Spotlight On: The Old Republic's Imperial Agent Profession

After making a huge impact at this year's Electronic Entertainment Expo with an impressive new video trailer, Star Wars: The Old Republic has become one of the most highly anticipated games among online game fans and Star Wars fans alike. Publisher LucasArts had already revealed five of the game's character classes publicly: the Republic trooper, the smuggler, the Sith warrior, the bounty hunter, and the Jedi knight. It recently took the wraps off the sixth player-character class in the game, the Imperial agent, but at a recent press event, we had a chance to see this profession in action.

The agent profession relies on stealth and trickery to get the job done. At a glance, it may seem like the profession is simply an Imperial analogue to the smuggler, but the agent focuses more on assassination skills that include both close-range "backstab"-style stealth melee and long-range sniper shots. The agent also focuses more on deadly hovering drones and an approach to stealth used for assassination purposes, rather than a hasty escape.

The demonstration we watched showed an agent character quietly climbing a series of ramps in what appeared to be a Republic base. A few guards kept watch at each ramp level, and rather than simply run in with guns blazing, we watched the agent take down each group stealthily. To dispatch the first pair of guards, for instance, the agent character first did a quick survey of available cover by mousing over nearby environmental objects. Like we explained in our E3 coverage of the game, cover works by letting you hover your mouse over environmental objects and projects a colored stick figure behind the objects to give you a preview of how much cover those objects will provide. The agent character selected a set of crates and clicked on them to acquire cover, causing the character to automatically tumble forward behind them, still out of sight of the rebel scum. The character then dispatched an exploding drone (those wonderful, baseball-sized hovering spheres) to flank one of the soldiers and fired a high-powered sniper shot to fell the other. As soon as the first enemy fell, the second became alerted to our presence and began firing on us, though a follow-up shot from our agent's rifle, which dealt damage to the second guard, triggered the detonator on our drone, blowing him to bits.

After clearing this obstacle, we then moved up to the next ramp level to find another pair of guards. We took a slightly different approach with these two, immobilizing one by using the agent's "sleeping dart" ability, which silently incapacitates an enemy, then tagging the second with a "poison dart" ability that inflicts an accelerating amount of damage over time but starts out so subtle that its targets may not even notice. We then tagged the sleeping guard with a drone. For a few moments, all was quiet, until the poisoned guard made the horrified realization that half his health had drained away and opened fire on us. A sniper shot got rid of him, and we disposed of the sleeping guard with a few more rounds.

The next ramp level up was a bit harder to negotiate because there was no cover this time around. With no cover to hide behind, our character was unable to simply pop out a few stealth shots, so we instead activated our stealth-field generating belt (a holdover from the Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic single-player games). Apparently, this belt doesn't fully make your character invisible--rather, it just amplifies your character's stealth skill and helps you move more quietly, so you still need to stay out of sight. However, when in stealth mode, your character can utilize a backstablike stealth melee attack (with what looked like dual short "vibroblades"--the metallic swords of the Old Republic universe) that does huge damage to an enemy when performed from behind, and the last guard died bravely for the sake of showing off how this works.

The Imperial agent class appears to be a profession for players who want to think through and carefully coordinate their next moves in battle. This should prove interesting for players who enjoy playing stealth-based classes or assassin professions. Stay tuned to GameSpot for more updates on The Old Republic, its character classes, and more.