PAX 2011 Preview: Star Wars: The Old Republic
At PAX East this year, the lines to get in and play BioWare's Star Wars MMORPG The Old Republic were just as epic as the game that these people were waiting to play. People stood for upwards of six hours or more to get in; even though I was able to get in line to play a good twenty minutes before the horde was unleashed on that Saturday morning, I still had to wait for a good two and a half hours.
But it was worth it. While BioWare has done a great job getting information out about the game's combat, classes, and story-driven style - something that makes this MMO a little more unique than most - it's just not the same as knowing how it all comes together. We were set up in groups of four, and went through quite a bit of "training" before we sat down at a PC, and that's a good thing, because these characters were level 32, this was pretty far into the game, and there were a ton of abilities on each character's bars to sort out.
Our mission was a flashpoint - kind of like a dungeon instance - on the planet of Taral V. We used the game's conversation system, where every time a choice for a response comes up, the person with the high "roll" (like you would do for loot) gets to have their say in the conversation. Jedi Master Oteg, a Yoda-looking dude, wanted us to free a Jedi held captive by the Imperials down on the surface. It seemed like all possible responses led to the same result in this case, but knowing that we were very short on time, we didn't linger in conversation or ask too many questions. The real gameplay started when the shuttle dropped us on Taral V.
The classes we got to play were the four that BioWare has announced on the Republic side: The Jedi Knight, the Smuggler, the Jedi Consular, and the Trooper. Each was specced out as one of the later, more narrowly-defining subclasses. The Jedi Knight became a Guardian who was good at melee damage and could take enough hits to be an off-tank. The Trooper was a Vanguard, able to use area-of-effect explosive abilities and tank the bigger stuff. The Jedi Consular was a Sage, using damaging Force-based abilities from afar like a caster would in other games. Finally, the Smuggler was a Scoundrel, and was our healer by throwing out medpacks and setting up little healing droids. All classes had crowd control capabilities as well as buttons to recover quickly in between combat sessions, several ways to damage enemies, and more. In all, we had somewhere in the range of about a hundred abilities between the four characters to sift through and work out, and we only had forty minutes to play. This was going to be tough.
We were up against some of the native wildlife on this lush planet, along with Imperial troopers that were defending a Jedi that the Imperials were holding captive. We had to get through this linear, but rather large and open path through a canyon, taking out multiple enemies at a time along the way. I played as the Jedi Knight/Guardian, so I was throwing my lightsaber, jumping into combat from 20+ feet away, and even using Force Pull to yank some enemies away when they'd jump on our Sage or Scoundrel. It's important to have an off-tank, too, because several fights had more than one big, tough dude to fight.
I can't speak to precisely how other classes played, but the Guardian used basic attacks, including a Sunder-like ability that dropped the enemy's armor and stacked multiple times, to build up focus points. Then, I could spend those points to unleash big damage attacks. There were a couple of sweeping moves that let me hit multiple enemies in a circle around me, but it seemed like those were mostly for getting initial threat, not for serious AOE damage.
Possibly the most interesting thing I noted about the other classes is that the Scoundrel was able to use a cover mechanic in order to reduce damage taken. The player could either use a function to run behind a low wall, or even use a special ability to put up a little barrier to hide behind. I'm unsure just as to how important it was to do this, but it didn't seem like it turned that gameplay into some kind of Gears of War cover shooter or anything.
BioWare reps there weren't really there to help us with strategy. We quickly figured out that they expected most of us to fail, and that on all day on Friday, even with about eight groups playing at a time for 40 minutes each (from 10AM to 7PM, mind you), only about 7 or 8 of them in total actually completed the flashpoint. It did seem to be difficult; we watched the groups ahead of us on the monitors, and at first we thought it was just a bunch of newbies who hadn't played MMOs before, but after a while it became obvious that the last fight wasn't a straightforward tank and spank, and every time people lost, they had to run for three or four minutes to try again. The boss was an Imperial officer, Captain Shivanek, with a 20-foot-tall "pet" (a Ripper, which does vaguely resemble a Rancor). The challenge was in figuring out how to defeat both at the same time, as the Ripper would do AOE stuns and I, as the off-tanking Jedi Guardian who took more damage than the dedicated Trooper/Vanguard, had to do dedicated tanking on one of them.
Our strategy was to stay on the narrow path leading to the boss, skip any monsters we didn't absolutely have to fight, and try to get to Shivanek as efficiently as possible so that we could get the most tries on him. And we did that, and got a good five tries on the boss fight, constantly tweaking our strategy. In those attempts, we switched tank targets, we positioned them apart, then decided to position them together, and also tried to have the tank swap over to my target (the pet, which was doing more damage than the Captain) once some threat was built. That last strategy allowed us to kill the Ripper on the last attempt, but that triggered an Enrage ability on Shivanek that quickly took out both tanks, and he then easily cleaned up the rest. We walked out defeated, having gotten so close to winning, but we all had smiles on our faces. (You can see a successful run from this same flashpoint here, done from the perspective of the Jedi Guardian - they make it look easy, even though they do almost die at the end.)
Will The Old Republic revolutionize the MMO genre? Will it satisfy millions of gamers that have already decided they hate MMOs? Will it put World of Warcraft out of business overnight? On all three counts, I doubt there's even a chance. But this game is already leaps and bounds ahead of Star Wars Galaxies was, even years after that game's release, and TOR is still months away from its launch. Sure, we get a very familiar interface and the action is very similar to that of other MMOs, but the production values are top-notch, the action is slick and smooth, and the story should (hopefully - we didn't get to see too much of it) add some much-needed weight to players' actions in the galaxy.
Not having gotten the chance to play TOR at past industry events, I have managed to maintain a hardened, dark pit of skepticism down in my belly for this game, especially since we've seen so many other failed promises in this genre over the years, but I'm finally excited for it. This is the Star Wars MMO that Galaxies should have been all along. And it's already got the quality and polish that many other big-name games in the genre failed to launch with. The Old Republic is set for release later this year on PC. It's already been delayed more than a few times, but if the rest of the game looks and plays like this, it should be a very successful game when the launch date hits.
