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Publisher: Electronic Arts
Developer: BioWare
System requirements: Windows XP/Vista/Win 7, 2.0 GHz Core2Duo/Athlon 64 X2 4000+ or better CPU, 1.5 GB RAM (XP)/2 GB (Vista/Win 7), 256 MB Nvidia 7800/ATI X1800 or better graphics card with Shader 3.0 support, broadband Internet connection
Genre: MMO
ESRB rating: Teen
Release date: December 20, 2011
Written by: Michael Smith
There really is no honor among thieves, even in a galaxy far, far away. Minutes after the smuggler arrived at her destination with a load of weapons stashed in her ship, someone at the spaceport hopped in and took off with it when the now-furious captain was off trying to collect her fee. The war between the Sith Empire and the Republic was heating up, so it wasn’t easy for her to finish her run, and there was no way that she was going to let some light-fingered bantha jockey deprive her of her hard-earned commission.
So begins the smuggler’s journey in perhaps the most highly anticipated MMO in gaming history, Star Wars: The Old Republic. Smuggling is one of four career paths you can take in the game, which takes place millennia before the events of the film series. I recently spent between 25 and 30 hours in the public beta, and what I found should bring a smile to the face of even the most jaded Star Wars fan.
 You start off with some of the highest-quality cinematics to be found in gaming today, followed by a character-creation system that has you choosing an affiliation (Sith or Republic), class (Jedi, Consular, Smuggler or Trooper), species (choice of five, some of which you likely won’t recognize unless you’re a serious Star Wars geek), gender and physical attributes. Once that’s done, the game begins the way it should begin — with the classic Star Wars title text crawl setting up the story, backed by John Williams’ iconic score (although most of the game features music from other composers, 12 in all).
Developer BioWare has put more emphasis on the RPG in MMORPG than in other games, grafting the Mass Effect character conversation system onto the classic World of Warcraft template. Your orientation to the light or dark side of the Force is determined by how you conduct yourself, both in combat and in conversation. It also affects how you’re perceived by NPCs, especially the companion who joins you in your adventure once you level your character to nine or so; you have to decide whether you want to be feared or revered by those around you. BioWare has also assembled perhaps the biggest voice cast in gaming history, led by the usual suspects (Nolan North, Jennifer Hale, etc.) You can converse with practically anyone in the game, even if they don’t speak English (apparently everyone in the galaxy understands every language without the use of an automated translation system).
 TOR is primarily a single-player game, at least up through the first act of the campaign. My companion was considerably better armed than I was, which made the tougher missions less frustrating; many times I found myself sitting back and letting him do most of the fighting. But there are separate instances called Flashpoints that require grouping with other players. I only found a few of them in the early going, but they become more plentiful farther along in the game. A secondary specialty becomes available at level 10; my smuggler gained the ability to dual-wield weapons and deploy a personal shield, attributes that kept me alive as the missions became harder to complete. Tech-wise, TOR is very stable and virtually lag-free, even with almost 100 servers running at full capacity around the world. This is hopeful news, considering that MMOs are notorious for rocky launches. The graphics are excellent, but not without a few bugs (corpses suspended in mid-air, etc.), and I got a respectable 40 FPS with very little stuttering, even with high settings enabled.
Star Wars: Galaxies shut down its servers recently, but hopefully those who’ve spent their time and energies with Galaxies for the last few years will give The Old Republic a try. It looks good, it runs smoothly, and it tries to make the MMO experience a bit more personal than others in the genre. Anticipation has been building for this game for a long time; on December 20 we’ll find out if it lives up to the hype.
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Bioware has absolutely NO idea how to run a proper mmo.. This should have been a single player game . or 4 player etc co op.. My prediction,.. when the masses get a class or 2 to the max level and beat 90% of the content.. The install base will dramatically decrease , as will interest in this game..
Im personally boycotting bioware for now anyways. Im still pissed off at how badly they ripped me off with Dragonage 2 .
Neither did Blizzard 7 years ago…
I understand all of the discontent with Bioware and the “hardcore” MMO players or gamers wanting to nitpick the definition of an MMO and the mechanics required to qualify as an MMORPG, but no sane person can argue that Bioware/EA have published a great game that is reaching out to a wide range of players. I’ve heard a lot of negatives about the game, but I have also heard A LOT of positive confirmations of the game’s ability to suck players in. The feeback ranges from console gamers that are playing it on PC to the hosts of the PC Gamer podcast.
That leaves me with the impression that all of the negativity on this site might be slightly biased and not reflect the feelings of the majority of gamers. Anyone can dispute its MMO label, but it seems foolish to try and make this game out to be a “bad” game based on personal squabbles with Bioware or whether or not casual gamers start labeling these sorts of games as MMO’s.
no sane person can argue that Bioware/EA have published a great game that is reaching out to a wide range of players
I can argue it, seeing as how by credible estimates close to 30% of the beta testers gave up before launch. Bioware has continually removed popular features and completely ignored all user feedback. Bugs go unpatched and new ones constantly get introduced. Some players held out hope that things would be fixed by launch, and of course they weren’t. That’s what the “squabbles”, as you call them, are primarily about. I lol’d at your “wide range of players” comment: if by “wide range” you mean anti-social, e-peen waving WoW players, yeah I guess so. Its blatantly obvious this was meant to be KOTOR 3 in the beginning and then EA started salivating over visions of Star Wars geeks paying for a single player game over and over. I’m glad you have such confidence in this game..probably a lot more than Bioware itself, since they’ve decided to commit breach of contract and demanded user credit card info or they will cancel your free trial. This is the probably the biggest bait-and-switch in MMO history: a trilple-A title that half the users can’t even play thanks to endless queues and network issues. F2P within a year, if not sooner and a complete embarrassment to the industry. I fully expect a class action if they start cancelling the free trials.
@psycros: “Bugs go unpatched and new ones constantly get introduced.”
That’s the nature of programming. I used to be a programmer for a living (these days I do tech support because I got tired of sitting in a cubicle 8 hours a day doing the same thing all day). Murphy’s Law of Programming: For every bug you fix, you will find (or cause) two more. It’s especially bad when you’re trying to debug something the size of an MMO while at the same time trying to add/remove/adjust content.
There’s no question that any coding project of any real size (say, more than a floppy disk’s worth of source) is a prime example of human-centric chaos theory. You simply cannot account for all variables and interactions between different dependencies, tools, environments, etc. Certainly you can adopt an extremely methodical approach with all the best practices, but humans made all the tools, all those libraries, the main program itself…bugs, like all mistakes and unintended consequences, are a fact of life. However, MMOs have given the industry such an insatiable appetite for endless revenue streams that anything not relating to the cash store or DLC is put on the back burner. Why do you think the biggest seller of all time was a single player RPG?? People are getting fed up with the constant deluge of half finished MMOs whose only purpose is to get at their bank accounts every month. At least with FPSs you have a real social element because team-based warfare requires communication and – yes, teamwork. Name one MMO today that demands either for more than a tiny fraction of the time. 99% of all content can be soloed and you can usually buy your way to dominance (hell, your lucky if you can even disable the “store” button in the UI). MMOs have become the prime example of everything that’s wrong with the industry – from coding, to marketing, to QC and all the rest of it. “So what if the mail system doesn’t work? As long as there are still enough addicts to keep the gravy train rolling we can devote all our manpower to the next 20-hr expansion. Plus we can charge them to re-add all those nice features we had in the beta and then removed.” There’s a popular buzzword that describes this business model: unsustainable.
I’m intrigued by the role-playing emphasis. What attracted my beloved and I to LOTRO was the narrative arcs and the friendly community. I was wondering if Jason could tell us a bit about whether the single-layer content is also suitable for 2 player co-op, and whether the narrative in the game justifies all the pre-game stuff that was released.
I don’t mind if the game is not as hardcore as some others; however, it is important to know what you are getting into.
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