PAX East Quick Impressions: The Old Republic

Greetings from PAX East in Boston!

Early this morning, we had the honor of being some of the first people to hop in the insanely long line to play BioWare’s Star Wars: The Old Republic. Considering the stories I’d heard over the weekend of the line for The Old Republic filling up within literally ten minutes of the Exhibit Hall opening, I was grateful for the opportunity to skip ahead and jump into the game after a meager hour-long wait.

Read on after the break for my impressions.

As we were waiting in line, I got to chat with a couple BioWare employees, and I was able to ask a few questions about PvP and endgame content, but I will leave that for the more extensive Old Republic preview I’ll be doing later in the week. As I was waiting in line, the employees passed around a few iPads with a short tutorial describing the “flashpoint” (instance/raid) we would be playing. After splitting into groups of four, we would each choose one of the four available classes – Trooper, Jedi Consular, Smuggler or Jedi Knight. The catch? We were playing level thirty-two characters. This meant that each of our characters had already specialized deep into their advanced classes, such as Scoundrel or Sage, and learned more advanced abilities. More importantly, it meant that we had two full skill bars’ worth of abilities to memorize, so the iPad tutorial helped teach each of us our various powers and tactics that would help us beat the demo.

I was always a fan of the Smuggler class, so I immediately claimed it, but it wasn’t what I imagined it would be. You see, in order to show how each class could take on multiple roles at higher levels, BioWare decided to throw us all for a loop – they made this particular Smuggler the group’s main healer. With slow healing med packs, underworld medicine, and other mechanical healing devices, this Smuggler healed while standing behind cover and occasionally throwing grenades or shooting his blaster. The Consular took on the role of ranged DPS, the Jedi Knight was melee DPS, and the Trooper was the group’s main tank.
When we finally got to play, the first thing the demo showed was the game’s multiplayer dialogue system. We all approached the NPC (voiced by none other than the voice actor of Winnie the Pooh) and right-clicked, taking us into a very BioWare-like interactive cutscene, complete with a conversation wheel. Each of us would select a response to everything the NPC said, and as we did so, the game rolled a random number between 1-100 for each of us. The character with the highest roll would speak for the entire group, using the response that player chose. Since dialogue can often change or interact with mission itself, this can create an interesting dynamic.

Once we finally got into the game, things went smoothly from there. In the preview I’ll be writing later this week (complete with gameplay videos), I’ll describe what occurred in more detail, but suffice it to say that the game plays and feels like an MMO should. There are definitely some tweaks that could be made, and some gripes that could be solved with UI modding, but overall, if you’ve played an MMO within the last decade or so, you’ll be right at home. The UI had some abnormal default settings – for example, the chat window was at the upper-left hand corner of the screen, and at the bottom of the screen was the health, energy and buffs for you and your target (instead of the reverse). One thing that bugged me as a healer was that I could not target an ally and an enemy at the same time, as is possible in many other recent MMOs (Warhammer Online and Vanguard, to name two off the top of my head). So, in order to switch from firing my gun to healing my ally, I had to manually switch between my targets. Additionally, I found that rolling into cover as a healer often severely limited my healing potential – if one of my allies ran outside of my range or field of vision I had to jump out of cover and run to catch up to them so I could heal them.

Other than these gripes, the game played extraordinarily well. There were a lot of really interesting abilities I barely had the opportunity to explore, and the group dynamic was great, even with half my group being complete strangers. We didn’t beat the boss at the end of the demo, I’m sad to say (I blame myself), but it was a blast anyway. I’ll have more updates on The Old Republic soon, so be alert!