The Old Republic Space Combat Video and Commentary

I'm currently eking the last drops of Force fueled fun from the Star Wars: The Old Republic beta weekend. I've managed to get a Bounty Hunter up to level 17 and gotten myself a starship. This has allowed me to try out the very controversial "space missions" for myself and see what they're all about.

In this video I take you through a space mission in my Bounty Hunter ship.

As you will have gathered from the video, unless you were watching it with the sound turned off or have the attention span of a goldfish, I am not really very keen on the space missions in SWTOR. I don't understand the design decision to put in on rails shooting missions in a game that is all about immersing you in a believable world filled with player choice.

Perhaps it is some sort of ironic metaphor, a commentary on how these apparent choices you are making during the game are all an illusion and that you are actually just being guided down a narrow path with very little control.

Probably not though.

The basic idea of Star Wars space combat is of course a sound one, as we have seen in the X-Wing series of games. I guess that Bioware felt that trying to do a full on space simulator in addition to a MMORPG would be too big of a task to take on, and so we get "Rebel Assault" rather than X-Wing.

"The Old Republic gives you a galaxy to explore! Except in space where you'll go where we f**king tell you!"

Perhaps it is asking a bit much, both in terms of designing it and requiring players to learn a whole additional set of game mechanics. But I feel that what they have given us is a much too watered down experience that is frankly slightly offensive to people that have played X-Wing or Tie-Fighter (but since those games are so old by now, perhaps that will only be a small segment of the SWTOR player base).

I think that the space missions need a lot of work if Bioware wants them to feel like an integrated part of the game. I would almost rather that they were removed completely at this point and the designers went back to the drawing board, even though I know that is completely impossible just a few weeks before launch.

So SWTOR space missions... they're not good.



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