So I recently decided to try out Star Wars: The Old Republic, since it has gone free to play. I played back in the BETA, and wasn't overly impressed with the game as a whole. It felt a lot like other, more popular MMOs, and overall gave me little reason to play it over the others. However, I had heard they added some new, unique features, and since it was at no cost to me, I figured I would give it a shot.
I'll likely add several more entries as I play, and I'll try to express the good, the bad, and the ugly about this game. You know, for science.
I'll be looking at this from a few different viewpoints: both as a player, and as someone who wants to get into game developement. Hopefully, after a few weeks of playing, I can figure out exactly what I think works and what doesn't work in the game, for me, and uncover some truly unique features about this game with such an awful reputation.
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First Impressions
From loading up the game and creating my Sith Warrior, I could tell the game changed very little from the BETA. The interface was still the same eye-sore of a neon blue, but was very nicely stylized. The game opens up to a small introduction sequence that introduces your character, and gives you a minimal backstory. As a story freak and roleplayer, I like this approach.
I immediately started digging through all of the key-bind and interface options as soon as I could. One new feature stuck out to me I liked a lot: the interface editor. You can move, manipulate, and modify any of the default UI elements, which is always a welcome feature. I at-first tried to make the UI resemble something I was more familiar with, but in the end, I decided to just suck it up and get used to the default.
I also hit my first brick wall with being a free-to-player: you only get two action bars. Now this may sound like a minor problem, but I knew that later on, those weren't going to cut it. I was eventually going to be starved for skill-bar space. Now, I could pay real money to get more of them, but I have sworn to ONLY pay money if I deem the game worthy of the cash. Otherwise, as my friends say, "the terrorists win".
The story for the Sith Warrior was quite excellent. I loved the characters you meet, and they all were just flushed out enough to keep interesting. Most of the minor characters you meet are truly one-dimensional, but that's alright considering you only see them once, at most. The voice acting is also fantastic, and I think really adds to it in the beginning.
It does make me a little sad that every other Sith Warrior in the game has my same voice, but it doesn't break the game for me. Just would have been nice to make my character a bit more unique. Plus, why do all of the Sith have British accents? I've never understood that in games, making the "bad guys" have British accents, but I digress.
Game-play is static and kind of boring. My force charge ability is cool, and it's fun to see my character literally fling himself across the landscape of Korriban, but the rest of my abilities are boring, and the icons all look the exact same: a lightsaber being swung. Just the blade. It makes it impossible to tell what an ability is at a glance. Most of them look the same, too, just different flavors of "hit thing with red glowy stick".
You also move slow as Christmas, until level 15 when you unlock "sprint". If you pay for the game, you get sprint at level 1, and can pilot speeders at level 15. They make free-to-players wait until level 25, and raise the price for them.
That seems to be the overall theme of this exercise, really: EA makes you feel like scum for being free-to-play. It's easy to feel like you're some kind of villain for having fun without paying, as the game reminds you at every turn "content locked for subscribers", or "you're suffering an XP penalty for being free-to-play, subscribe today!". If you want my money, EA, you're going to have to earn it. Charging me for the privilege of hiding my ugly-ass helmet isn't going to win me over.
I am impressed with how many features they lock for free-to-players. Here is a list of them from the top of my head. Most of these are unlocked by either paying "cartel coins" which cost real money, or subscribing to the game:
- You cannot show titles.
- You cannot show your last name.
- You cannot hide your helmet.
- You cannot color-coordinate your armor.
- You cannot use 2/3 of the in-game emotes.
- You suffer a 25% XP and Legacy XP penalty, which can be offset by buying an XP boost from the store.
- Many quest rewards are locked unless you subscribe.
- You cannot customize the appearance of your companions.
- You cannot access your bank tab.
- Prices for all in-game items are increased for free-to-players.
- You are limited to winning only 3 items out of dungeons per week, unless you pay for more.
There are more features locked and changed, I'm sure, but these are all I could think of off of the top of my head. This doesn't sound too awful, but these literally break your game in places, and make you struggle if you want to progress farther in the story, which is the entire selling point of the game.
The Good
The game looks pretty good, and the voice acting is spot on. The worlds and environments are nice to look at, and they are filled with interesting creatures. It's fun to fight packs of mobs, versus only one or two at a time like most MMOs, and the game is balanced around that fact.
Dungeons in the game, called Flashpoints, are fantastic. It is the closest I have ever come to playing a table-top styled roleplaying experience online, which is incredible, because I played the dungeons without other roleplayers.
The dialogue system is fun, and doesn't really feel out of place. It adds a bit of depth to your character, and makes it feel like you have a real choice in the world, compared to other MMOs.
The Bad
Combat can get boring and repetitive, and it doesn't really try to do anything new. Literally every other MMO ever made plays the exact same, and the allure of two Jedi dueling is completely lost because of it. Companions are neat, but they often feel mismatched, and their abilities don't really compliment your own in many cases.
Many of your choices boil down into Light and Dark side options, which are completely inconsistent, and it feels like many of the unique moral choices are lost because of this. At the end of the game, you need to be completely devoted to one side or the other, and because of that, I feel like I lost a lot of the neat options I could otherwise take. A good example comes in the Jedi Knight quest, where you get two choices: murder and entire tribe of locals, or tamper with their weapons to make them mistrust them and stop using guns. Murder is the LIGHT SIDE option here, and the tampering is the DARK SIDE option. How stupid is that?
At level 16, I'm still not really sure what my character is supposed to do. I'm wanting to build into being a tank, but many of my abilities seems counter productive. With a limited space on my tool-bars, this can be an issue. Plus all the icons look the same, so I often forget what abilities apply what conditions.
The skill point system is outdated. Badly. It's long, and filled with tedious choices that don't really affect game-play all that much. It falls into the trap of having "mandatory" skill choices that leave no choice at all.
The Ugly
This is by far the WORST attempt at making a game go free-to-play I have ever seen. The idea behind it should be to make your players have fun when playing, so that they WANT to spend money in order to have more fun. The Old Republic literally tries to force you into buying cartel coins to unlock features that every other MMO just gives out. Some of these features have no reason to be locked, other than trying to get players to waste money on pointless features.
I feel bullied into spending money on this game when I play, and I will not pay a single cent of my money until that changes.
The servers feel more or less dead. I saw plenty of people when I played, but they were mostly other free-to-players giving it a shot. High level players were rare and hard to find, and the ones I did meet seemed to be clinging to the game out of hope it would take off. It actually made me feel really sad. There was some neat roleplaying going on, they just need to give roleplayers more cool places to actually roleplay.
TL;DR
The short of it is, The Old Republic is a perfect example of what NOT to do when making an MMO. The sad part is, if they refined it a little bit, took away some of the multiplayer aspects, and focused more on the single-player story, they could have made this into a great KOTOR 3 with multiplayer. Would have been a better game, too. Instead, we get a really bland MMO that isn't worth a single cent of your hard earned cash.
At least I can pretend to be a Jedi.
