Overall impressions from "The Old Republic" beta weekend - Adopt, Adapt and Improve

I've already dipped into my experiences with the beta weekend for Star Wars: The Old Republic, firstly by touching on the space combat missions and secondly by describing how I enjoyed my time with the Bounty Hunter class.
Today I'm going to give my overall thoughts on how I found the game and tell you if my expectations are still the size of an Imperial Star Destroyer or if they've been slaughtered like Sand People by an angry Jedi.

First up let me give you a bit of background on how much time I had with the beta and what I used my time on. I got in a good 25 hours or so, and in that time I leveled a Bounty Hunter to level 17 and a Sith Inquisitor and Warrior both up to level 10. I also dabbled very briefly with a Jedi Knight, but only got up to level 4 before the lure of the Sith Empire overwhelmed me.
My travels took me through Nal Hutta and Korriban, and I also finished up Dromund Kaas with my Bounty Hunter and just got my feet wet on Balmorra. I also played through the "Black Talon" flashpoint, so I got a taste of the "dungeons".

The first stop in my SWTOR experience was the character creator. Compared to what World of Warcraft offers there is an incredible wealth of choice on offer. I do however have two significant gripes with character creation.
Firstly I am disappointed by the race selection that BioWare has decided on. You really only have human and "variations of humans with slightly different coloration". I do appreciate the inclusion of the Chiss, which I have always thought were a very cool race ever since I saw Grand Admiral Thrawn in "Tie Fighter", but Cyborgs are nothing but humans with a few bits of metal stuck to their face and Miraluka are just humans with a veil over their eyes... Really BioWare?!

Miralukans. They're like humans... BUT! No eyes! Mind = Blown!

There are so many other interesting races that they could have chosen. The old Star Wars MMO "Star Wars Galaxies" offered a much wider choice including Wookies, Trandoshans and Rodians. I don't know if BioWare simply thought that people did not want to play anything that looks more alien than a red human with some small horns on his head, but I am really disappointed that we're getting treated to these "Star Trek" aliens.
I also found that the "body type" selection is too extreme with the available options. You go from skinny short guy to super Schwarzenegger and then to big fatty Mcfat with no steps in between. The end result is that pretty much 90% of the male characters that I saw in the game were all using the pumped bodybuilder body type, which is a big shame. There needs to be a more "normal" body type available that is neither skinny nor steroid filled.

On to the game itself then. Every class starts the game with the classic "Star Wars crawl" that sets the scene for your situation and finishes off with a cutscene that shows your character arriving on the relevant starting planet. It's a great way to set the mood and feels appropriately Star Wars.
You'll immediately be thrown into a conversation with a story NPC and be introduced to the voiced conversations and the dialogue wheel. Pretty much throughout my beta testing time I found the quality of the voice work to be really good and the conversations were interesting to follow. I did encounter several instances though, where I would be talking to an alien character speaking in their native tongue and their spoken lines would take only a second or two even though the lines they were speaking were two or three complete sentences, which was a bit jarring.

A big part of the conversation system is of course also the decisions you get to make, which are often associated with gaining Light- or Darkside points. These decisions can range from being very plainly incredibly evil and incredibly good, to cases that are very much grey zones where both choices seem equally good or evil, depending on your point of view (just like Obi-Wan has taught us all).
I really enjoyed making the moral decisions most of the time and some of them had me actually pondering the choice for a good number of seconds as I consulted my inner moral compass.

Of course the concern about the whole Light- and Darkside points system is that players might feel that the system forces them to min/max their points, because certain pieces of equipment has a requirement that you must have x amount of Light- or Darkside points. This could reduce the engagement of the players as they simply always click on the relevant alignment response without actually caring about what action they are deciding on. It's a tricky problem that I hope BioWare can manage to navigate around somehow.

During my playthrough of the Black Talon flashpoint I also had a chance to experience the group conversations, and while it is a little jarring that your choice may not affect anything (in group conversations every player selects an answer and the game then "rolls dice" and the player with the highest dice roll gets to answer), it was really cool to see my two party members included in the conversation and see their characters talking and interacting.

Showing up by hologram because you just couldn't be bothered starting up the speeder is simply bad manners, people!

Overall I really enjoyed the conversation system of Old Republic and I think that this is probably for me the biggest selling point that the game has over other MMO's at the moment. It really felt like playing a high quality single player RPG and helped a lot in immersing me in the universe and my character.

How about the gameplay itself then? Well, you're controlling your character from a behind the back 3rd person perspective, selecting enemies by clicking on them or hitting tab and then using abilities from the hotbar at the bottom of the screen to kill them. Does that sound familiar?
I will say that the combat feels very much like most other MMO's out there. You don't have an auto-attack so that makes things slightly different, as you will have to constantly be pressing buttons to bring down your foes.

You'll also pretty much constantly have a companion character following you around and helping you out in combat, so if you're not used to playing pet classes then that will also be new to you, though having played a Warlock in WoW I can't say that the companion felt a lot different in terms of actual gameplay than any of my demons did in WoW. Sure they have a personality and they'll talk to you from time to time, but out in the field they're pretty much just a pet that helps you DPS, tank or heal.

"Just shut up a fight, Vette. Before I hit you with the shock collar again"

The actual quests you will be doing are slightly more interesting than the "kill x number of y" in general, but you'll still stumble onto a good number of those quests, so don't expect SWTOR to completely do away with standard MMO quest framework. It should come as no great surprise that I found the quests that drive your main class storyline to be the most interesting ones with objectives that felt like meaningful tasks and not just an excuse for you to run out and gun down dozen of enemies and pick up some random quest item.

I'm not sure I'm a big fan of all the instancing that BioWare is using to section off class specific quest areas, though. When running certain quests you will see a doorway in the world with a green or red "force field" over it. These indicate areas that you can only enter if you are on a specific quest. It kills the immersion of the world a bit and reminds you that you're just playing a game. I guess this is BioWare's answer to phasing, but I honestly prefer a phasing system that would just move you out into your own little section of the game without the need to throw up big clunky looking red and green doorways all over the place.

Speaking of phasing I'm also a little disappointed that SWTOR extensively utilizes creating copies of the same zone to handle the population load. What this means is that you'll be coming out from the Dromund Kaas spaceport and find yourself at "Dromund Kaas City 17", with players scattered throughout Dromund Kaas City #1-20.
This is of course done to ensure that the zones don't get completely swamped with players, but it also makes things feel a little less MMO-like and makes hooking up with other players just that little more of a hassle.

If I have to pick out the highlight of the beta then it would probably have to be playing through the Black Talon flashpoint with two other players.
This instance sees you on board a spaceship fighting off Republic invaders and boarding an enemy capital ship to seize an important prisoner. There are plenty of conversations spread throughout the flashpoint and several of them give you some pretty cool Light- and Darkside choices.
I had a ton of fun running through this instance with my party and I felt that the experience managed to hit the real Star Wars experience of space adventure and action extremely well. Lots of enemies being blasted and rousing music playing in the background. Suitably spectacular. I hope that the other flashpoints are as fun to play as Black Talon and I really look forward to playing through them once the game launches.

*Zoooom! Pow pow! Boom!* Plenty of action makes the Black Talon flashpoint feel really exciting

My one big concern about flashpoints are how much fun they are going to be once you've played through them a few times and seen all the different outcomes. How much fun is it going to be when you're just skipping through all the dialogue? Or worse, when you've done it 20 times but one of your group members are playing it for the first time and insists on watching all the dialogue, making the rest of you sit around tapping your fingers impatiently on your desk and wanting to Force choke that damn newcomer.

Ultimately I did end up having a lot of fun during the SWTOR beta weekend. There is no doubt that BioWare is delivering a very polished product. SWTOR is looking to be a top quality MMO, but at the end of the day it is still very much a MMO and in terms of actual gameplay it does feel very similar to many MMO's that we've played before.
This is not necessarily a bad thing, but playing the beta did remind me that I needed to temper my expectations a little.
I think that SWTOR is a cautiously ambitious MMO in that it is trying to challenge the genre a little by adding a lot of focus on story, but at the same time it sticks dogmatically to most of the "traditional" MMO systems, which is probably the safer bet, if not the most exciting one.



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