Guess what, guys? The Old Republic came out, so I did nothing but play it all week. All other media fell to the wayside in the face of the biggest MMO (soft) launch in years. According to Raptr I played something like 53 hours of The Old Republic this week, so I’ve got plenty to say about it.
We’ll start with the bad, since it’s short:
– Travel decisions don’t make a lot of sense: Let me clarify this, because it involves a lot of minutia. After you finish your second planet, your character gets access to his/her own private ship. They chose to make these ships their own zones for mechanical reasons, I’m sure. Why load the assets for each player’s class quests for every player, right? Well that makes sense, but it also makes short trips to your ship next to impossible. Every time you click that hangar, a cinematic of your ship takes off into space and you hit a load screen. Whenever you decide to leave the ship, another cinematic and another load.
– Related: There’s no fast way to teleport to your ship. You can teleport to the fleet and run to your hangar (and hit another load screen) or you can fast travel to the spaceport and run to your ship, but there’s no way to just, BAM, teleport to your ship…yet.
– When you wipe in a flashpoint (think dungeon/instance) and you hit the button to go to the med center, you load into the Imperial Fleet. Then you can run back in (another load screen) and you’re back at the last boss you beat. Too many load screens. It’s the same number as WoW, I guess, but why not put a med center within the instances? I guess it doesn’t make sense for the mythology, but who cares!
– While we’re on the subject of flashpoints, Hammer Station is pretty boring. The other flashpoints have interesting encounters and neat little crew skill shortcuts, but Hammer Station is yawn-inducing and pretty easy. Even the Black Talon is more fun to do.
– This is a nitpick, but the characters that speak alien languages are all subtitled, right? Well why don’t they make alien sounds as long as the average subtitle read times are? Instead aliens all talk with big spaces in between lines.
Now all the goods!:
– The best part about working with Lucasarts is access to their vast Star Wars sound library. Everything in this game sounds sharp. Blasters, lightsabers, spaceships, etc. They even have these Star Wars-y “Duel of the Fates” type music that starts blasting when you’re facing elite mobs. Pretty fun. The little touches are great, too. Wear a mask or electric breathing apparatus and your voice changes appropriately!
– CLASS QUESTS! Oh my god class quests. These are so much fun! I can’t tell you how great it is to have a lore reason why my character is wearing that sick mask above (it belonged to my ancestor, Lord Kallig) or how cool it was to found my own cult on Nar Shaddaa by causing an “earthquake” beneath a rival cult’s building. This is the biggest thing that TOR is bringing to the table. The marketing speak of KOTOR 3-10 feels pretty accurate so far (maybe more like 3-7 when all is said and done)
– Aside from Hammer Station, most of the Flashpoints have cool and interesting decisions to make (and neat shortcuts!). They flow differently based on what you do and you can get dark/light points from those decisions. The other neat thing is that your crew skills come into place. I have high scavenging, so I can activate broken medical droids to help us or use a drill to punch a shortcut through a wall. Min’s high slicing skills allows him to hack elevators to skip trash mobs. It’s all very neat.
– Most of the planets after your capital have large, overarching storylines that have nothing to do with your class quests. On Balmorra, Torvalds, Evaclyn, and Nerius (mine, Min, and Jason’s characters, respectively) all helped the Imperial War Effort and drove back the Republic. On Nar Shaddaa I’m working with the criminal elite to push back a rival gang and garner favor for the Empire. It’s all pretty neat stuff.
– Datacrons are these permanent stat bonus things that you can find in hidden places on each of the planets. Hunting for those has been tons of fun. The devs stuck them in some pretty devious places. My favorite one so far was embedded in a droid factory that I had to jump down pipes to reach. A close second is one behind a forcefield that requires two players to simultaneously deactivate. Great stuff.
– There’s lots more cool things, but I’m gonna leave it there for now. This game is pretty awesome so it’s too bad I have to put it down for a week (unless I sneak it onto a parent’s computer) for Christmas.
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