Star Wars: The Old Republic Preview

BioWare's billed the Bounty Hunter as a gadgeteer - it'll offer players one of the widest ranges of looks and play styles in the game. My hands-on session showed it to be pretty versatile, but I reckon it will be best suited to fans of ranged shooting. And jet packs.

I used a combination of The Bounty Hunter's abilities to kill loads of respawning Evocii Scouts and Watchers gathered together in packs outside of Evocii huts. I was able to take on groups of five of them without breaking sweat. Now, although I was probably too high a level for the area in which I was questing, the experience wasn't unrepresentative of the combat BioWare's going for. The developer's goal is to have the player eat through mobs much quicker than in other MMOs. We already know that the idea behind The Old Republics' fast-paced, solo-friendly combat is that the player ends up feeling more heroic than in other MMOs. In other MMOs, BioWare reckons, players feel like just another brick in the wall because they spend most of their time hitting a huge dragon with a stick in a group of 40 players who are all doing the same thing. In The Old Republic you'll feel proper heroic because a solo player can take on loads of computer-controlled enemies at once and kill them all in the blink of an eye.

After dealing with the pawns in this gruesome slaughter-fest (except it isn't, the game looks like a chirpy Saturday morning cartoon), I was charged with killing Huttsbane, the wonderfully-named head of the Evocii village. In typical BioWare fashion, I was presented with a choice: do I cut off Huttsbane's head and bring it back to my paymasters, or do I sympathise with the proud natives and take the head of another Evocii in his place? I cut off Huttsbane's head, of course. I'm a Bounty Hunter, for pity's sake.

While it was great to get a taste of the game's moral decision-making in a single-player sense, I still haven't seen how grouping will work within the game's fully voiced, cinematic conversation system and story-driven gameplay. Nearly a year after the game's reveal BioWare is yet to explain just how plot decisions will be made when you've got a group of players all pulling in different directions. Who will decide which dialogue option to choose in a key cutscene? Will it be stat based? Will it be determined by a random dice roll? Will the player with the quickest mouse movement win out? And then, how will your decisions come back to bite you in the ass, as BioWare has promised they will?

Back in December, producer Blaine Christine told me he couldn't go into detail on grouping despite the fact that there will definitely be grouping in the game. But he did tell me that the group-specific content will be "additional to the main story". Say, for example, there are two players in a group having a conversation with an NPC - a conversation that has a number of potential outcomes. BioWare has said that both players will make real-time decisions that influence the way the conversation goes, but it still hasn't worked out the nuts and bolts of it. Obviously, if voice over internet is supported, players will be able to work out how to proceed by talking with each other. But let's be honest, talking never did anyone any good in a pick up group.

Just how much of an MMO will The Old Republic end up being? Will it be a predominantly instanced game that has MMO elements wrapped around it? Or will the game be, first and foremost, a social experience with single-player RPG elements innovatively weaved into the gameplay? Really, a year from release, I still haven't got a clue what kind of game BioWare is making.

But The Old Republic's potential is mind-boggling. If BioWare can realise it without sacrificing all that is good about the MMO, it may have one of the greatest online-enabled games of all time on its hands. But so far that's all The Old Republic is: potential. With E3 2010 fast-approaching, it's time for the game to show us what it's really got.

Star Wars: The Old Republic will be out in spring 2011.