised for its voice talent.
There are few "Kill XXX creature" quests in TOR, although they do exist in an interesting form. Almost every quest will need you to activate or collect something in the environment. As you kill an enemy in the way (and you will do it a lot due to the cramped environments) you will usually receive a bonus objective to kill 10-30 specific enemies in that area. You don't have to do this and in many cases you will get enough kills just by reaching your goal but the incentive is clear that they want you do this. It's a poor system in that it tries to disguise generic MMO grinding as an option but ultimately you will still do them for the rather decent XP and cash reward it offers. As with the voice acting they have lazily tried to mask the issue rather than solve it.
Crafting in The Old Republic is rather interesting in that instead of going out into the wild to farm resource nodes (although you can do this) you instead have your companion characters (essentially glorified pets) vanish into thin air and perform the task for you, returning after a certain length of time with a random ingredient for your chosen profession. Instead of going to a designated workbench and creating the item you instead assign a companion to do this as well, dropping the item into your inventory once they are done. It's a nifty feature to try and get players who would usually ignore crafting all together to try and give it a go and it does work rather well. The problem? Only two professions are actual useful at the level cap; Biochem for the stat consumables and health kits and Cybertech for the consumable damaging grenades. Most other professions are there simply to give you equipment up to the level cap and due to how easy content is to gear up from they become useless quickly.
Player versus Player in The Old Republic feels tacked on as an after thought simply because the unwritten laws of the MMO state you must have it in there somewhere. At the time of writing there are three Warzones avaliable (instanced 8v8 matches). "Civil War" is based around capturing and holding three locations which gradually cause the enemy tickets to bleed out the more you hold (comparable to Arathi Basin in WoW and The Guns of Nordenwatch in WAR). "Voidstar" sees one side defending three sets of doors from the attackers who must breach them in the fastest time possible (comparable to Strand of the Ancients in WoW) and finally Huttball which involves a single ball in the centre of the map that one team must bring to their opponents line in a sort of capture the flag affair. The unique aspect of "Huttball" is that unlike the other two Warzones players can fight member of their own faction. In theory this is meant to reduce the queue times if one faction is overpopulated than the other but in practice if your faction (The Sith Empire on the majority of servers) is unlucky enough to be overpopulated you can look forward to the vast majority of your matches being Huttball and this will get old rather quickly. There is also no feature to select which Warzone you wish to enter and so if you only like one you are out of luck. There is no penalty for leaving a match prior to the end of it either meaning that drop outs are very common when it becomes evident one team will not win.
Flashpoints - more commonly refereed too as instances or dungeons - are for groups of up to four players. Each Flashpoint begins on the 'fleet' of your faction (the player hubs of the game) and the game does a good job of placing breadcrumb NPCs along your travels to tell you "Hey! You're a high enough level to do this Flashpoint!". All flashpoints are entered from your fleet rather than being out in the wild, which means trying to put together a group is a 'relatively' painless process since like minded individuals also searching should already be there. Considering every flashpoint is entered from the same location anyway I have to wonder why a "Dungeon Finder" was not implemented. Feel free to rip me apart for suggesting it. The two most advertised flashpoints prior to launch were "The Esseles" and "The Black Talon". These two faction specific flashpoints contain plenty of conversations with NPC characters and depending on your actions they can go down different paths, contain great environmental touches (dog fighting in the background, soldiers running as a dropship crashes in a hanger, etc) and doing them the first time feels fresh, exciting and anticipating the next one. Sadly despite claims to the contary the flashpoints following this are nothing but generic corridor trash-fests like you would find on any other MMO. At Level 50 (the level cap) every flashpoint can be played in an Heroic mode designed to gear you up for Operations.
Operations are the "raids" of The Old Republic. At the time of writing there are currently two available; The Eternity Vault and Karagga's Palace. Both are roughly the same in difficulty and that is to say they are pathetically easy. I am not a hardcore raider by any means but any guilds designed for this purpose are liable to see themselves getting bored very quickly. Bosses are interesting and fun mechanics but bringing them down is rarely a challenge once you have worked out the tactics. Both raids can be cleared in a single night in around three hours. Trying to gear everybody up is only made difficult by the overpopulation of Inquisitors and Consulars and should these classes balance out it will not take long for you to grow tired and run out of content. I am not somebody who likes to burn through content like no tomorrow nor scream and cry for more constantly but it is clear even to me there is going to be a lot of trouble keeping peoples attention past a couple of months.
The Old Republic feels unpolished and rushed. It is clear they wanted to see this product out just in time to beat Christmas. Bugs are extremely common, many of them breaking important aspects of the game (such as PvE raids) for weeks on end. Whilst almost every MMO will have a large number of bugs at launch - and I don't see this as an acceptable excuse - so many stand out in TOR that you cannot help but feel it needed more time being polished. Patches are sent out several times a week and I suppose we have to give BioWare props for looking like they are actually doing something. Each moderately large patch seems to bring with it a host of new problems for their team to solve and although I cannot claim to have ever worked in development it seems to me like they do not even test their "fixes" before sending them to the public. For example there is a bug where it will not count your wins in a Warzone and this has apparently been fixed -three- times at the time of writing. There is no doubt things will improve over time as BioWare nail everything down but to shove the product out there in such a poor state is still bad show.
At the end of the day if you have played any theme park MMORPG created in the last ten years you will feel like you are in extremely familiar water. The voice acting does add a nice gimick to proceedings but at the end of the day the story has to end and after the meat you are left with some poor tasting vegetables and potato you have already had enough of. I would highly recommend The Old Republic to those who have yet to try an MMO or only play them on a casual basis, but veterans looking for something different from the usual WoW Clone should look elsewhere.