Preview: Star Wars: The Old Republic

The Star Wars franchise has had a long history of video gaming excellence. Dark Forces, X-Wing, Tie Fighter, Rebel Strike, Rogue Squadron, Force Unleashed…all great games that pushed the envelope, introduced new technologies or techniques, or at the very least stood atop their contemporaries.

But in more recent years, the Star Wars Saga’s video game adaptations have fallen from grace. Critics and consumers alike have panned recent Star Wars releases like Episode 1’s Obi-Wan, or the Clone Wars titles, and with good reason. For the most part, these titles have been the equivilent of movie tie -in games, with the sort of production values and creativity you would expect in Shrek shovelware. And the general consensus on Star Wars: Galaxies, the first attempt at translating the Star Wars universe into an MMO, was not exactly favorable. The game suffered from numerous gameplay issues, culminating in a controversial retooling of the entire character system. But, if you will pardon the truly awful pun, SW: TOR may offer Star Wars fans a New Hope.

I told you it was a bad pun.

Bioware, creators of such genre defining RPGs as Mass Effect and the Knights of the Old Republic series, are hard at work on their own Star Wars MMO. The game takes place in a relatively under-explored collectively referred to as “The Old Republic Era”. Specifically, SW:TOR takes place 300 years after the events of Knights of the Old Republic 1 and 2, and about 3000 years before the movies. This separation from established canon allows Bioware to create new characters or worlds, and innovate without worrying to much about having to work around previously explored territory.

And innovate they shall. The Bioware team have some ideas that could very well shake up the MMO genre for years to come. They want to explore an often neglected aspect of the MMO gameplay experience: the story. Most MMOs have you explore the story by reading quest entries before going off to kill 20 boars, or what have you. Some games have experimented with different quest types, more interesting encounters with enemies, and the like. More ambitiously, World of Warcraft has instanced dungeons, full of unique boss monsters who taunt players and run through scripted sequences before getting down to the final brawl. But while these events give the enemies a degree of character, no game has yet tackled the challenge of giving player controlled characters a unique place in the story.

Traditionally, player characters are just hollow participants in the events that unfold around them. They don’t speak to quest givers or NPC, but are spoken to. There are very rarely any dialogue options to choose from, and almost never are their points in the game where a moral decision could affect the outcome of a quest, let alone have a lasting impact on the world. Bioware hopes to change all that with The Old Republic.

While details are still scarce, one way Bioware seems to hope to do this is by incorporating the sort of decision paths common to offline RPGs into TOR. As you proceed through the game your character will be given numerous choices. Kill the mouthy NPC, or spare them? Employ a subtle negotiating strategy, or throw all your cards on the table and make demands? We do know that the decisions you make will affect how a given mission or scenario plays out, and in theory it is possible for the choices you make to have lasting repercussions on your gameplay experience. In other words, you should think carefully about doing business with Hutts… it might come back to haunt you.

In addition, SW:TOR is being built to be more receptive to “Solo” players. In MMO parlance, that usually means quests and objective that it is possible to complete without the aid of other players. In TOR, the term “Solo Player” takes on new meaning… the obvious joke, of course, being that you’ll get a Wookie partner. Which would be funny, if it wasn’t also partially true. Bioware has said that they are experimenting with giving players the ability to pick up a cast of ’supporting NPCs’, not unlike the party you formed in KOTOR. These NPC allies interact with you during downtime, again, similar to how your allies would occasionally ask you questions and advance plot in KOTOR. Bioware seems to want to take this dynamic to the next level, however, by giving you the ability to befriend, betray, or ally yourself with a wide range of NPCs. It also seems like you’ll only be able to take one NPC ally along at a time, and it’s not yet known how much of an effect they might have on combat. One can assume, however, that these NPC sidekicks will mostly be used in solo-questing. It’s a compelling idea, to say the least.

For the time being, Bioware plans to launch the game with eight playable classes, four for each side of the coming interstellar conflict. To date, the announced classes for the Republic include the Trooper (a straight forward heavy weapons and armor specialist) and the Smuggler (a rouge-like class), while the Empire’s only announced class is the Bounty Hunter, which seems to be a heavy combat class with some unique tricks up it’s sleeve, sort of like a middle point between the Trooper and Smuggler. Of course, in a game that has such emphasis on story, gameplay mechanics might not be the only criteria you want to look at when deciding which class to play. While five classes have yet to be revealed, it is curious that most obvious choices should still be omitted. No Jedi or Sith class has yet been announced, leading some to speculate that becoming a Jedi or Sith might well be a choice you can make during gameplay, rather than at character creation.

And while it would be ambitious for any MMO to delve into the realm of forking paths and decision trees, SW:TOR has also decided to work in unique content for each of the game’s 8 classes, making it a truly mammoth undertaking. And as if that wasn’t enough, Bioware announced at E3 this year that ALL in game dialogue would be voice acted. No more walls of text from a quest giver.

In conclusion, all of these factors combine to make SW:TOR one of the most hotly anticipated MMOs in years. The goal of TOR is ambitious, “bring a single player RPG experience to an MMO”. If Bioware is successful in reaching this goal, this could be the next big step forward for the MMO genre. At the very least, it’s on the top of my list of games I want to see more of. No official release date has been set, but given the game’s progress and the hands-on time Bioware gave to some journalists at E3, I wouldn’t be surprised if we saw it in 2010. Until then, keep checking back here, and I’ll keep you updated.

Check Out:
Preview of SW: TOR [Kotaku]
Star Wars: The Old Republic Official Site