SW:TOR achieves many of the goals it set out to accomplish. Now in time we will see if Bioware can right its wrongs.
Well I have finally come around to writing the review for the new Bioware MMO, Star Wars: The Old Republic. I have LONG time awaited this game, and I can say with gusto that I sincerely enjoy this game. It has its bugs… It has its flaws… But the beauty of an MMO is that it is constantly changing. And the progress of this MMO will truly show depending on the developer's responses to the outcry of the public.
For your reading enjoyment, this review will be LONG and THOROUGH. So if you expected a quick snippet, get out. There will be no expense spared in this review.
Story:
SPOILERS ************************ SKIP THIS PART IF YOU DON'T WANT SPOILERS
I will start off the story section by first telling you a good piece of advice: Read the Bioware written book "Revan", based directly off of the KOTOR main character Revan. This book ties DIRECTLY into both KOTOR 1, KOTOR 2, and the future events of SW:TOR. I say future because this new MMO takes place around 300 years after the events of KOTOR 1. Many people were complaining about this MMO, wanting a full blown sequel to KOTOR2. Well there is a problem with that. Since Bioware didn't handle KOTOR2, it would be very difficult for them to do that. If you purchase and read the book, you will see, however, that the Exile from KOTOR2 is a key part of the story in the book. As I said, I highly recommend reading this book.
Now, for the events at hand. As you have seen in various videos, the Sith Empire is back, and on a full fledge assault against the forces of the Republic. However, this is NOT the same "Sith Empire" Revan and Malak commanded during the Jedi Civil War (KOTOR1). This is the TRUE Empire, led by their mysterious and equally dangerous Sith Emperor. For thousands of years, the Emperor slowly started to grow his forces on the planets of the Outer Rim, including their home base of Dromund Kaas. After many years, they finally led a full fledge assault to capture their burial world of Korriban, as well as launching an all out "Sacking of Coruscant". The Sith then confronted the Republic with a "Peace Treaty", after destroying the Jedi Temple. It agreed to give up several Outer Rim planets, including Korriban, and any other non-Republic controlled systems over to the Empire. This treaty now, 12 years later, is hanging by a thread, as patched groups of Republic and Imperial combat each other on several planets. The Sith, lead by the Dark Council and they ruthless agent, Darth Malgus, have begun re-inserting themselves in the galaxy, trying to reclaim their place in the universe. The Mandolorians have also arisen, lead by a new Mandolore, one who has coincidently aligned himself with Empire. The Jedi, with their new Grand Master Satele Shan (descendant of Bastilla Shan), and their new home base of Tython, are struggling to recruit their numbers to be able to resist the might of the Sith. The newly re-discovered planet of Tython was in fact the place of the discovery of the Force, as well as the birthplace of the Jedi Order. Now, the planet has been re-colonized in the name of the Republic, and the Jedi have begun training new padawans on the planet to help fight against the Sith.
That's the back story of the lore for this game, but there are many different bits of lore that are discovered down the road. You have the opportunity to play between 8 different stories (4 republic, 4 imperial). Even though there are 16 total advanced classes, the stories are the same for each main class. I will begin to describe a bit of the Inquisitor story, as well as the Jedi Knight storyline, because those are the only classes I played.
The Sith Inquisitor storyline (my main character) is an amazing story of slave turned Lord. You arrive on Korriban as a slave to fight your way to become apprentice to a very conniving Sith Lord, Darth Zash. On the planet Dromund Kaas, she sends you to explore the ancient tomb of a Sith Lord to uncover artifacts for special ritual that Zash wants to perform. During this excavation, you discover not only hidden Sith secrets, but as well as a secret to your own past. I cannot continue with details of this story, because it will give out the fun. Lets just say not everything is as it seems.
The Jedi Knight story is the typical "Knight in Shining Armor" story. The Flesh Raiders, native race on Tython, have amassed great strength and numbers and are causing trouble for the inhabiting Jedi. Soon during your trials, you learn that the one organizing the creatures in fact is a fallen Jedi, bent on the failure and destruction of the Jedi. After your confrontation with this fallen Jedi, and the construction of your lightsaber, you are Mastered by Orgus Din, who hasn't taken on a padawan in many years. Together, you and Master Orgus fight the Empire and seek to destroy many of their dangerous weapons of war.
Graphics
I have been watching SWTOR grow since it was first announced. I remember back in the day how dismal and pathetic the presentation of this game was in the Alpha phase. The lightsabers looked like giant crayons. The landscape was something out of LEGO Star Wars. Now the game looks totally different and amazing. Many complain that SWTOR looks bland, and that this game could look so much better. But here is the thing: Star Wars has never been about bright colored Axes, flashing shoulder pads, or drop dead hard core visuals. The art design coincides with that same template used for KOTOR1 & 2. Now, that being said, there is a major issue with frames per second. The servers Bioware is running are not very powerful. Heavily populated areas/planets drop to very low FPS, and make the game feel like a slide show. Overall though, the game is very fun to look at. I highly recommend a good working graphics card so that everything is enjoyable.
Sound
This is one thing Bioware clearly spared no expense in. They claim to have 100's of hours of fully voiced content. And in fact, not a single being in this game lacks a voice. No NPC uses recycled sounds from other characters; Each character enacts his own dialogue options, exactly like it was for KOTOR (minus the repeating lines of Huttese). One thing that did repeat were some choices your character would make. For example, an Inquisitor would sometimes say "Now you will see what a real Sith can do!" I know that money had to be saved up, but the repetition of the exact same line so many times was a bit irritating. The music as always was amazing. They created hours of new musical content for this game, as well as reusing the awesome sounds of John Williams, and a lot of the music from KOTOR.
Gameplay
Im going to break this down into several categories, as this is an MMO. There are many categories people wish to focus on:
[b]Leveling:[/b]
Bioware saw what all the great companies were doing for the noobs who wanted to level and put it ALL together in the same pot. The main focus though was on the stories of each planet. Quests are all linked by area, as well as the main quests. You are also assisted by your companions, who aside from help you fight the good fight, take part in the quests you take them along for. You aren't obligated to do the group quests that are available, but it does offer GREAT loot options, as well as good XP. Wanna just do Flash points(TOR's instances)? You can start off low and repeat the instances over again, till you go to the next ones. Don't like stories? Want to PvP your way to 50? You can do it the whole way through, after your initial prologue. Don't like playing other players or stories? You can do space missions your whole way through.
Classes:
Bioware got both innovative and lazy when it came to designing the advanced classes. The classes are innovative because most of them can stem into a wide variety of play styles. BH's and Troopers can choose between a Tanking focused toon, healing, or damage dealing. This, and the ability to wear heavy armor makes them highly versatile. However, the fact that both classes are mirror images of each other (for the most part) kinda takes away from the uniqueness. The talent trees are great in the sense that your not always forced down one tree. For different purposes, its best to have a mixture of skills to be more useful on the battlefield. Having a healer who can do good damage is always good, as well as a damage dealer who can withstand a good amount of damage.
PvE:
The instances for SWTOR consist of FlashPoints and Operations. What shines in these instances is both the story line and the mechanics of the fights. Each instance has an interesting story to weave, from a rogue group of Mandolorians to an arena style War Game. The mechanics of the fights are also very innovative. No fight is a simple "tank and spank". Each fight requires some knowledge and 100% attention. You got Bounty Hunters fighting you with their ship as back-up, insect creatures you fight off with turrets (Starship Troopers much?), mazes you have to complete, and even a homage to Return of the Jedi. Loot is handled like many MMOs, with a combination of commendations, unassembled loot pieces that get traded in for gear, and other similar gear drops.
PvP[
Now here is where TOR is lacking the most IMHO. Right now, there are PvP servers just like any other game. However, it is few and rare to find moments where you encounter players from the opposite faction. You could go the whole game without encountering a single one, TBH. While its good for people who hate getting ganked, it sucks for those who want a true open world experience. There are also Warzones, just like Battlegrounds. However there are quite a few problems with this. Mainly the fact that since most servers are predominately Empire, all you EVER get for WZ's is Huttball. Huttball is the faction neutral WZ that pits two teams of 8 in a football/rugby deathmatch with arena traps and power ups. Now, this would seem like a good idea, since you don't have to wait much for queue times. However, Huttball is the worst type of WZ. It sucks to pick up a bad group, as you don't get anything great for losing. Also, there are no punishments yet for deserters. So you can literally leave whenever you feel like it. This is common practice now, and it ruins the game for everyone else. The other WZ's, Voidstar and Alderaan, are completely different. The Voidstar consists of 3 rounds. Your job either begins as an attacker or defender. You must either infiltrate the enemy ship, break through their forces, and download the files at the command console within the allotted time, or you must defend it from the attackers. Best two out of three wins the WZ. Aldreaan consists of a Republic drop ship and an Imperia drop ship. Teams of Rep and Imp players have to fight to capture the three gun turrets on the battlefield in order to shoot down the enemy drop ship. First one to drop the tickets to 0 wins. The planet of Ilum is also an open PvP planet. However, as stated before, too few Republic players makes for the combat onesided. The FPS also plummets here to as low as 1FPS. The PvP gear is collected based on commendations either purchased with tokens, or won randomly in champion bags.
Gear:
Heres the cool thing that Bioware did with their gear pieces: Many of the gear drops and tier pieces can have their stats removed and placed into other pieces of gear. For example, you can take your tier head piece, take out the mod and/or enhancement, and put it into a Custom head piece. As of right now, expertise (PvP stat), armoring(main armor slot for gear), and set bonuses are not removable, however there are talks of them implementing that. The idea was that Bioware didn't want everyone running around with the same armor pieces. The concept is great, but again, crafters cant make armor mods equivalent to the stats of tier pieces, as well as PvP expertise stats. Looks wise, the armor is fantastic. Juggernauts and Marauders look like evil, killing machines, while Sages look like soldiers of peace keeping. Nothing looks or feels out of place.
Crafting:
Here is another spot where Bioware kinda dropped the ball. The way Crafting is handled is with crew skills. The companions you pick up along the road handle all of the gathering, learning, and crafting of your selected crew skills. Each companion has benefits to certain different crew skills. You send out a companion on gathering missions, where they take upto an hour picking up useful materials for your crafting skill. In the mean time, you can send your other companions to go craft available schematics. Now the concept of how crafting works is great, for leveling. You never have to sit there and grind grind grind. All you have to do is send out your companions, and you can continue leveling without them around. The bad thing is, once you hit 50, you have BARELY any use for ANY of the craftable items. Very few of these items have any future uses. Only certain ones that drop off later Flashpoints and Operations have any value, and in the end, the mats are mostly bind on pick up (which means you cant buy them), and so are the very items you craft.
Space:
Space combat is by far Bioware's biggest mistake. Their intention with space was to make it an epic single player encounter where the players fly through streamlined levels blasting ships left and right. This was a BIG mistake. Not only is the streamlined content boring and easy, the missions DO NOT CHANGE. The enemy ships appear out of the same places, shoot for the same spots, and stuff blows up the same way every time. Anyone who has played any type of space game knows that you cant limit yourself to something like that. Its even worse for SWG veterans (like myself) who are used to completely customizing our ships, down to the COLOR, and being able to fly freely over a MASSIVE set of outer space maps. One of the main things that made Star Wars was its iconic space battles, and this game seriously strays away from that.
Game Support/Advancement:
When the game was first released, many of the bugs and issues the game contained were quite severe and bothersome. Most of the time, Bioware gave a general response for the problem saying "We're working on it". Now, in most games, those problems don't get fixed. However, when Bioware puts out a patch, and there is an issue with it, within 24 hours, they are fixing it. For example: There were quite a few problems with the release of Patch 1.1 "Rise of the Rakghouls". Within the night, they fixed the larger issues. As far as advancement goes, one month exactly from when they released the game, they had their first big patch with plenty of additions as well as changes. And they have already talked about the future changes which will be debuting soon. From what I can tell, Bioware is working REALLY hard on giving the people what they want.
Conclusion
I am going to agree with Kevin VanOrd main assessment, being that this game isn't a record breaking, ground smashing, history destroying MMO anyone assumed it would be, but it sure does what it does EXCELLENTLY. It might reuse a lot of MMO standards, but it does so with such exuberance that you could honestly careless what game it's similar to. It adds plenty of features, but definitely needs to focus on making most of them work at full potency. What it requires though is some time, and faith from both the developers AND the players.