PAX Prime ’10: Star Wars: The Old Republic Preview

I should be pretty damn psyched for Star Wars: The Old Republic. Mind you, I’m not one of those people that played Knights of The Old Republic over and over until their eyes bled, nor am I some sort of BioWare fanboy. But I did play a lot of Star Wars Galaxies back in the day, even to the point of “hologrinding” one of the first Dark Jedi Knights on my server, back before Sony turned the game into utter shit. So the thought of a new Star Wars MMORPG gets me salivating.

But SW:TOR tries its damndest to make me want to hate it. Every time I get excited about some new feature, another video will come out and make me want to gag. So in approaching senior producer Blaine Christine at PAX, I was a bit nervous about what he was going to tell me about the game. Baby Anakin? Playable Jar Jar? TWI’LEK SEX?

Designing out of the mould

Nothing quite so bad. The preview build that Christine and I sat down with featured six of the game’s playable classes, and three of the “origin” worlds, which immediately brings to mind Dragon Age: Origins. Blaine would not comment on the comparison, something of a running trend throughout the session. Most observers are familiar at this point with the class breakdown: Bounty Hunter, Trooper, Smuggler, Imperial Agent, Sith Warrior, Sith Inquisitor  and the two Jedi classes which were not shown at PAX, the Jedi Knight and Jedi Consular. We also took a look at the planets of Ord Mantell, Korriban, and Nal Hutta. The class design feels pretty good and does a legitimate job of capturing the feelings from the movies.

According to Christine, that was a major goal. “It all goes down to the fact that when we started to look at the classes, and actually working on the game, we wanted to design from the perspective of what is interesting from a Star Wars perspective, not just what we’re constrained to because that’s what other MMOs do.

“Now obviously some of that other stuff is very important, just by building an MMO you’re going to have those factor into the equation having to have a healer, DPS, whatever, but we went about it in another way. For instance, the Smuggler, when using the advanced class system, can specialize in ‘underworld healing’, so he actually is able to… because he’s on the fringe of society maybe can’t always go to your local Republic hospital and may have to know how to do some healing on his own.”

That ability to draw from the movies to really capture the feeling of the original trilogy (because lets face it, the prequels sucked) is something Blaine obviously felt passionate for, and gives me hope. Yet that hope gets dashed every time I see that goofy looking Mon Calamari from the Flashpoint video, walking around barefoot and speaking with a terrible British accent that would make David Stirling cry.

At least they’re taking fan opinion into the equation. There was recently a major outcry on the official forums asking for the option to have a DPS class that uses a single lightsaber, rather than the current dual saber or double-bladed sabers. According to Christine, they’ve taken that into consideration, and though he wouldn’t say either way, the final decision is pending. “We pay attention to what all the fans are saying in our community all the time and certainly factor that in, because we’re still in development, and we want to make sure that we’re making decisions that people are interested in,” Christine said.

Balancing requests with requirements

“We’ve got to make sure we’re not doing anything that harms the game when it comes out, but ultimately part of this was about making sure that we weren’t just doing traditional MMO specs, we actually make it so these decisions mean things in terms of really distinctly changing your base class. So that when you see the [Jedi] Guardian, who’s got heavier armor on you’re gonna be like ‘wait that doesn’t look like Jedi that I see all the time, why is he different’, and the same with the dual wielding and double edged sabers, so when you make an advanced class choice it affects the weapons you use as well.”

Apparently they’re also looking at drawing inspiration from other BioWare games, like Mass Effect. “Players will have their own ship to serve as their base of operations to explore the galaxy and also participate in space combat. There is some ship customization, we haven’t gone into details on what yet, but absolutely, we want you to feel like your ship is your own.”

When asked about player housing on land, Christine was a bit evasive. “Nothing about that [player housing], I mean we have talked about the fact that that you can interact with companion characters on your ship. So basically ships are going to operate like the ships in Mass Effect, so very similar to, you know, what the Normandy is all about; you can go there, get more story out of your companion characters, as well as explore the galaxy, that’s kind of what goes down.”

Mass Effect 3: The Old Republic? Well, maybe not, but it’s not the only EA game that has been an inspiration. “In particular, Mythic being part of BioWare, part of EA, certainly helps and we’re using some of their expertise to helps us craft those PvP warzones, and they’re turning out very nicely because those guys have had a lot of experience with Warhammer.” Now, that scares me a bit, because Warhammer had some major balance issues, but also some very fun open world PvP and some pretty good instanced PvP as well.

The playable demo was nothing that you guys haven’t seen, with one exception. There was a mysterious feature called “Social Tier” in the character sheet, that Christine did not want to comment on. “Nothing’s been announced about that yet, that’s a feature still under wraps, but keen observation on your part.” Could it be a similar feature to the Guild ranking system in Warhammer? Or is it some sort of new-fangled social networking feature? Speculate away Nukezilla fans.

So after my experience with SW:TOR, I’m still not entirely sure whether I should be anxiously waiting on bated breath for one of the few truly divergent MMOs, or whether all the “story-driven” talk that BioWare keeps spouting is just a cover for the game being another crappy MMO clone. But who am I kidding? I’ll pre-order the special edition just like everyone else, because it’s MMOs in general and Star Wars games in particular are an addiction, and today at least, BioWare gets to play the dealer with a sweet, sweet stash of the good stuff.