Evan and I are watching the last two Harry Potter movies this week. Since I’ve already written about those (see here), I can’t do that again. You’d be getting the same jokes, and my fanbase (Hi Mom!) would revolt. I’m not far enough into Skyrim to give a detailed review of that game (but trust me, it’s coming). Instead, I’ll write about Star Wars: The Old Republic. The NDA was lifted this week, so I can talk about what happened last week. Note: this was being written well before it can be posted, so it may be out of date.
I got a fantastic email on Wednesday. It was from Bioware (or possibly SW:TOR), inviting me to participate in a weekend beta for Star Wars: The Old Republic. Now, I have been looking forward to this game ever since it was announced. I imagine when it does come out, you will not see me for a month. It will replace my addiction to World of Warcraft (or possibly, just add to it). The email gave me a link to a page with more links on it, and some details. The links were for a forum, and for an installer.
The installer itself was pretty small, but it was pretty much just a downloader, and once it was on my computer, it got to work. 20 gigs worth of work, actually. Besides that, there were two main things I had on my mind. First, I had agreed to an NDA (a non-disclosure agreement), so I wasn't allowed to talk about my beta experiences for a while. Secondly, I would have roughly 55 hours from start to finish (
After a few days of downloading, Friday finally arrived. I actually had it off (honouring the memories of our World War veterans by lightsabering my way across the cosmos), which was nice, but I needed to kill a few hours. Luckily (or unluckily, depending on how much free time I need in the next month), Skyrim was released on Friday at
Once that's done, I choose my class, race, gender, and specific customization. Class was Sith Warrior (dual wielding lightsabers? Yes please). Race was a bit harder. Humans were too widespread, and I didn't want the Darth Maul race because it would look a little too Satanic, and I'd probably be thrown off by the uncomfortable spiritual connotations of staring at that all day. I settled on a cyborg, which is a human but I got to choose specific metal improvements. I played a male, since it raises fewer questions than a dude playing a hot chick and getting hit on virtually. MMO's are weird like that. Lastly, I got some personal customization. That's where I got to choose a body type (ranging from 90-pound weakling to offensive lineman for the NFL), hair, eyes, the usual stuff. I ended up with a thin, young guy, black hair parted on one side, with mechanical right eye and scars on his left cheek. Pressed play, and off we go!
Dah! Duh duh duh! Yay, Star Wars Music! And Star Wars Text. I haven't even played yet, and already I get three awesome things. Two trailers, and iconic music with personalized text. Now THIS is how to start a game. F---! YES!
Anyway, the text describes how I'm brought in early for Sith training, apparently as some sort of secret weapon for a rising star in the Sith Order. I land on Korriban and meet my mentor in a cut scene, and get into a conversation with him. It's fully voiced, and I'm given some options on how to respond, but we can't loop around to the same points in any conversation, like in a single-player Bioware games. Almost every choice is irrevocable in conversations, so beware. If you’re a dick, there’s no option to go back and be nice to make up for it.
Anyway, I finally get control of my character, and get some pointers on the right side of the screen on how to move around, and other basics. I leave the room I'm in through a green screen, which apparently represents my own story mode. Green screens (they’re mostly transparent, but shaded green) are essentially instances from World of Warcraft. Some are personal (only you can go in there) and some are group only. It's cool because there's almost no loading, and if you interact with an NPC only behind a green screen, you can kill them (if the story demands) without having one of the classic gameplay and story segregations of "Hey, didn't I kill you already?" I got a little wary of green screens though, because after a few of them, I almost expected to have to kill whoever was behind them.
Anyway, I left the green screen and explored a bit, encountering a red screen. This is a story instance for a different player, so I wasn't allowed to enter. But I did find my way towards whatever I saw supposed to go towards, which turned out to be a tomb of some sort. I recognized the name from the original Star Wars: Knights of the
In the tomb, there were more quest givers. You can tell they have quests because they have triangles above their heads. If they end a quest, the triangle is filled in. This is just one of the ways Bioware is trying to make SW:TOR different than WoW, by having gameplay the same but calling everything different. "See?" They say. "They have triangles instead of exclamation points. It's COMPLETELY DIFFERENT! And our character portraits are on the bottom." I actually liked the character portraits on the bottom, because they were right next to the action bars, so everything in our HUD was sort of grouped together, except not quite. There were some menu buttons at the top (character sheet, abilities, inventory, game menu, world map, that type of thing. There were only four action bars of 12 buttons each, and you could only see up to two at a time. But it was oddly set up. You could see one bar and scroll through them all, or see two (bars one and two) and scroll through one, three, and four while two stayed constant underneath it. So two would be for immediately needed skills that didn't need to be keybound? I don't get it. I ended up sticking my cooldowns and non-essentials on it.
Anyway, back to the gameplay. I got some quests, which took me around this giant tomb, with a bunch of other people. The lag seemed small enough (it was listed at <100 ms), but there seemed to be a bit of a disconnect between when I pressed the button for an action, and when I took that action. On top of that, enemy health gets taken off at the beginning of what action you take, but the animation may take half a second or so to complete. So I'd press a button, then a slight pause, then the enemy's health could decline before the animation would take place, and then my action would end. It all seemed disconnected, which is a problem for newbies. I have plenty of experience with newer Bioware games, and a few years with WoW, plus some other RPG's as well. I'm a veteran player, and it took me a while to get into it. How will this affect people that don't know what they're getting into?
Anyway, some of my quests popped up a bonus option. For instance, a quest for setting off three explosives at specific places might have a bonus option of killing 6 mobs, but that bonus would only be triggered by killing off a mob. So if you don't hack and slash everything around you on your way to your objective, you may be passing up valuable experience.
My original quest was to get a weapon from an ancient Sith Armory in the tomb. It wasn't a lightsaber, but it was a melee weapon. I got it (from behind a green screen), completed its bonus of beating droids, and ran around the tomb, doing other quests and getting hopelessly lost. I also levelled up and got some more abilities. And there was this little bar below my health that kept filling with dashes. Eventually I figured out what I was doing, what those dashes were (rage, a familiar gameplay mechanic for WoW warriors), got into the game, and found a route out of the tomb. I also got some nifty abilities. One was a distance closer, with me leaping at an enemy from 10 to 30 meters away. Usually, this would just be me flipping or jumping straight at an enemy. If something was in the way, though, I'd end up flipping sideways at it. It sounds silly, but looks unbelievably cool, like my character is hyper-acrobatic and gravity is his plaything. The other ability is an AoE (damages more than one enemy around me) that also stuns for a short duration. There were a few rage builders, but more rage dumps for large damage.
Out of the tomb, I ran to the Sith Temple, where I got more training, and met up with my mentor behind a green screen. Ominous indeed. I got sent to various other tombs that I recognized, and introduced to the travel system. There are taxi points, where one can take a speeder (sometimes bike, or just a shuttle) to another taxi point, but only to ones you’ve already discovered. It's a quick way to get across the massive planetary areas Bioware's provided. I completed some quests, and tried to take down the monster that was part of my main quest, but got killed pretty quick. I turned in some quests, killed some mobs, levelled up, got new abilities, and took another crack at it. This time, I barely got the monster down. Whew. It was behind a green screen, so it was story related.
When I got back, my mentor informed me I was summoned by the head of the academy, a Lord Baras. He was also behind a green screen, and gave me the quest of killing my mentor (for some political shenanigans involving my rival that didn't work out) and bringing his hand as proof. So, back to my mentor, I told him what was going on, and got a big choice. I could kill him reluctantly, kill him with pleasure, or just take his hand.
I decided to kill him reluctantly. I needed him dead, or else my new master may sense him still alive, or at least that I was trying deception. But he had brought me to Korriban and given me this opportunity. I had played up to this point as a rather arrogant douchebag, so it was a little jarring being thrown into this situation. Normally I play (any character in many games, actually) as a nice guy, but I tried to think as a Sith would. This was one time where I didn't just want to pick the worst option for gameplay reasons. So kudos to Bioware for story-telling.
I took this guy's hand back to Lord Baras, who sent me on some more quests. More tombs, better gear, higher levels. I got some HEROIC quests, which are labelled that way because they'll need two or more players to complete. They deal with elite mobs, or higher than that. And usually a boss. I tried one of them, and didn't make it very far. I hung around the entrance to the other, beside another player. After a few seconds, he invited me to a group, and we got to it. Well, we tried. We died. A lot. Sometimes I didn't see mobs, or pulled one set while he pulled another. Eventually we cleared the area and beat the boss (that last part went pretty smoothly), completing the quest. Then we went to the other area and did that one. It went a lot better, even though it was HEROIC 2+ instead of just HEROIC 2 (like the one where we died a lot). He died once, I didn't at all, and another quest done.
I didn't notice too many bugs. My lips didn't move during one quest, and my gloves were screwed up for a while. My right one was fine, but the left one flared up around my elbow. It looked like my wrist had it's own gravity-defying mini-cape. I noticed a similar bug on an NPC that was awaiting execution for treason. Due to the static nature of the surrounding environments and NPC’s, he’s going to be kneeling there, waiting for the killing blow for months. I’d feel sorry for him, but he betrayed my order and should die. You know, my order built on evil and all that jazz.
Eventually, I got sent on a quest called "The Final Quest" to retrieve an ancient Sith Lightsaber (if you're wondering why everything is Ancient Sith this and Ancient Sith that, it's because Korriban was the homeworld of the Sith millennia ago, but lost it or died at some point a while back). I ended up killing my rival (fulfilling the political shenanigans of my now-dead mentor) and getting myself an awesome weapon.
Also, I had a companion tag along. She was a Twi'lek named Vette who had been captured opening the tomb I was supposed to go into, and now a slave to the Sith Empire. I was to take her to the tomb and make her open up whatever secret passages would lead me to my goal. She sported a blaster and stat-worthy (if revealing) clothes. I treated her as a guide, rather than a slave (even if she did wear a shock collar to which I had the controls).
We got back to Lord Baras and got a new quest to meet him on Dromund Baas (the Sith Capital world). The personal questline never really stops. You end one in a conversation that also gives the next one, so there's always at least one quest to do or turn in. Anyway, I got a special token to show to the shuttle pilot that would get me access and take me offworld, which I did after clearing up some side quests and getting me through most of level nine (all the good stuff pops up at level ten). So I took a shuttle to the space station, which was part of the orbital fleet. I took off Vette’s shock collar (we’re more partners than anything). Somehow I completed some necessary quests and got to level ten, which opened up some options: Talents trees and PvP, as well as a quest giver. He told me to talk to a specific trainer to pick a specialization (Sith Warriors can choose Juggernauts - tanks - or Marauders - Melee DPS). I chose Marauder, because they can dual-wield lightsabers. The reward for this quest was a second lightsaber, so I was ready to get my dual-wielding on.
I was also given a flashpoint quest. Flashpoints are group quests in instances. This one involved a battle in the middle of a trip to Dromund Kaas. People were looking for a group in the General chat of the station, so I managed to get myself into a group with three other players. I got really lost, but eventually made it to where the group was (after a few blue screens - these are green screens that a group member has gone through already - elevators, and loading screens). We beat a boss, went back to the command deck, and got sent over to the enemy cruiser to kidnap or kill a general over there. We didn't die much (thanks to the healing of the Sith Sorcerer in our group. He was a pretty good player already), and I got some good materials from my Salvage skill. Salvage is a crew skill (think professions in other games) that can snag the wreckage of some droids, as well as some junk piles in random locations (like ore nodes in World of Warcraft). There were more gathering skills as well, and some crafting skills, but you're only allowed to choose one crafting skill (I got salvage, cybernetics to craft tech equipment, and investigation, which gives me companion gifts and some compounds I need for crafting). Anyway, I got some salvage, but not a lot of gear. Still, good times, learning how to group. Getting into social scenes is fun. In conversations, everyone is able to choose what response they want, and the game chooses randomly who actually answers. Doing these increases your social rank, but I'm not sure how useful the social rank will actually turn out to be. Anyway, once that was done, it was really late, so I landed in Dromund Kaas and logged off.
The next morning, my server was greyed out. I had no idea what that meant, so on a different server, I started a Bounty Hunter. Built like a linebacker, and of the Ratataki race. I got the opening crawl, and I played him a lot more sarcastically than my Sith. I'm not sure if that's because more sarcastic options are available, or what. Also, his voice was a lot different, and I got to wondering how they split that up. By race? By class? By body type? My skinny guy sounded arrogant (and familiar. I think he's the voice of Fenris in Dragon Age II) and my big guy sounded gruffer.
Anyway, after my opening crawl (it still gets me excited), I get plopped down into the bounty hunter's story. Same type of quests as the Sith Warrior, although I do get something new: Heroic Area's. These are areas where the mobs are much harder, but they aren't separated from the rest of the world by a green screen. I got lost and wandered into one. I was actually able to complete a few tasks there because another group was in there, clearing out the mobs and doing the same quests I was. I'm not sure if heroic areas are good things or bad things. You can sort of tag along with a group if you're feeling shy, but it's easy to stumble into and not realize what's going on until your paste on the ground.
Not that being paste on the ground is such a horrible fate. Dying is actually pretty painless. Gear takes some damage (which you’ll have to repair, but just about every vendor can do that, regardless of what they sell), and you have to wait increasing durations of time (depending on how often and quickly you die) to resuscitate in the same place, or to be resurrected in a nearby outpost. If you go to the outpost, you get full health. In place will leave you temporarily stealthed but at low health.
Low health isn't a problem as long as you're not in combat. Each class has a channelled ability that can regenerate all your health in 15 second. If you're not damaged that much, you can stop the channelling whenever you want. This ability means far less downtime between fights, or less money spent on food or drinks (as some people are used to in WoW). Fantastic choice.
Another good choice is a companion ability to sell all the vendor trash in one fell swoop. You don't even need to go to town. Just send the companion away (it’s an option around their portrait) for a minutes, and suddenly the inventory is a lot less full. I'm not sure where this was first borrowed from, but I did notice it in Torchlight. Bioware tends to borrow from good games, at least. From Borderlands, they borrowed the Glowing Loot Pillar. If the mob you killed had loot, it'll glow, and you can right click it to get the loot. A blue glow means vendor trash (it's conveniently labelled, too. "This item has no use, but may be sold to a vendor.") while a green glow has two good meanings. One is for uncommon equipment that can either be equipped, or sold for good credits. Green glows can also mean the loot contains a planetary badge. Each planet has its own badge (and sometimes you get separate badges for other stuff as well). Multiple badges can be traded in for rare (blue) equipment. Badges can show up as a quest reward, and very occasionally on a mob. Yellow pillars mean a quest item dropped. I imagine dark blue means a rare drop, and purple pillars mean epic loot (keeping with the tradition of white < green < blue < purple for gear quality).
And yes, purple gear is already in the game. In fact, I managed to loot a purple mod of some sort, but had no idea how to use it. Mods fit into modification slots on some pieces of equipment. The quality of the equipment determines how many slots they have. For instance, green-level lightsabers only have a color crystal, whereas blue-level have crystal, support, overlay, and one more that I can't remember. So I can stack my blue-level lightsabers with massive stats. Good times.
Well, anyway, I managed to get a group for the heroic zones, but missed out on the bonus because most of the required enemies had been killed already. That's one of the problems with heroic areas. So I missed out on a little extra experience.
I actually abandoned my bounty hunter around level eight (just after I had gotten my companion) to do some laundry. When I logged back in, my original server was back up, so I hopped back on (into?) my skinny douchebag of a Sith.
I picked up and completed a couple of quests around the Dromund Kaas Spaceport, then took a taxi to
Companion affection is one of the meters in the game. I tended to gain it in 15 point burst (a good decision will gain me 15 points of affection) and lose points one at a time (an arrogant or cruel decision will lose one point). I only lost a bunch once, when there was a quest with the option of what to do to rebellious slaves. I decided to manipulate them into doing what I wanted, and Vette (being a former slave) didn't like me to the tune of -30 affection. But I gained it in leaps and bounds on other quests, so it didn't really matter all that much.
Dromund Kaas involves hunting through the jungles outside of
Bugs turned up, but they were few and far between. One quest I couldn't complete because I couldn't loot the required object from a corpse. One quest I managed to reacquire despite having completed it the previous day (maybe the server maintenance reset it). I didn’t complete it again for fear that it would bug out completely and I’d have to restart. It's possible it was a daily and I just didn't know it. A few junk piles I couldn't scavenge, but that's it. My glove had fixed itself, and my lips moved when I talked.
At level 14, I got an ability called Sprint (actually, everyone gets it) that allows characters to move 35% faster when out of combat. This made it a hell of a lot easier to get around, particularly for quests that don't take place near discovered taxi's. I had to keep remembering to turn it back on after I died, though (and yes, I died often enough that that got to be a real annoyance).
Once I wrapped up my personal quest, Lord Baras sent me to the spaceport for my very own spaceship. Awesome! I cleared up a few more quests and wandered over there to take a look and try it out. I looked around and found a droid who couldn't fight, but could do crew skills for me while I did other things. See, that's another thing that companions can do. The perform crew skills, but have to be away for a certain amount of time for it to happen. I didn't really want Vette to depart while I had to fight (since she's quite useful in combat), so getting a second companion (you can only bring one with you) let me always have a crew skill on the go.
I activated the holoconference table (it's a 3D telephone, basically), and Lord Baras told me to go to two planets to hunt down and kill his spies. They're about to be exposed, so it's best to have them dead rather than alive, providing proof.
I also got the chance to try out some space combat. Man, is that awesome! It's a rail shooter, but it's a spectacularly beautiful rail shooter. My first mission was to escort a shuttle as it tried to make it to a friendly ship. Other fighters would fly in to take pot-shots at it, and heavier ships (think the Corellian Corvette that Princess Leia flies on at the very beginning of Star Wars) have turbolaser turrets. Each fighter and turret has a nice ring around it on the HUD, making them easy to spot and shoot. Fighters go down after one or two hits, but turrets take a number of hits. Shooting is done by left-clicking. Right click unleashes a missile at whichever target you have your mouse over. Your ship generally follows your mouse around within the confines of the rails, like a spaceship version of a third person shooter. The mechanics are fairly well done, and because it's on rails, Bioware can make the rails go every which way. I was screaming over some ships while shooting at fighters, then ducking under more ships before firing missiles off at various turrets on the frigate that was trying to shoot down my protectee.
The first time I tried that mission, I failed. But I succeeded on the second time, and then tried a few more space missions (three are available right from the start, and they appear to be dailies - you can do them once a day after you complete them the first time, so that's pretty cool). One of them involves an assault on a republic controlled space station, so the rails took me around the heavier cruisers guarding it to make a run over the top, then back out and in again for a strafing run at the bottom. I had a certain number of targets I had to destroy (shuttle bays, tractor beam emplacements, turrets) before I was allowed to jump to lightspeed, leaving a smoking station behind me and my allies.
The last mission is a showdown with some elite Republic pilots, led by their veteran boss. I was tasked with taking down 5 elites and the boss, all while flying within an asteroid field. And the asteroids are made of ice, making this combat deadly and beautiful. Bioware has made magic. This thing is just phenomenal. I can't wait until launch day. If they add PvP space combat, I may pass out from sheer excitement.
So, after I took a run at those, I went to another planet whose name escapes me, but reminded me of Tatooine, only with slightly more water and vegetation. There, my personal quest was to destroy some sort of building that contained evidence of who the spy was, and possible links back to Lord Baras. Oh yes, if you're wondering how Lord Baras knew his spies were in danger of being compromised, it's because we tortured it out of a captured agent back on Dromund Kaas. One of my quests there was to find a device that could break him, because he was rather resilient. The cutscenes involving the final device were both disturbing and pretty cool.
Anyway, I destroyed the evidence-holding building on this new planet and did a few other quests, before my intermittent helper - a Lieutenant Quinn - pointed me to a droid factory where the spy was. The factory was guarded by a lot of the best Republic troops, so this quest was going to be a bit of a handful. I managed to avoid a lot of combat, actually, before entering a green screen.
There, a bunch of a troops confronted me, delaying me so their superior (Lord Baras's spy) could bring in reinforcements. They never came, although the spy did. He was quite willing to die, but put up a good fight to make it look authentic.
Unfortunately, the Jedi investigating all of this managed to record our conversation, so I had to rush to the Spaceport to head her off. I got too her right before she could board her ship, but she had already transmitted her recordings offworld. Curses! We fought lightsaber-to-lightsaber (well, with Vette on my side as well) and brought her down. Lieutenant Quinn showed up during her dying breaths and told me he'd intercepted her transmission offworld. Good man! Our plans were safe (for now). I went back into town and upgraded my ship (you can do that), before doing the space dailies, this time with far more firepower. Ridiculously fun! Then I got on the holo with Lord Baras, who told me to go to Nal Hutta and kill his other spy there. After that, there was about 10 minutes left before the weekend beta was over, so I said good-bye and logged off.
My impressions? This game is seriously AWESOME! The double-trailer to Star Wars crawl opening is a fantastic way to get everyone excited about playing. Hopefully that will carry over to the hour or so it takes to get used to everything and get really into the game. From there, the personal story is engaging (at least the ones I played), although the opening planet for the Bounty Hunter is a bit depressing. It’s basically like a toxic waste dump, or
Levelling takes a while. I got to 19 after about 24 hours of playing. I'm not sure if that's good or not, but sometimes it feels interminable trying to get through your current level. But once you gain a level, your stats increase, you get new abilities (either new abilities or higher ranks in ones you already have are available at every level). I felt really stupid for not noticing the tab underneath my trainer that let me train in abilities specific to my advanced class (Maurader) until level 17. Meaning I had missed out on seven levels of abilities. Seven! But I picked those up and used them as much as I could.
It plays the similar to World of Warcraft, but tries very hard not to show it. It also borrows good parts from other games, for which I approve. If you're going to steal, steal the best! Space combat is awesome, and I want to get back into it. I like how groups are smaller (four people, with all roles contributing to damage instead of just the three DPS), but I don’t like that you need them for areas that aren't instanced. All in all, a fantastic game, and I cannot wait for December 20th (or a few days earlier, depending on how preorders went).
It turns out I don't have to wait that long. Bioware is announcing a new beta (the last beta), and they're trying to blow the doors off. Everyone who signed up to test before November 11th gets an invite, regardless of whether or not they've tested before. And a lot of people got to play this past weekend, so they'll all get the chance to play again. Plus, if you haven't signed up, many game companies have thousands of keys available. Seriously, there were over 200,000 between Curse and Joystiq. That's not even counting places like IGN or PCGamer (where I didn't check numbers). I think Bioware's hoping for one million testers, which would certainly put a load on their servers.
They also released some stats from the weekend I got to play. Testers put in one million hours. Since the period was only 55 hours long, there were at least 20,000 people in there. I put in 30 hours across two characters, and if people put in similar numbers to me, that would be about 30,000 - 35,000 people. I think there were about 20 servers, giving a population of maybe 1500 or a little more players per server.
This is actually divided between three duplicate levels, which is an ingenious idea on Bioware's part (or whoever they borrowed it from). Each player plays on one of three levels (one, two or three). This cuts down on player population in one area, and means that there's only one third of the players competing for quest items. However, what happens if you have a group quest and can't find anyone? You can talk across layers to other players in General chat. If you end up grouping with them, there's an option to hop layers to where the group leader is residing. For instance, I was playing on Dromund Kaas layer one, but grouped up for a heroic quest with some people in Dromund Kaas layer two. The game asked if I wanted to go to their layer, and I said yes (there's also an option in the bottom right hand corner to change as well). A long loading screen later, and I was in exactly the same place, only now I'd be able to see my group and help kill the elite mobs around us. Great decision on Bioware's part, because it's a fantastic compromise between having too few and too many players. There's no guarantee that there won't be crowding, or a lack of players to do certain quests, but it'll be three timse better.
Anyway, I signed up for the next beta, but I'm a little stick about what to do. I saw Bounty Hunters on Dromund Kaas, which means that the second world is where the classes for each faction (Republic or Sith) converge. So if I chose trooper or smuggler, by the time I got to the second world, I'd be doing quests I'd have to repeat in the actual game. So I'll have to choose Sith again (not that that's a real problem). I could play the Sith force using class, but I have a feeling they'll play similarly to the Jedi Consular I want to play for real, so that's out. I suppose I could play Bounty Hunter, but I've already played through the first few hours. So that leaves Imperial Agent. Either ranged or melee DPS, and possible healing as well. But the healing will be technologically based, so it would play a lot differently than the Jedi Consular, while still letting me get a feel for what healing would be like. So in less than a week (hopefully), I will again be advancing the cause of the Empire as its death dealing agent. You may see part II of this beta test column soon enough.
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