SWTOR Beta Mini Review

spookymia

I'm a casual gamer and have only played a few MMOs, those being City of Heroes (4 years), Champions Online (3 years), Star Trek Online (2 years), APB: Reloaded on and off and I tried Age of Conan and DCUO but never got into them. This is what I think of SWTOR so far. I played about 8 hours all up. It’s pretty good. I only played in the first zone and got up to level 9 as a Jedi Knight.

 

 

Graphics:

The graphics are ok, not as good as I expected. I think the graphics in STO are slightly better but they will probably improve over the next year as it settles in. Character movement is ok. Better than Age of Conan but not as smooth as Champions Online or STO imho. CO has a very different style though so maybe that doesn't count.

 

Character Creator:

The character creator is pretty basic. You choose a class, a race from about four, a few body types and various heads. There are a lot more options on the head but they are fixed, i.e. no sliders. Everyone starts with the same clothing and these change with upgrades and armour etc. Considering the character creators available today it’s quite disappointing.

 

Environments:

The environments are pretty big, but they seem bigger because you have to run everywhere and there are no travel powers. You can get taxis between some areas but you have to do a lot of running. One thing that isn’t good is that the environments are not very open. You have to follow paths everywhere. Sometimes your objective can be pretty close but they put ridges all over the place so you have to take the long way around. 

 

And now the good stuff...

 

Progression:

The voice acting is very good and the story is good to follow. The choices you make sway your alignment but I don’t know what that means yet. The story makes it a bit linear at the beginning but there are lots of side missions and I hear it becomes a lot more MMOy when you get to the teen levels. The missions are more varied than in any of the MMOs I played and most are pretty engaging. I’m guessing there is heaps of content already and I hear people are raving about the Trooper class storyline. 

 

Combat: 

The combat is really nice. It has some nice touches like if you have a guy behind you shooting a blaster you character will automatically block them with his lightsabre between power activations. Most fights are pretty easy, but some require some planning. I found no urge to button mash too. The targeting and movement is more RPG like than FPS like.

 

Companions:

The companion thing is pretty good. People are saying it is an innovation but STO did it first with Bridge Officers. The difference is that the SWTOR companion is involved in your story a little bit, but the STO bridge officers are much more customisable and are much more important to your play style I believe, although having only got to lvl 9 I may well be wrong.

 

Instancing:

It's mostly open world but there are small instances for your storyline. You can invite other chars to your instances. The good thing is there are no loading screens in these mini instances, you just walk through a cave entrance and you are in your instance. There are also very few loading screens which is nice.

 

 

I'm based in Australia and played a west coast server. I hardly got any lag, but when I did, strangly it was in my characters personal instances most, and when I went back to a large shared area it got better. I'm confused as to what this means. 

I haven't seen space combat yet but i'm not expecting much. Overall I enjoyed it a lot and it has lots of depth. I will probably subscribe for a while once it comes out.