Star Wars: The Old Republic Hands-on Preview

So here’s my problem with BioWare’s ambitious Star Wars MMORPG: it sounds genuinely revolutionary in theory, but in practice, the practice I’ve experienced at least, there’s nothing revolutionary about it. Let me explain.

At EA’s recent spring showcase event, I, once again, got the chance to play The Old Republic on servers whirring back at BioWare’s Austin, Texas, studio. This time, I played as a level six Rattataki Bounty Hunter, one of eight classes that’ll be included in the game. As all Star Wars fans know, the Rattataki are a near human species with chalk-white skin and bald heads. Asajj Ventress, a Dark Jedi from animated series The Clone Wars, is a Rattataki, for example (didn’t have to Google Rattataki. Promise). Whatever level of Star Wars knowledge you have holed up in your head, you have to know what Star Wars Bounty Hunters are, right? The Sith Empire class is based on Boba Fett, perhaps the most-loved Star Wars character of all. Bounty Hunters kill for cash, usually while hovering ten feet off the ground and spraying flamethrower fire in Jedi faces. I’m detecting some puzzled looks. Boba Fett got swallowed up by that vagina with teeth monster in Return of the Jedi, remember? Sigh.

The thing is, while my hands-on was with a race and class I’d never previously played as, the experience offered little new information and felt disappointingly familiar. Given how long The Old Republic has been in development, and how many times it’s been playable at preview events, I was hoping to at least glimpse some of the innovative features BioWare’s been banging on about since the game was announced back in 2008. Alas, my hopes were dashed.

Before we get into that, let’s give the poor Bounty Hunter the benefit of the doubt. Bounty Hunters begin life on Nal Hutta – the barbecue-coloured home planet of the bulbous Hutt race. My gameplay demo began in a dusty Cantina. Inside, NPCs were walking about, doing their business. Some of them had quests available for pick up. The main one in this area, picked up from the evil ball of flab that is Nem’ro The Hutt, instructed me to head towards a nearby village and kill all of its inhabitants – perfect work for an imperial-funded jet pack for hire.

Here’s the deal: The Hutts ditched their original home world, Varl, after they killed it with pollution. They then settled on Nal Hutta, much to the annoyance of the primitive native race the Evocii. It’s the Evocii, with their powerful tribal warriors, that we were ordered to sort out. James Cameron eat your heart out.

So off I trotted, holding W on the keyboard to run forward, moving the camera about with the mouse and occasionally jumping with flirtatious presses of the space bar. Inside the Cantina a band played out a ditty reminiscent of the Cantina Theme Tune from the first Star Wars film. Outside, Hutta’s barren, sludge-infested wasteland presented itself. The once lush jungle planet has been reduced to something akin to Croydon on a Friday night – it is a cesspit of doom, depression and drunken down-and-outs. I bet the Hutta Tourist Board has a hard time selling the planet as a holiday destination for wealthy members of the Galactic Senate.

After a few minutes spent walking towards my clearly marked destination, I came up on the Evocii village and got my hands dirty with Bounty Hunter combat. The Bounty Hunter begins with six special abilities, all mapped to the number keys. Rapid Shot, your basic attack, fires a quick stream of bolts. Missile Shot fires a high damage rocket that knocks your opponents down and has an area of effect. The channelled Flame Thrower ability (check it out in FMV form in the game’s glorious E3 2009 trailer) spews searing fire in a ten metre cone. The Electro Dart stuns your opponents for five seconds, making them susceptible to the Rail Shot, a heavy damage attack that only works against vulnerable targets. And finally there’s the Vent Heat ability, used to cool down your weapons of destruction when they overheat. The Bounty Hunter’s abilities aren’t limited by mana, rage, energy or something else that’s basically mana. They’re limited by heat, ie, when you get too hot, you have to cool them down.

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.