Emily’s Star Wars: The Old Republic Diary

There’s an angel on my shoulder that whispers a resounding “NO” every time I start to think this site is due a review for Star Wars: The Old Republic. You might have noticed despite 67 per cent of the content on VideoGamer being infected with “Th’ Wars”, there’s still a gaping TOR hole where you’d expect a scorebox and a few paragraphs on what TOR really means, to us, to the genre, thematically. But ethically, reviewing an MMO will leave any journalist in an awkward position.

There aren’t many times in the life of a reviewer when not reviewing a game seems like the one clear road to maintaining a kind of doe-eyed neutrality necessary for any journalist. But when the success of an MMO relies on how much new content a studio can feed into the machine before its userbase loses interest, critiquing the genre like a collection of fixed, single-state objects is a blinkered approach to analysis.

MMOs, these things are a quagmire of patches, updates, additional zones, dungeons, and quests added late into the game, nerfed characters, re-jigged stats, skills, and abilities. They change, often.

Persistent worlds change dramatically over short periods of time. In six months you’ll hear people saying “Remember when we used to have to queue for over an hour before we could even start playing TOR?” Even looking back a year and a half ago you wouldn’t have guessed Blizzard would be eyeing the casual market with the kind of unruly appetite fit for a Zynga employee. But it is.

Right now we’re a month into TOR and the gulf between what critics say the game is and what the game will be a year from now – hell, another month from now – is going to grow enormously and possibly separate forever in some pangaea explosion of updates and re-designs. How do you review something so genetically predisposed to metamorphosis?

That’s the basis of this diary. Like last year’s The Last Days of Star Wars Galaxies, or the SWTOR: Daily Diaries which lurks on our forums, the answer to the question is to treat the game like it is a persistent world rather than seeing that fact as a burden to your review. Star Wars: The Old Republic is a big, winding, hell of a thing that requires a few more than the standard 10 review paragraphs to pin down.

More than that, it’s an MMORPG that’s true to the second half of its acronym: a game with more of a natural inclination to role-playing anecdotes and storytelling than any other MMO the genre has to offer. Those experiences slip through the cracks of your standard, traditional review structure but in a game that hinges on creating a personal story it’s absurd to let that disappear.

So begins: Emily’s Star Wars Diary! This is the story of my character, Glucas, over a period of weeks, while looking at specific traits of the game on a bi-weekly basis to offer as thorough a look at Star Wars: The Old Republic as it deserves.

Diary – Day One: Ain’t No Party Like A Role-Playing Party, ‘Cause A Role-Playing Party Don’t Stop

The history of role-playing games is long and full of tribulation; not since the Blitz has the nation mourned so emotionally than when it lost its youngest generation to the introduction of RP servers over the internet. But when you’re playing a game where the Unique Selling Point is a solid foundation in character role-playing, the first step is just to give in. Picking the right class is crucial in TOR, but deciding how you’re going to play your character is at the heart of why TOR works as well as it does.

I’ve repeated this before: this is the first and only MMO on the market where developing an avatar’s personality is as important as levelling. Not only that, it will overtake levelling as the main incentive to play. And this is how Glucas was conceived.

Glucas is part of my continued effort to role-play as George Lucas as if he was a Sith Warrior. That means he demands a highly structured style of role-playing, and the result is an Xtreme sports of role-playing: an attempt across a period of weeks to stay in character without breaking form.

In my RP backstory, Glucas comes from the wildest jungles of Modesto, California, having decided he would leave his ranch to pursue a life as a career Sith.

Trying to stay in character, I created an inflexible man of simple taste. There are the three pillars of Glucas. Glucas spends most of his time in TOR doing everything for the money regardless of the outcome, while always making things worse by choosing whichever dialogue fits least in the scenario and ends with the worst possible acting. If it’s available as an option he will choose to blindly start romantic relationships with all NPCs.

These are immovable pillars, built to create as clear-cut a character as possible in the game. But how does TOR actually rate in terms of being an MMO?

Over the course of this diary I plan to role-play my way through The Old Republic while asking whether basic role-playing is enough to make a great Massively title. Stay tuned through the coming weeks for an in-the-trenches view of what it takes to be a successful MMO.