Gameplay impressions from the UK Community Event

MMO.Maverick · April 2011

I thought I'd post the impressions from demo players from the community event last week as found in this thread:

Some other stuff that was revealed at the event: no more planets will be announced before launch, there'll be space stations and asteroids though. Companions so far for warzones are out, for flashpoints they're in. New UI build is on the way even if the current one already seems satisfactory to many, talk about more advanced pvp will be coming soon.

Also handy to know: your loading screen will present you in a short text journal an update of your progress and next steps regarding your class storylines.

Deanogee:

I thought the (Jedi Knight) gameplay was pretty smooth and the story progressed nicely as your were immersed straight away into a "heroes" role. Despite playing for an hour It felt like I was only a small percentage of the way through the sub plot upon the origin world Tython, progressing only 2-3 levels in the process. Nevertheless with the whole game being bigger than every single previous BioWare project put together I see this story lasting a very long time and loads of tiny sub-plots along the way.

The music was pretty impressive it flowed really nicely and as soon as I entered a boss fight arena (at least I think it was in terms of the story) the music really got pumping.

In terms of dying you simply end up at the last checkpoint area but with everything up to date such as fights and mission progress.

Another thing is I didnt see a single loading screen playing for an hour and 15 minutes Obviously there was one right at the start before I started playing but that was it.

Did you solo the whole time or did you group with the other players?

I solo-ed personally as a Jedi Knight but I was challenged to a Duel by another player in a room. He/she won though haha one level higher than me.

What was the toughest part?

There wasnt any tough parts. I did notice however I had a disadvantage against longer range NPC's though which is nice to know a balance exists between the class styles (pros and cons).

Darth-reaver:

So i played the Sith Warrior for half my time and the other half i played a Bounty Hunter, the game runs nice and smooth quest system was easy to follow.

Combat is very similar to WOW both melee and ranged, i did find vendors, trainers and a taxi system on my short travels.

The games is looking very good, however i did notice some very minor bugs while i was playing.

But very fun to play.

I had only an hour to play so the characters were very very basic. Only a few powers to click or key in the UI...O yeah UI is nice and smooth i thought with a nice layout

Dariel:

Played a Sith Inquisitor tonight at the event.

Only got to level 4 but I absolutely loved the voice over. Even the random NPCs standing around which don't have much of a purpose are talking to each other and they have voice over too whilst they chat, continuously found my self stopping and listening to what they had to gossip about.

The phased story areas were pretty awesome definitely felt very cinematic and heroic every time you went into one. I had one scenario where I was interrogating a guy and had the options to reason with him, talk trash or just straight up electrocute him . There were some traditional kill x and collect y but nothing in terms of having to grind mobs as you were usually leading yourself to the next part of a story or phased area.

At level 4 i had 4 attack abilities and 1 buff, i only learned from the trainer twice and peeked at what i could expect, i can truly say i was always excited to level in that respect. I had learned force lightning at level 3 and overload which was a AOE knockback at 4.

Combat did feel a little button smashy at first until i did get overload which sort of put me into a bit of a rotation but can't comment much past that with only being so few levels in.

Did you solo the whole time or did you group with the other players?

Mostly soloed however there was always a players around killing what you were killing too.

What was the toughest part?

Fighting 4-5 mobs could get rough sometimes depending on what the mob was. There was this one looter NPC brawler around a quest location which took longer to fight then most NPCs.

Matteh:

I played the trooper, had a great time playing grouped with another 2 troopers

One thing mentioned is that we were playing off the NA servers and there are no European servers currently (I could stand corrected on how far along they are) but could show how far/close are from release or open beta.

Took me about an hour and a half to get to level 5.5 skipping a few conversations to get a bit further. Also there is a queue group/solo button for joining warzones don't know if its been mentioned before. I ejoyed the mini map and the whole transparent part of it. The questing as a group was well put together.

Nighthaunterz:

Just got back from the London event and I'm ready to give my humble opinions.

I'll get this out of the way first and say that I had had a great time at the event. The game was fun and all of the Devs were awesome. We all got a t-shirt and a signed poster, more awesome.

The overall state of the game is definitely pre-open beta, there were still lots of minor glitches with pathing, animations, npc vendors, items and a ton of other stuff. That being said, those are all minor minor issues that I have come to expect from playing early beta/alpha games. I didn't fall through the world, none of my UI was broken and the game didn't crash.

I chose to play the Jedi Knight class (we couldn't create our own characters). I won't go in to details about the story as I believe there are already videos out there showing the starting worlds.

Right off the bat I got the sense of being in a Bioware game, I was in an rpg, there was a story, it felt Star Wars, it felt Jedi, I was happy. The conversation system is pretty much what you expect from Bioware, but seeing it at work in a living world was truly liberating for me.

Nothing I saw of the actual gameplay was in any way revolutionary or an industry first but the way that the story is actually integrated in to the game is what made it unique. I actually wished I'd had more time to see more cut scenes and have more conversations rather than beat up flesh raiders. I have substantial mmo experience, and I enjoy story based games, but in most mmo's the walls of quest text are off putting and do more to break the immersion than create it (for me.) With swtor you get none of that, the story is happening before your eyes and ears and you get to be part of it.

The actual core mechanics of the game are not much different from any mmo, limited amount of starting moves, spam them to kill enemies. pick up loot, complete quests, get rewards and xp. If you are looking for the new wheel mechanics wise you might want to look elsewhere. That being said the combat system is as fun as any mmo can be at low level. The combat animations are varied and feel slightly more dynamic than other games. You start off with some buffs and a kind of generic out of combat self heal, which is useful. Several green items dropped for me in my limited play time and I could buy and sell with local vendors. Taking on multiple enemies at once was nice, you don't have to worry about not having cc and pulling adds. The system where you build up some kind of combo points worked nicely for the Jedi Knight, the finishing attack was very satisfying. There are med packs, I used them a couple of times.

Bonus quests are picked up slightly like rift, you enter an area and find some enemies that you can kill or another objective to be completed without speaking to an npc. Not all quests have to be turned in at an npc for the reward. You communicate with some npcs via the kind of holo projector thing, you can accept and hand in quests this way I think (?).

Tython and the whole game look pretty nice, we didn't have an AA and shadows were jagged as a hacksaw but I was happy with the overall art style. I didn't notice any textures or items popping in, draw distance was far and the resolution was set really high. There were however several odd happenings with npcs in cutscenes including clothing clipping and levitating.

The game flowed really well, I wasn't focusing on levelling at all. I was more engaged with following the story and completing the tasks my Jedi masters set out for me. The hour and a half flew by.

JamieM:

I played a Sith Warrior Pureblood for my 50 mins or so - from what I can tell you the game looks really, really good. Korriban itself is probably less of a jaw dropping world than Tython (what I saw of it which is hardly anything so I could very well be wrong) but it all fits very well with what it should feel like if you have played KOTOR and read the books etc.

I got up to lvl 5 - SW basic fight mechanics are built on building rage and unleashing it in strong saber attacks that take big chunks of ife from normal mobs. Basically the stuff that has been seen at PAX East, but the storyline is just awesome - you get to be pretty damn mean as a Sith - for example one quest involved me interrogating prisoners to illicit certain information. I pretty much chose the most dark side options out of the lot and ended up killing 2 of the 3 in spectacular force chocke / sword impaling fashion. Exactly what you'd expect from an evil Sith Lord in waiting.

I can't tell you how satisfying it is to kill things in this game as well - enemies really react to strong blows from your weapon and the combat sounds are epic in the way that Indiana Jones punching sounds were epic in those movies - not quite real but almost hyper-realistic.

Another thing - music is really atmospheric as well, hints of the Darth Vader theme drifting up from the orchestral score every now and then that really gives you a sense of how epic your storyline is/will be.

At the mo you cannot scroll out too far to get an isometric view of your character - in that way it feels very much like KOTOR but the animation on the faces is great - especially around the eyes - really sucks you in as the plot unfolds.

There was only one minor bug that i encountered that corrected itself within a few seconds - apart from that I could literally have played the game for hours straight it looked that good.

If you like what you see so far this game will not dissapoint and I am quite happy to let Bioware/Lucasarts do all the polishing they want becasue the game is going to knock some socks off when it gets released.

As a SW i started with 2 basic attacks - a light slash attack that builds rage quickly and effectively but is low damage and a second heavier attack that consumes the rage and usually knocks out a lvl 1 mob in 1 hit. You start with an ability that also heals you by channelling hatred - this is basically a mobile unlimited health regen tool that stops you having to spend down time eating/drinking a la WoW. Another improvement that will make a big difference levelling. With key binfding you get through mobs pretty fast and can take on 4-5 at a time no probs.

There was also a Shi-Cho (is that the right spelling?) lightsaber form which Daniel told me was basically a constant buff that you kept on to increase damage - a bit like a warrior's stance in WoW (except better ofc). SW also have the ability to fast travel, a bit like a Recall abiity to get you from one part of the map to another instantly I think - I didn't try it but saw it on the bar.

When you level up a small animation appears above your character letting you know you've levelled - pretty hard to miss and also quite cool. On my second level up I gained the abiity to force jump which is probably the most epic ability I got to try out. You clear about 6-10 metres (game scale of course) and smack the crap out of your target. Never gets old.

One minor, minor gripe now I remember - for me the UI was a teeny bit large - hope they will let you customise on release!

TheDarkKnight:

I decided to play my second choice of a main, the Bounty Hunter. A Ratataki. While playing Daniel came over to me and said that they had completely redone the race visually and I have to admit it did look different to the last time I played one. But still at its core a bald humanoid.

To get the bad out of the way. We were all playing on the servers in the US, there are none in the UK yet etc, and because of this, especially once we all logged in, there was quite a bit of lag.

An example of this was after I finished talking to Braden I tried to open a mail box, talk to an NPC and then check on a vendor. Nothing happened. So I ran of to my next quest point. Once I got there, to my story instance, the game caught up with me. My mailbox opened, the vendor list appered and suddenly I was talking to a Hutt Quest giver.... All while I was in combat. Was quite funny multi tasking.

Any way enough of that.

The Bounty Hunter is as fun as I remember. Much like the Trooper its a run and gun. Straight line... either the mobs move or they die. I only had two attack abilities to start with. Blaster pistol and wrist rocket, which is very effective with small groups.

My aim was to see how far I could get by just following my story line with out getting better abilities and without doing side or bonus quests. After about 50 mins I was at level 4 in level 6 / 7 area on Hutta. I was still able to hold my own on groups of 2 and 3 but anything bigger and it was time to play hide and seek and line of sight kill them.

What I learnt was that in reality it is best to clear areas and do the extra quests just to make sure you are on a level playing field. You maybe able to just do the Class quests but, at present, it is best to do as may as possible in any given area.

One interesting think that I can't remember seeing before is that I was getting nice XP for mob kills. I am sure that initially that mobs would not give XP only Quests. Thus removing the possibility to Grind mobs to level. I will need to go check on that.

The hour and 15mins we had was all too short but It was great fun none the less... hey I got to talk to a large talking Slug!

DarthViscus:

I played as a Chiss Agent.

The story was very gripping from the start, I found myself skipping dialogue only because I did not want to get too engrossed in the story due to time restrictions.

The stylized graphics were pleasantly pleasing on the eyes during gameplay. There were a few emotes that I found, /dance was the first I successfully tested

We were not allowed to view the character creation screen but each character looked quite unique from what I saw, It was made clear that there is still work and possible changes being made to this aspect. The voice acting was superb.

To form a Guild I needed to go to my capital of Dromund Kaas so I'm assuming there are requirements. I was unable to travel to Dromund Kaas at my low stage.

There were fast travel droids, you choose your destination and automatically get taken there on a speeder.

There are nice dark and light side graphics when you make a dark or lightside conversation choice. The dark or light side options were apparent via an up or down arrow next to the dialogue, so you could see what it would case before choosing it. One dark side choice I selected caused my character to instantly shoot and kill the NPC conversing which caused a bit of a hoopla and was pleasing to me.

The healing skill caused a nice graphical holo screen to appear in front of the agent that the character interacted with while they regained health and energy.

A few skills that I started seemed to have no cool down which made the battles rather easy on occasion. A sniper skill was available but only when behind cover, it took time to charge up and during this period you could get interrupted but it caused good damage if successful.

I leveled up and purchased 2 skills from a trainer, flash bomb and suppressing fire which did exactly what they sound like they do.

The world map was nice, you could run and turn your character with the full screen map open in a transparent manner, which made navigating easy if you ever got stuck.

The most important thing to me was that it did not seem like a grind fest, because of the way the quests are handled I felt like I was doing it to progress in the story and not just to level up.

rapidity:

Arrived for the 9pm slot. Played as the trooper. Got to level 4 in the time (with also a quick go on an all the other republic classes), and i can say i was thoroughly impressed. I enjoyed how the trooper is able to kite around enemies to avoid their melee attacks, and just generally really liked the attacks on offer early on for the class. Full auto and butt strike are especially enjoyable to use, though i did find there to be a glitch with butt strike with a long delay between the attack and the mob getting hit.

Combat dynamics were quite similar to wow in some ways, but its early level content so I'm sure with progress through the game the differences will become apparent. However, you do feel the sense of an 'epic fight' right from the get go as the developers have spoken about, whereby you're fighting 3-5 mobs at a time. A feature you certainly don't experience in wow in the origin phases of the game.

Story/quest side of things is just awesome! Loving the cut scenes for quests, quest choices and voice acting. Adds a whole new dimension to the game, and though in the short time i was able to play the game i wasn't able to fully absorb the story unfolding i can see it to be a brilliant addition to the mmo genre. Questing will no longer be meaningless and monotonous.

Orellian:

My experience at the 9pm session today was what I believe to be a 'unique one'.

I'm a pretty experienced gamer and had watched some videos of PAX Sith Warriors, I was sure I could get a little farther than them given I wasn't keyboard turning and didn't plan on getting killed 'too often'

My aim was the lightsaber, which the Devs I believe have previously said was between 5 to 7 hours in. Ridiculous aim, the Dev told me, not possible. I set out on my path of ignorance, trying to achieve the impossible.

The first four levels went by quite quickly, I skipped every side quest off the main quest paths. When I came to the first tomb where you have to kill a large armoured beast, I was under levelled for the encounter (I was level four, the beast was a level six STRONG (elite) mob, thus immune to the AoE Stun which made it rather challenging).

Luckily I had a single Stimpack which I chomped down on, that aid enabled me to kill it on the second go. Just to give you an idea of the level gap here, this mob drops a Vibroblade with a level 7 requirement on it, which I was still three levels away from using at that time.

I then returned to the Sith Academy where I took part in more mass effect style RP, there are some great dark side choices here, if anyone really is aiming for pure evil gameplay, you'll have alot of fun in the academy prison.

It came to a point where I was required to kill my first master, at this point there was still a noticeable level gap, I was 5, the master was a level 7 strong, and he has the first active lightsaber I saw firsthand in game.

Realism doesn't quite play through here, he fails to kill me in one hit like I believe a lightsaber should, but he did kill me, none the less.

I shortly came to realise I'd shafted myself here, I'd skipped too many side quests to be able to continue with the main story without either A, having a shed load of Stimpacks (and they don't seem cheap, approx 150 credits a pop) or B, spending time completing the vast amount of side quests I'd amounted in my quest log to date.

I was stumped, we didn't have more than half an hour left, and this is when I noticed "THEM". I was flicking through my inventory, and I couldn't believe my eyes. Dev Tools. Two shiny Dev Tools. One for instantly killing enemies, and one for instantly training me in all skills (I couldn't use the ones I wasn't levelled for).

I immediately tested the instant kill tool on my master who had defeated me twice previous. I smirked as 40 billion volts of lightning flew from my fingertips, instantly ending that part of the story and allowing me to approach for the cutscene and gut him.

I was now on a roll, I'm sad/very happy to say that I was most certainly consumed by the power of the skull icon now resting in my number one slot.

It was a race against time, I cleared some large open areas of mobs with my new found ability and I closed the level gap just through mob experience. I achieved level eight and had some great abilities, impale and choke being the two most noticeable.

I won't go into detail on the next few tomb quests, partly because I probably wasn't supposed to get that far, and partly because I didn't pay alot of attention, I had my goal and it felt within grasp.

There happened to be a Dev right behind me listening to Daniel talk designer stuff. He didn't appear to notice my new god like form, or frantic tab targeting/keyboard mashing. Picture a lightning turret, this was me.

After those quests we're finished I had hand-ins back at the academy, taking a new quest from my new iron clad master (who looks broadly like the metal masked villain from league of extraordinary gentlemen) - to go down to the prison and pick up Vette. I ran back down there (I had executed two and nominated another up for continued torture earlier).

Inside a prison cage was Vette, it was very comical allowing the jailor to provide her with two / three electric shocks which awarded further dark side points before she was allowed to join me outside her cage.

Vette had a set of aggressive abilities whilst she was with me in the field, unfortunately I didn't take note of the nature of these. At this stage in the evening were very close to finish, the talk with Daniel was winding up.

I went back to my iron clad master and he gave me 'the quest'. Get your

lightsaber. It felt very close, I could feel pulsating vibes emanating from the reward of this final quest.

Running out of the academy I made a trip to what appears to be the final tomb of the origin world, everything was coming to a head at this point.

I proceeded down into the tomb and noticed a few clickable statues against the walls...but alas...my time here was up. I was required to relinquish control and proceed to the exit, or potentially face pain of death from rather large bouncer types.

I felt it, it was close, the lightsaber was waiting for me, but it was just out of reach.

I exited and claimed my Sith T-shirt and Poster. On the way out I let Daniel and the other developers know just how kind they had been leaving me with such a great set of tools in my inventory. They blamed Daniel, ofcourse.

In conclusion, during live I will have great pleasure in replaying the origin world as Sith Warrior.

The game feels very polished and I don't have a single bad word to say about it. For me it has to live up to provide the same fun as Star Wars Galaxies pre-CU did, which although will be challenging, I'm confident in the quality of content in this game and its ability to keep people interested long term.

Saigo:

The force is.... showing potential in this one!

Okay, so just got back from the UK get to play (#SWTORGB) event and I have to say, well, I'm impressed.

I honestly didn't quite know what to expect from Star Wars: The Old Republic and I was a little bit full of dread after hearing all the rumours and scuttlebutt so I turned off the news for a while to give myself a change with the game. I'm glad I did. I went in to this thinking to myself "as long as I don't leave feeling depressed it would have been worth it" as the time drew to a close I was thinking to myself "JUST 5 MORE MINUTES.... GIVE US ANOTHER HOUR PLEASE!!!" but even then I get the feeling I wouldn't have had enough.

I went for republic, In front of us were 4 pre-created characters for us to choose from "click on create character and you'll be force choked on the spot" Seemed to be the message so I just picked from the 4 in front of me as I wanted to get in. Smuggler it is.

The opening smuggler area looks pretty nice, I have to say though that I was taking my time getting used to the controls and movement so I probably didn't appreciate it as much as I could have done, the UI looks pretty nice as it stands, however as I was told "the latest version has a much nicer UI" which was a nice little nugget of information, but right off it's intuitive, there's the usual 'skill bar' your health, mini map, quest tracker, everything you'd expect, but a real nice touch I found was that if you targeted a mob and it couldn't see you then there was a middle segment that was 'neutral' as soon as you became more visible it would turn orange, and when engaged red with an angry looking eye, nice touch!

Character screen is 'as you expect' but with plenty of info there, inventory didn't look huge but I'm sure it might get expanded there was enough space for the time we had to play and more to be fair.

Gameplay wise, everything felt really smooth, I was pleased by the character movement, jumping was fine (if a little clunky) rolling to cover looked nice (even if it felt a bit unwieldy sometimes) and combat felt pretty good, this is important, I always felt that once NGE came in combat in SWG was really 'light' feeling, here there's meaty effects, you really feel like you're shooting something and making it die/explode, it just felt right. As I said the 'getting behind cover' felt a little clunky, I can't image me doing this 'quickly' all the time it was more like something that needed to be planned but that might just be my play style.

The Smuggler opening area felt a little cluttered and confusing to me, enemies seemed to jump out of nowhere sometimes and it got a little annoying, the area was still fun though once I worked out what I was doing.

I completed a mission and was told to 'pick up my holocron' in effect I took a call this was nice and led to the same conversations as you'd have face to face, I didn't find the conversations as time consuming as I expected, but as someone who skim reads or doesn't read quest text at all (just use the map) I can still see myself getting a little bored of them, however the actual gameplay is strong enough to make you... me... not mind so much.

Anyway, the Holocron, I managed to do something that completely broke my character and stay in the 'looking at holocron' mode, yes the game still has bugs, the 'fix' was to log out and I took the chance at that point to switch character. To Jedi Knight.

Chalk and cheese in terms of the area. After the opening sequence you're taken to a lovely wide open field with lots of rivers and wildlife, some hostile some not, you're tasked to help padwans being attacked and off you go into the fields, it looked great I have to say even if my pre-built character was a bit goofy I spent about 5 minutes just looking at a river and the way it washed over rocks before realising why I was there....

Play style the Jedi feels totally different to Smuggler, it felt more akin to my Warrior, I prefer a straight up smash mouth rush in hack hack fight and the playstyle suited me a lot more, once you get a couple of levels you get your force jump and a defensive skill which are both satisfying to use, I wanted to force jump and 'swipe' everything as it just felt so RIGHT, I didn't have any force powers so to speak but as a starting class I really enjoyed the opening area and while the smuggler felt a little clunky the Jedi had nothing of that to it, everything felt smooth.

Ended up walking around the Jedi temple marvelling at the statues, the holo's and meeting a few friendly faces. That place is pretty stunning.

So to sum up.

Graphics - Everything looked pretty lush, if I was being honest I didn't enjoy the look of the smuggler starting area as much as the Jedi one, it was a bit more cluttered and could be a bit confusing to new players, plus the quests there were pretty basic.

Play - Much better than I was expecting, everything felt smooth or 'give me a few hours and I'll be with it' there was nothing there that bothered me and I felt very comfortable in the game, which is good as often when I pick up something new I just feel like it's all wrong, everything adds to that feeling, the graphics/animation, combat, layout of the UI, it just all felt natural.

UI - we have a new UI coming which is good, looking forwards to seeing that because if it's an improvement to what they already have (which is pretty nice!) then I'm all for it.

Overall - We got around an hour of play time, it's not enough to really get in depth but as I said I went in a bit worried and came out confident that there's a game coming that I'll want to play for way more than one month. We didn't get to see any crafting, didn't get to see much in the way of anything else apart from the opening area's but that was enough to set my mind at rest.

Sure there are bugs and collision issues, it's not 100% ready but if you were to ask me I'd say that another 2 or 3 months full on bug fixing and the game could well be ready for release. Of course that's only based on what I saw.

Costello:

Just got back and time for some feedback. I played a Sith Warrior (I'm pretty sure Human though could have been half Ogre from the look of him) and a Chiss Agent. I did experience some lag but this was due to the machine and not the server so I can't speak as much to the mapping as I'd like cause it was probably the lag.

The Good

The polish and finish to the game. No matter if you love it or hate the game there is a high level of polish in the game, not always noticable as your playing but when I sat back and looked at the 20 or so screens in view the quality level was breath taking. Thats not to say there aren't some issues with choices but any problems with the game that I could see where design choices and not a lack of work or production value. With lore updates as you explore and all those wonderful things you would expect from a Bioware game.

The individuality of the classes. Even at low levels the 2 classes I had played felt completly different and offered unique challenges and appeared to have their own personalities and ways of serving the empire. I can't go as far as to say it offers completely different gaming experiences as kill 10 thugs or 6 slugs is still killing something. But it will definetly open up the alt options or perhaps more importantly mean that there is a class for everyone.

The fun factor. Whether its flying through the air as a sith or taking head shots as an agent the game grabs your attention. Of course I can only speak for an hour and a half but for that time there is story and action that has to keep any Kotor fan happy with a number of different abilities and attacks available to the different classes that keep things fresh as you level up.

The Bad

First off is a very minor point with the self heal function. It works more like a rest function or a drink option or out of combat health regen option instead of a heal. Its very useful and I dislike in some recent MMO's where you have to purchase a consumable to get an increased Out of Combat quick health regen option. But unless you have 10 seconds between combat its not going to act as a heal.

Tried and tested gameplay. How can this be in the bad section well I'm glad you asked. The game play so we aren't talking about the story, the cinematics the VO or any of those lovely things isn't going to make you take a second look at all those MMO's you used to play and wonder how they got it so wrong. From my experience ToR has taken what others have done and tweaked it so instead of a charge its a leap (looks much better) or instead of disappearing to avoid danger your rolling behind cover. And I think this will work very well for the legions of MMO fans out there that will pick it up very quickly. But for single player gamers that are used to the latest FPS or action game its going to have difficulty appealing.

The Other

These are more personal taste observations and the first came about as Stephen fixed my lag problem and I opted to take on the Agent. With limited time the story and the VO was getting in my way of exploring the game. Suddenly I'm watching my time tick down as someone is going on and on and on about something and why I have to kill 10 of these people. Right let me go kill them and I'm off 3 kills later I'm now in my next dialogue only this is subtiles, yes I have read the subtitles but his still talking and I can't skip through I want to go kill..... Now this was exaggerated by us having limited play time but for people that want to jump into the action this is a problem or at least EA and Bioware probably realise that they aren't going to appeal to everyone. If story isn't your thing with lots of wonderful dialogue the game is unlikely to appeal. But if you love story and dialogue and back story then its a wonderful experience.

The art direction. I think the game looks really polished and given the art direction is as good as it could be. But once again this will be one that divides opinion. The cartoonish or stylised look caused some issues with taking things seriously or giving the slugs the right level of menace, they looked good but they did look like stylised slugs. My mentor is imparting words of dire warning and its hard to take them seriously as I'm thinking about my half ogres mohawk. The big issue though was the character sheet screen which looked more like a trading card from some cartoon. Star Wars falls into a category of space fantasy which is a hard place to be. But me I always see anything sci fi as having a futuristic sharp look with hard angles and precises. Cartoony doesn't capture it so well.

Overall it was a fun and enjoyable experience with a very polished and competent game that ticks all the boxes for what works well in MMO's. There are design choices that perhaps aren't the way I would have expected them to go but I still feel it could compete well with anything in the market at the moment. That said it isn't going to cure cancer or re-invent the wheel and while it will bring story and VO and choice to the MMO game all important aspects I don't think it will change the way we look at MMOs.

Two questions answered:

Grouping up: Yes. You can get the hologram option and if they aren't around you just get a red x by their name so no chance of them adding to the conversation. It appeared though not long enough to check this that my agent could take a bounty hunter mission because I was grouped with a BH. I can only think this because the mission was to hunt down someones husband and child sounded bounty like to me.

Light/Darkside. It is very easy to tell if you are going down one of these paths cause you get get an icon with a star (light) or triangle (dark) in it in the conversation wheel. If they didn't existed you could be as nice or evil as you wanted and it didn't appear to effect your points.

Karduth:

I played a Jedi Consular at the 7pm session.

When I was given my first quest to collect the Holocrons (only to find out later that one was missing), I thought it would be the basic Fed Ex quests you see elsewhere. But alas, BioWare brought story to the table. I was taken through the Jedi Temple, down the Tython canyon and ended up in a cave where I assumed it'd be the final showdown with the naughty Twi'lek thief that had become unstable and semi-force sensitive. I figured it'd be a "do we kill him or let him live scenario" like we've seen in some of the flashpoint previews. Nope. The Twi'lek started to make the cave collapse in on itself, and I had to race to the exit! I was very impressed with the variation of outcomes and experience with such a short sample of the starting zone.

I found the Consular to be fun. My only grievance would be that the same bacta tank is pulled from the ground each time you cast Project. I'm sure this is a beta issue and come release we'll be flinging all manner of different shaped rocks and underground parts at our adversaries. Running with my weapon unsheathed still looked a bit stiff as well.

The level design is just absolutely stunning. For a moment I just looked at the Jedi Temple in awe. No longer do I see a bunch of pixels resembling a semi-accessible building. BioWare went the whole way and sculpted a luminous building that is well worthy of belonging to the Jedi. Unfortunately I couldn't access the Council chambers because they "weren't currently in session" - they were out to lunch or something I'm sure the Sith equivalent and the rest of the game is no exception when it comes to the extremely detailed zones.

My assumptions and general expectations were thrown completely out of the window. This is far beyond anything I've seen in previous MMOs. When play testers claim they have a hard time going back to other MMOs, I understand that sentiment now.

Aestel:

I was fortunate to play a female human Jedi Knight at the event. We weren't allowed to access the character creation however my character had a lightish skin tone with shortish red hair swept straight back along with two long scars one running diagonally across her right eye and one running bellow the right eye.

The game started with a simple text splash screen which then drops you straight into the game with your first conversation. Most of the time you get 3 basic responses with the paragon response at the top right and renegade response at the bottom right. Occasionally you'd get just 2 response and though I'm not completely sure I think these were the ones followed by a glowing blue bar appearing across the top of the screen with a +number in the bottom left showing a shift in alignment (I assume the renegade options glow red). You start out at neutral alignment and I didn't really see a massive shift in my bar during my play time.

After the first conversation you head down to take a speeder which is an on rails taxi system that you initiate by talking to a droid who shows you a map and possible travel locations. Uncovering further locations required me to travel to that location on foot and speak to the droid at the new location. The initial travel was free but generally it would cost associated with it.

After taking the short speeder ride to the training grounds there was a bind point on the right I saw further ones at the Jedi Temple and and the Twi'lek village. So they seemed common to most of the main hubs.

Once you head down from the speeder platform there is a vendor which presumably is for selling junk to however I didn't come close to filling up the available inventory space without selling any junk at all. You can expand on the initial space as well though the cost was set at 15000 credits which is a little out of reach of low levels.

There is also the second quest NPC which has a helpful yellow icon hovering above his head. This icon also displays on both the mini-map and main map to help you find NPCs offering quests. Once a quest is accepted circles appear on the map indicating where to go to complete an objective if an objective is in a different area of the map such as a cave or a different level of a build you get a thin rectangle with an arrow at the entrance to the other area. The quests also also listed on the left of the map and hovering over them shows which particularly indicators relate to that objective. When you get to an objective which requires you to interact with said object then the object lets of a slight glow.

As well as quest NPCs occasionally a name will appear in a rectangular box on your screen and clicking it will start a holo conversation with the named NPC offering a quest.

One of the first quests is to kill flesh raiders as a Jedi you start with two main attacking abilities one does low damage and generates focus (+2) the second ability does around x3 the amount of damage but consumes 3 focus. Also noticed that my focus deteriorated slowly overtime when not engaged in combat and maximum focus was 12. Generally was taking on 3-4 standard mobs right from the get go usually taking around one of the bigger hits to kill. Was missing auto attack on the first few kills particularly when the mob was really low on health and just needed a basic attack to finish off but it soon became a non-issue. The out of combat heal restored health fairly rapidly and so downtime was very limited. I picked up two more abilities once I reached the Jedi template around level 3 the first was a force leap which was extremely satisfying and the second granted a short defensive boost though had a relatively long cooldown.

Loot doesn't drop from every mob it was more around 1/3 drop something, was having to individually loot all nearby corpses separately. Generally money appeared in orange and I think the tokens I looted were orange the rest of the loot was grey/white/green/blue in ascending order of quality/usefulness. Most clothing item could be right clicked from the inventory to equip (there was a issue that meant I had to unequip my training saber to equip a vibro sword as it was trying to use it as my off-hand when I lacked the proficiency). Green or better items seemed to be bind on equip.

UI was easy to get to grips with there was a nice aggro indicator in the center of the UI to indicate if nearby mobs were likely to engage you. I wasn't able to find an achievement system. Guilds looking to setup in game will be required to go to Coruscant. Also there is a codex system which kept track of important events that happened during your story.

General opinion of the game was I loved the fully voiced its great to sit back and watch the dialog scenes and it really puts what you are doing context. Tython looks amazing the environments do lead you but they are open enough that you don't feel like it. It was great to walk into the big Jedi temple building and find tons of space inside. The game aren't standout but they feel solid and intuitive. Even though it was only the first few levels it felt like I was playing a game rather than trying to rush to the point where I could start playing the actual game, they've definitely taken the emphasis of the leveling which is good cause it takes ages I'd have made twice as many levels as a new character in RIFT in the same time period. Finally have to say even though I didn't have a saber and was just killing flesh raiders with the VO and music you really get that sense that this is star wars and your a Jedi.

Just to quickly cover off the current state of the game it did seem that most everything was in place for the origin worlds and in a generally good functioning state. There were some minor graphics glitches and the issue with switching weapons and there was some lag particularly before people started thinning out across the zone.

MMO.Maverick · April 2011

JonoBradley:

SWTORGB Trooper Analysis.

Firstly let me say; I'm starving, hungry and tired. Yet being all of these things can not bring down the elation I have after playing a simple 1hour/15mins or The Old Republic. Im writing this on the train home so hopefully everything is nice and fresh in my memory.

I jumped onto a computer and chose to play as a Republic Trooper. My decision was purely random and I wasn't considering playing a Trooper at launch.

Before we all sat down we were notified by Stephen Reid that due to us being connected to the US Servers we may experience occasional lag issues. Occasional wouldn't be the word I'd use to describe it I was inundated with latency issues from the off. I could have probably switched computers as others didn't seem to have the issues I had but I didn't as I was too focused on playing the game! Yet none of these latency issues have put me off from playing the game... Maybe from playing on a US server, but then again - I wasn't planning on doing so anyway.

After loading into the game and watching the fantastic cut-scene which involves your character and an NPC, where you're straight away thrown into BioWares trademark decision wheel so you get used to the conversation technique before even getting into the game. As a trooper your Origin World is Ord Mantell and there is allot of fighting from the off. Random killable groups of NPC's litter the streets; ready to be blown away by the Troopers awesomeness.

I managed to break the game. I'm not sure if anybody else did, but I had to have Daniel Erickson come log me in and back out of the game due to the game just freezing up and dieing. I suppose it had to happen to one of us, might as well have been me!

Now the one thing I can say is that now that I've finally played the game; I am convinced that the immersion and StarWarsey feel that BioWare have been talking about so much; is really there! Those of you worried about TOR being a WoW clone - cast those thoughts out of your heads! NOW! Even though TOR adapts generic MMO controls the game feels very different from any MMO game I have played in recent years and it is this that excites me the most I think.

I did die. I died around 7-10 times, I stopped counting after the 5th death. They were mainly due to latency issues and finding I was dead when I had 3/4health and due to a badly placed health bar. For me to have to force myself to look around the screen for the health bar is just bad design. Though happily I can report that the devs do keep saying this UI isn't final and the hopefully that means the Health bar will move. Too many times I was having too much fun blasting my enemies to smithereens that I forgot to move my eyes to check the health bar and died.

But considering my only negative comment is about something that they've already said they're changing I feel that the game is fantastic. I will be very surprised if anybody who saw the game today thinks anything differently.

AdmiralMalice:

1 and 1/2 hours felt like 10mins and all too soon the session ended. But, by the hair on Yoda's head, it was worth it.

I played a pre-rolled Female Jedi Knight (with a very scarred face that reminded me of Heath leadger's Joker) and off to Tython I went. The place looked awesome,very lush and vibrant. The VO really draws you in to the game right from the outset and if you so choose to skip it you can, I did skip some of the VO because I want to experience it fully when the game is released and I just wanted to get out and hit things

After I leapt off of the Speeder platform (accidently of course) in to the water below (nice forward roll animation when you jump from a tall object), I found myself running along the bottom of the lake trying to find my way back up to the speeders, which I couldn't but I found that typing /stuck worked just as well and I found myself back in civilisation. I asked DE if swimming would be in the game and he said that it wouldn't.

Combat was fun (a bit laggy, which I'm sure was just a local problem and wont show up at launch.) and scores of Flesh Raiders fell to my training saber. The item drops weren't too bad either I picked up 7 green items and loads of vendor trash.

Duelling is in, I challenged another Jedi Knight to a duel and it was good, nice and quick.(I won so I could be prejudiced)

The map is easy to read (and easily the most detailed I've seen in an MMO) and there are markers where you have to go.

There were a few graphical bugs/glitches that I noticed but nothing that would be considered gamebreaking.

All in all, it was a great experience to finally get my hands on TOR and meet the guys from Bioware.

wintersweater:

9PM SESH. Me and my friend (rapidity) managed to get some PCs next to each other, so we basically leveled up a jedi knight and a trooper so we could get some game time on both classes. I did play a smuggler for a bit though. I'm too tired to write up loads of feedback, so I'll stick to the main points. Note - I am not a massive MMO fan (i've played wow sporadically when I've had the time) so, apologies for this relatively simple take on the game.

General Points

- UI really needed improving. Some of it was good (inventory and chat with NPCs), but the character sheet looked ugly, some of the buttons were too big/too small, and I didn't enjoy having targeted players appear at the bottom of the screen.

- Origin world for both trooper and jedi knight felt quite chaotic. I'm not sure if its just because we had a time constraint, but I felt pretty lost at the beginning. I would have liked more quests available at the start for Jedi knight in particular. Plenty of mobs to tear into though (which is what i did for most of the hour in between exploring)

- There is a taxi system between villages/towns, which involves riding a speeder (which you aren't in control of). I had major problems with this, since even though I had "discovered" the taxi ports, it didn't allow me to travel between them (I hope this is a bug), which meant loads of running around.

- the combat was smooth and satisfying. I had my doubts before playing as to whether or not bioware could pull off saber combat that is true to the star wars universe, but they proved unfounded. it works really well.

- playing with the cover system for smuggler was perhaps the most enjoyable thing this evening. Its awesome, and easy to use. it adds a whole new tactical dimension to the game that Ive only seen in FPS. Plus, it was easier to solo big mobs, since the charge blast from your pistol (in cover) is pretty much a world ender. Think I'll be rolling smuggler when the game releases now.

Basically, I've been reading these forums since 2009, keeping up to date with the game. From a gameplay perspective (i'm really not interested in lore and role playing etc) it was REALLY fun to play. I guess there will be thousands of players like me who despite taking an interest in the game, haven't really had much experience with MMOs. I'll definitely be firing it up when it releases.

Kandycane:

*WARNING... HUGE WALL OF TEXT FULL OF SPOILERS IS INBOUND, THIS IS YOUR ONLY WARNING*

Note: Some of this makes no sense because I posted this as it's own thread, this is SPOILER HEAVY, and if somebody reads this without reading the capitalisations at the top of this post then I am sorry

Scampering to the back where the Empire computers were, I checked the first machine and to my dismay the Imperial Agent setup was Male... *GASP*, I dare not play a male character in my one and only chance to play SW:TOR, I quickly check mere thousands of PC's (read the one right next to it) and at last I find a female IA, the most ugliest Chiss I have ever seen, reggae Braids a really weird nose and well.. a chiss and not a human (sorry.. I dig redheads and I doubt I can be a redheaded Chiss :P). However, this did not matter... I was in my chair and I had the character I wanted to play.

It took a while to load but to begin we had to press the space bar at the end of the loading screen. Before moving on, I need to point out that we were on U.S. servers, tbh the lag really wasn't noticeable 80% of the time, and hovered around 200ms, it was occasionally spiking to 1k ms at some parts, but that I think is to be expected.

Launched into the wilderness of TOR, or otherwise known as the starting area you have seen for the Bounty hunter a million times over (or well in 2 videos :P), I was presented with a cutscene of a Hologram, my Imperial Master seemingly, with me being his agent on the ground. My job is essentially to infiltrate and spy on the Hutt, Nemrod, the main ruler of this region of Hutta. The hologram had a lot of black lines through it and whether this was inentional or not, I couldn't tell, it could probably work either way but compared to the Holograms seen in Taral V and other cinematics it seemed to be of "lesser quality".

Before we actually launch into the world of SW:TOR, a bit of background on my play experience and set-up back home, set-up at the event. Firstly, I am an extensive WoW raider, I have since quit WoW but previously I raided in a top 10 in the World guild and so therefore it is safe to assume I was carried through the content totally. I am used to using a laptop at home with a Razer Naga Mouse. We were using some Keyboard with Macro buttons on the RHS along with a Mouse with 4 extra mouse buttons, 2 on the side. Hence I was continually hitting these buttons instead of pressing 1 to attack just because I am so used to using a Naga Mouse.

With that aside and my initial dialogue over I was left with a quest (Oh and btw, imperial agent female VO IS Jo Wyatt!) along with 2 other NPC's located in the room, one was a droid who had a recording from Nemrod the Hutt about dealing with gangsters in the area. Another was from a local Bounty Hunter who wanted to help me make a name for myself by dealing with more vile gangsters (really, I am not sure what this guy asked me to do, I know I did it and only ended up killing mobs so.. I'll presume it was a different set of gangsters outside than the previous quest).

Having got my quests I preceded out into the Wilds of Hutta, no real idea where I am going to kill mobs, theres a small circle on the map showing a vague area of where mobs are but that was about it, I first proceeded to talk to my on-world surface contact about becoming... "The Blade"... my persona for infiltrating the Hutt's organisation and planting listening devices. However, as with all NPCs ever in MMO's this alien is completely incompetent and doesn't have the Gifts I require to get acquainted with Nemrod. Not surprisingly I tell him what an incompetant lowlife he is and set about going to rob some guys... but first! Combat!

This was my first experience with combat in SW:TOR, a helpful Bioware employee informed me that I could hold Shift and it would show me all the cover locations within my local area, they would appear as Grey downward arrows, when I was facing one and near enough to it a crouching man appeared and I was able to press "r" to roll into cover and gain access to new abilities. If I was targeting an enemy mob then the arrows would turn green if I would gain a cover bonus against them, I.E they would be within 180 degrees in front of me.

In cover I had access to 3 abilties, these were "Default attack"(yes this is a made up name, I can't remember it's exact name) "Snipe", a 2 second-ish cast and "Overload shot" (again not sure on ability name, it's something like that though). Essentially the default attack consumed no energy and was therefore usable every global, The snipe and the Overload shot abilities both consumed about half my energy, I'm not exactly sure on the regen rate but I probably had to use 3 "default attacks" before I had enough energy to use a special, I would presume this means about 10 energy a second regen, but don't hold my word for it.

Snipe was able to be pushbacked to the point where the cast would fail, much akin to Vanilla/TBC WoW, which essentially reduced it to a powerful opener, it would hit for around 100 or so and crit for around 150, crit modifiers seemed to be 150% across the board. Overload shot had no cast time and hit for around 80 or so and crits around 120-130. The default attack shot off several volleys hitting for around 10-20 or so, I think it was 2 hits, but it may have been 3... I'm not really sure. Essentially 1 special + 1-2 defaults would take down any weak enemy. Most packs were in groups of 3, but there were some 2's scattered around aswell.

Out of cover I still had access to the default attack and overload shot (may not have been the same ability, but it essentially had the same effect). However, I also had access to Shiv, an awesome melee spell that made me twirl around and initiate a backstab on the enemy, along with a buff that increased my agility (I think) for 30 minutes, although according to the game the buff was lasting 1595 seconds all the buffs were in seconds and so yeh :P.

Overall the combat was incredibly responsive, I really could not tell I was playing with 200ms, the only moments of lag were when the 1k ms spikes came, honestly I can tell in WoW when I have 200ms, and this game felt way, way more responsive at 200ms then WoW ever did. My attacks linked really well and I had a blast, the combat was reasonably difficult aswell, I could survive in the beginning pulling 2 sets of packs but by the time I was 4, halfway to level 5, If I pulled 2 sets of mobs my health would be getting dangerously low doing so, especially if I didn't have cover against the enemies.

The Enemy AI seemed a little off though, I never really experienced the enemy trying to flank me, the few melee opponents I went up against usually decided to just charge over the barricade I was covering behind and ranged opponents, although mostly trying to seek cover mostly never tried to flank, I even had times when they were flanking me from my position of attack and they would actually move so I gained a cover bonus on them, a little silly yes but this is a Beta and these sort of things are probably low priority. It certainly did not detract from my enjoyment of the combat though, it just felt fast and responsive. I probably preferred playing out of cover simply because the Shiv animation is so beautiful, I could have done it all day, but alas it did have a cooldown .

About this time (when I was killing gangsters for the aforemented quests) I dinged to level 2, I had a big Red Empire Sign flash above me with some imperial droids circling around it, the animation was cool but nowhere did it tell me this indicated a level up, sure I induced it was but there was no chat message or anything to actually tell me I levelled up, probably something that will be added later but I'll post it for sake of "feedback". I also noticed I was able to queue for a warzone at level 1, (although I only queued at level 2 it was definitely active at level 1) and I decided to queue for one, I had 2 options "Solo" or "Group" and I have no idea what functionality this actually has but I decided to queue just to see if anything would happen, I stayed queued for the full 90 minute session but alas no warzone popped .

So having done these 2 simple kill quests (just going to mention hear that "group looting" which is showcased in Rift was not in the build we got our hands on, I had 2 mobs which had loot sitting right next to each other and had to loot both in turn, not every mob drops loot so I think it's fine just going to put it here because somebody was probably desperate to find out whether this "vital" feature was in the game.) I was left with my story quest to recover the gifts.

I first didn't know exactly where the questing area was, on the map there is like a yellow square-bracket with a green arrow in the middle to indicate the entrance to the story mode quest I was on, but I couldn't really find the entrance for a bit, I did find it after circling the building but the map doesn't really make it clear when an objective is inside a building and when it is not, this frequently was something I had to live with on the onboard tracker.

I get into this instanced building, indicated by the green forcefield, and I kill the 2 guards between me and my goal, and bam I get a Bonus Quest: "Leave no witnesses", which simply required me to kill those 2 guards, I am not entirely sure how I could not kill them, but I suppose it might be possible to run by loot and then run out... /shrug... when completing this quest it leaves a button in the top-right of the screen which you click to complete the bonus quest and get your xp from them. I didn't realise this but "fortunately" someone across from me didn't realise it either and Daniel told them and of course, me being a total baller pressed that button like I knew what I was doing, 8-).

When handing in this story quest, I again voice my concern to my commander that this contact is completely incompetent and we should kill him, he assures me we still have use of him, I disagree because I mean... if you can't acquire simple gifts what use can you be, he also happens to be an NPC, which automatically means he is a moron (as previously stated), hopefully he won't be a pain in the *** later . I headed back to the starting area, and this time noticed a few more things, firstly there was a taxi service right outside the main place, it was manned by a protocol droid, imperial style, and essentially had a type of "recycle" button on the minimap, essentially it was a square made by 2 sets of right angled arrows. It unlocked the taxi station but I didn't know anywhere else to go... so I was like .

There was also, what can only be described by my memory as a "box" which I could essentially bind my location too, essentially the "Hearthstone" of the game, there were a large number of these throughout any main quest hub, which was appreciated.

There was also a mailbox, shown by a mail icon on the minimap, nothing in the mailbox though . I suppose at this point I should mention the Codex, this was pretty damn awesome, when I first entered the wastes of Nal Hutta I got a codex entry about the landscape of my immediate area, including lore and such. Mostly I got codex entries when discovering and exploring rather than questing,but certain codex entries referring to characters rather than locations were unlocked through quest dialogue. I think this is such an awesome feature , there was also some codex entries I got from interacting with some of the environment. I am not necessarily going to read these, but having the lore in-game rather than on some site like wikipedia is great in my book.

When handing in these first few quests I was presented with a new quest, to go find this woman's Husband and son, her husband doesn't want his son to become a sith, I mean... if you have force powers and don't want to be Sith you have serious issues... I comment on the fact that the woman is really aggressive and I don't blame him for being an ******e, but agree to find them. (I'll get back to this later).

I am now left with 1 quest, which hands-in at Nemrod's Palace, the next major questing hub of the zone, before getting there I notice a couple of new icons on my minimap: they were vendors, Modding machines and my trainer, I was never told to go to my trainer by any quest which obviously will be rectified (or I am plain blind.. could be either) before launch, but I was able to train flash blang, an AOE CC essentially, I think I used this ability once when I was in dire straights, but hey it was nice, when used it made enemies bend over and cover their faces with sort of "rays of light" coming off, like they were paralysed and such, hard to explain in words but maybe you get what I mean :P. I couldn't do anything with the modding machines, I had no weapons that could be... so I just left them .

Nemrod's Palace was impressively massive, A big *** ramp leading to 2 sets of stairs snaking round a pillar, behind which was a massive cantina, as soon as I enter the Cantina I am thrust into a conversation where apparently I am an Old friend with this girl, another contact. I get a quest to contact her but I couldn't find where to hand it in so I just left it, it didn't impede my progress at all. I believe the cantina had 3 branches coming from it, I tried exploring one of these but it was essentially a "Bounty hunter only" area when I tried to go through the Red forcefields. I therefore proceeded to go to the circle on my map where Nemrod was located, when I got near to Nemrod however, my objective changed to the cyborg guy, one of his lieutenants apparently (his name escapes me :<) He essentially talks to me before talking to Nemrod He knows I am the blade, and then he introduces me to the Mighty hutt, and boy what a sexy beast he was... One red eye, one blue eye, a big fat tummy and of course a lovely huttese accent, yes I am exaggerating but I mentioned my character was ugly right, she is probably that desperate in the game.

He introduces me to his other Lieutenants, a Twi'lek who doesn't speak Basic and is lovely and pink, essentially our cyborgs Rival and his hired gun a Rattataki (sp?) Bounty hunter again her name escapes me but if I remember right she is the first companion you would get later, nothing really gave me that impression at this stage but hey she was pretty hot tbh :>. I boast about my huge wealth in a sort of american accent, which is nice to show that my imperial agent doesn't try to sound so formal when in front of the Hutt's and therefore in character. He is impressed with the gifts that I!, yes not that incompetent npc, me... all me... was able to obtain and sends me off to the palace suite.

Yes, all you need as an imperial agent are lovely gifts and you get the best suite in the place, clearly this is the best class in the game. However, as with typical Bond style I have to locate 3 listening devices planted within the suite (clearly I wasn't as welcome as I thought, damn hutt I totally had the hots for him aswell ) This was actually quite difficult, there were no sparkles and it wasn't exactly clear what was interactable and what wasn't. I got 2/3 pretty quickly but couldn't find the last one, I then realised there was a single bottle of liquor on it's own which I could interact with and bam, thats where the listening devices were. I am not going to mention how weird it is that there was a listening device in liquid... but anyway .

I then proceed to report to base, my commander, yes he totally had a promotion cos like commander is sexier, it makes me feel subservient like any agent of the empire should be! So he informs us that our gifts have allowed us to gain access to his communications and Nemrod's secrets are no longer.. etc all this garbage. He also informs us that the weak link of their operation is the cyborg lieutenant we met earlier, we are essentially told to convert him and make him work for us, pretty sassy if I say so myself.

Heading back to him, we "bump" into a Zabrak, who is apparently an old friend of the blade. Well let's just say I'm a lot more feminine and blue than he remembers, but apparently my persona owes him a debt, naturally being the most desperate Chiss Imperial agent in the world, I put on my suave british charm and flirt, to my surprise he goes for it, clearly he is a keeper: Looks don't matter to him, and he offers to go back to his place for his "repayment" I obviously accept, I mean a moment ago I was willing to get with a Hutt, anyone is of higher standard! The screen fades to black out, my character reappears alone and facepalms... since the black screen lasted barely 2 seconds... I think we can infer why ;-).

Essentially we agree to work with the male Cyborg and support his views of the empire, he sends me to get some slaves working or something, so I set off, before we head there though, I head towards the spaceport (currently offlimits to get off the planet of course), where I meet the Father and son I mentioned earlier, I am obviously a cold-hearted *****, and since theres no option for him to commit adultery with me in order to save his son from going to Korriban, I am left with no choice but to kill him, Nerd chills run down my spine as redness comes up from the bottom of the screen and some lovely imperial music , My first dark side points and don't I feel like a ******! Oh yes!

I use the taxi service for the first time, obviously there is another one at the spaceport and whilst doing so I check out the character screen (Note I did not dare touch the options menu, incase we weren't meant to). I notice that I can actually click on my name and low and behold I actually have a title... "Agent ". Clearly I have to use this title (yes I know titles have probably already been confirmed, but hey ^^).

I then move East towards the swampy centre of the Nal Hutta Map, to the camp located there, I do my business with the Twi'lek located here, but his associate informs me of some guy calling himself the "Black Death" is causing the slaves trouble, I am essentially doing this for the money, so I am like, whatever. He warns me to take care of the droids first before attempting to confront him. I also need to get some Ore from the nearby area infested with bounty hunters.

I first go deal with the black death, this new area has a huge variety of enemies ranging from droids to angry creatues which were called dogs but seemed more like swamp beasts or something, they looked pretty damn cool though. Firstly I dealt with the droids with no problem surrounding the shuttle, I only had to kill 3 but it was so much fun I killed like 9 cos I felt like it, I needed to be thorough.. I then interacted with the speeder and bam the "Black death" comes out, now seriously... if you are going to name yourself the black death shouldn't your thing be poisons, not a serious bounty hunter... apparently he has some form of ear Fetish and he offers us a Bribe. Clearly as an agent of the order, I am not going to take it, but bam... Light side points, the bottom of my screen glows white and a small icon appears...

What is this madness I think to myself, lightside points... umadbro? However, this really got me tingling, the fact I could make this Light-sided choice of refusing the bribe, and then just killing him like a ****** anyway... I get darkside points for killing him, and all is right in the world. My Imperial agent has successfully redeemed her Light sided ways.

I then set off to do the other quest of collecting boxes, essentially it was a standard "Collect me quest", but it felt like it had purpose and the combat was really enjoyable, again I got a bonus objective for killing Bounty hunters in the surrounding area, and also a quest from a dead Rhodian on the floor, apparently I need to get some parts from the droids in the field behind the area I am in. Great, more easy xp I think to myself..

The game thought not... I rush in to the first big *** droid I see and before I can stop myself I realise *OH !@!@!@!@~!@!@~!@" the droid is a level 5 Boss, a full 2 levels above me (I had dinged 3 by now) and a super strong guy, I get him to about half health and am wiped from the face of this earth, my first death.. but no this was my salvation, death in this game is so nice, you simply respawn at the nearest med-center, which was pretty nearby and get straight back into fighting.

I suppose I should comment on the awesome OOC heal ability that the IA got (obviously all classes have an equivalent) it had a cool animation where a small droid came above your head and then displayed a picture of a face and some vitals whilst your character is interacting with the holo image, I thought this animation was really awesome anyway and it is so seemless I really didn't notice the downtime at all, I was pretty much able to go from 1 fight to the next even using this after every pull it didn't really slow me down.

But... like I was saying, dying was a blessing in disguise, dying put me at the medcenter where it showed a quest on the minimap, I went all around this hill looking for someway up it, where the quest was located, but I couldn't find it... but then I saw it a pipe! leading up the hillside, not exactly obvious but pretty awesome. I approached the pipe and I realised... Woah, I can't get up here, I need the jump button.

I might add that jump was actually useful, I jumped from small notch to the next up this pipe and when I was at the top I was able to manoeuvre around the hill to my goal. What was it? Well it certainly surprised me it was an Artifact Holocron. Interacting with it told me what it was and that it was attuned to.... "Increasing my Agility attribute", I could only use it one time to increase my agility and I did so, whilst getting a codex entry for my efforts.

What does this infer? That there are similar holocrons like this scattered across worlds that you can explore off the beaten track to find? Please let it be so, exploration is such an undervalued thing in MMO's and I really thought this was one of the greatest things I found from this day, probably somebody will turn around and tell me this was confirmed months ago or something, but hey... I didn't know about it and I thought it was pretty cool.

At this point I then realised I tried killing the wrong type of droid before, I had to kill the "Strong" droids behind the Boss guy, they weren't so tough but definitely harder than 3 weak mobs put against me. This quest was not a 100% drop rate, which made sense because it only required 1 item so obviously... make it rarer . Having done this I travelled back to the camp and told the slaves I really didn't care about their plight and just wanted credits, they didn't take it so well .

TBH though, I was just so engaged with the game, from start to end, nothing has really grabbed me and hooked me from the get go like that did, the combat was great, the story and VO was great, sure there were bugs, sure the quests were like all mmo's, but the VO gives them such a purpose, most of the "mundane quests" were simply handled by bonus quests. I felt like for the first time I was playing a Roleplaying game... online... and that was such a great experience, my only downside was the fact that /lick was not an emote in the game, us brits (or well me being a bisexual guy ((() love this emote! and I was frankly disappointed I was not able to lick fellow people in the game as a sign of friendship .

Some other things to note, you had 2 sets of inventories, one for purely quest items and one for the other stuff which were tabbed so you could switch between if you ever needed to. When you go into a dialogue you gained a debuff/buff which was essentially "immobilising you", observing someone in a conversation essentially showed them standing idle with a speech bubble above their head with a series of ellipses. This was marked in the combat log aswell, which might be cluttering with lots of people on the server... not really sure though. I had 1 conversation with an alien race, which I recognised and yet can't name off the top of my head, they were small and looked like grouchy old men, I really can't place the name but he had no facial animations, again... beta is beta but simply stating what I found.

The conversation wheel worked really well, obviously as I stated I didn't dare touch the in-game options incase we weren't meant to, and I would have liked subtitles on always, I always like having both sound and subtitles on when watching stuff, I don't really know why but mostly it's if I switch off for a moment I can read what they said . However what I liked was that mostly the conversation wheel wasn't universally Good/neutral/bad from top to bottom. On big choices where essentially you are choosing between LSP and DSP all the options did seem to be DSP bottom and LSP top, but I suppose that needs to happen because choices aren't reversible in the MMO.

However, in most of the conversations it sort of ended up being like "Get the job done"/"Question the NPC"/"Be irritating/ignorant", which is pretty broad in category, mostly when accepting/refusing quests the bottom option refuses the quest (although it doesn't lock you out from picking it up if you engage in conversation again), but mostly I was reading the options and making my options based on how I felt. I do wish I could flirt with more people (Did I mention I love Jo Wyatt's voice acting, especially when she is flirty/jokey in DA:2 ). But hey, it was certainly hilarious, I was smiling throughout most of the dialogue and enjoyed being irritating ^^.

In reality, I felt like this was one of the best games I had played, sure I only played an hour and half of it, and in reality that isn't enough time to judge but the combat felt responsive, and non-repetitive. The story and questing was really engaging, and pretty hilarious that I could essentially sleep with a guy to avoid killing him or being "good" and paying him, I certainly felt like a female James Bond , I do wonder if males have the option to flirt.. I doubt it though as stated above...

This post is way too long, and is pretty indepth I know, there are spoiler tags and the chances are this post gets locked and is told to be put in the existing thread, maybe it does and I put it there aswell but I don't want my spoiler filled review of the time spent with the game, which essentially took me about twice the amount of time to write as it did to experience the game, if that is even possible... :S, to be put in amongst reviews which are spoiler free since that thread has no such spoiler tags on it.

Remember, this is beta... we were told this was 1 minor patch or so behind the current testing build but there are still bugs, obviously there will be since all the minor stuff that was bugged are reasonably easy to fix, just time consuming, also having 1k ms spikes certainly doesn't help since it can make the game appear to be have a bug when in reality it's just your position according to the server being wrong or because you were lagging you walked past a cutscene that should trigger etc. I know I shouldn't need to state this but I do this because I know some people will read these reviews as what the game *will* be like. Bugs will be fixed and certain gameplay aspects can and will be changed during the beta period.

As a sound-off thank you for making this event possible Bioware... I had an absolute blast (as maybe you can tell), this was the first gaming thing I have ever gone to and I would never have been able to go abroad to see this game before release and even thought it was only for an hour and a half I had such a great time playing the game. I won't pretend I wasn't already sold on the game before today, because I was. I also want to say that I would be happy with rerolling alts all the time for this game, but I did want to state my raid experience earlier so hopefully you can feel "something" when I say that the combat was really fun and responsive, even at an early level.

It wasn't complex combat by any means, but it was more interesting than half the classes of WoW at max level, the cover mechanic really adds a big dynamic to the fight and I can only imagine what it will be like when you throw companions and advanced classes into the mix .

I don't care when the game is released (yes... these people do exist....) You've said it will come this year and in reality it doesn't affect me whether it comes next week or december 31st, what matters is that it is coming this year and if the rest of the 1-50 experience is anything like the first 90 minutes of playtime I will be a happy bunny ^^.

Has Tython (or any other planet) more zones (like Age of Conan) or was there only one big zone on one planet??? And how did they look like....like a big Map with hills as a border or invisible walls???

On Nal Hutta there were apparently 6 Codex location entries for the area and I got 3/6 getting around halfway through the zone, I didn't exactly skirt round the edges of hutta but mostly the zone was barricaded off with buildings/pipes as one might expect in the sludge fest of Nal Hutta. There may well have been other "Zones" within the planet, but the zone we started in was pretty expansive, I'd akin it to... about the size of Hillsbrad in WoW, but probably about 1.5 times the width, not exactly sure though, It's hard to judge size because the quests were linked together so well that there was only really 1 moment that I had to do a lot of onfoot travelling and that took around 3-4 minutes following the path I think.

One question: Was there any racial abilities, active or passive? Did NPCs ever refer to your race in dialogues?

I definitely was mentioned as a Chiss multiple times in my dialogues. Especially in the spontaneous dialogue I had with the Zabrak where he commented I was 1) female and 2) Chiss and nothing like the blade he knew :P.

I had no racial ability I could see at all. I glanced at the skills page and couldn't see anything, I would presume racial stuff would probably come into play later, and I don't think they would cut these things. Probably there are a lot of "racial" stuff in the world arcs and considering these were already done the racial dialogue would be applicable across class. I will say however that not once did my character refer to herself as a chiss, it was all done by the person I was having a conversation with, which perhaps supports my theory somewhat.

MEHColeman:

I had absolutely no idea what class I wanted to play (I like them all!). I ended up playing a jedi consular.

JC started off with 2 attacks - the saber attack and the rock-throwing one. It took a minute to work out what attack mode (ranged or melee) I should be using. I ended up starting with the ranged rock-throw and followed up with saber slashes.

Once you unleash the projection attack, you can run toward your target and follow up with your saber straight away.

At level 3, I was able to take on 2 lvl 7s at once on a couple of occasions - the Project attack stuns for a short while, so you can alternate attacks to keep one mob stunned while you concentrate on the other.

For the first 10 minutes, concious that I 'only' had an hour, I was tempted to skip the dialog so that I could get to see some action, but I soon relaxed a bit and thought I might as well enjoy myself - the dialog is superb and engaging. The mix of story, combat, exploration and introduction to the game's mechanics is pitched just perfectly - I love it!

The game was also very nicely polished the graphics and cutscenes right from the get-go looked fantastic -- there were a couple of graphical glitches here and there, and I when I started the session, I entered the world with a message saying that I'd 'been defeated'. However, the glitches were clearly what you'd consider low priority, non-blocking issues.

We had a short Q&A session afterwards, I asked Daniel Erickson what he was doing at the moment, given that a lot of the story was probably written quite a while ago. He said he's involved in the marketing events and playing the game an awful lot - to check the story and characters are consistent throughout the game.

The best question was about the British accents for the 'bad guys' - Daniel's reply was great because it showed how much thought goes into these things - talking about the future republic, how the events and cultures in SWTOR would eventually morph into what we see in the movies and how that might come about. DE went on to tauk about the hge abouts of background and lore that is written to give contexts for the writers, artists and designers.

Impressive. Most impressive.

A couple of other things I've thought of:

I noticed that during dialogue, if you are going to get light/darkside points for a particular dialogue option, a little icon of the appropriate flavour appears in the centre of the dialogue wheel. For light-side it's a silver star. If the icon isn't there, it's just a regular dialogue choice - you don't get ls/ds points for every piece of dialogue. If the icon is there, though, you know that this decision will affect your alignment!

There is a ping meter on the UI. I only payed attention to it for a couple of seconds, but noticed it varied from about 100ms to 500. Stephen said that we were connected to the US, and all in all, it copes pretty well with any latency issues. (Once or twice there was a lag spike, though - to be expected, I think) . I do believe that the next-action-queue was enabled, but only having two attacks, and mostly using the saber attack, I didn't really notice it much.

One of the buttons came up with a message "Your target does not have a target". So I guess there is a way of selecting your target's target - very handy. Listening to every podcast I could from the fan-sites' flashpoint in PAX, I know it was something they mentioned that they couldn't find.

PugNoobie:

I played a Female Rattaki Trooper. The character design was good. It is not lifelike but we have seen the tralers and know the design style so I wont go on about it. The textures were very clear and looks so much better than what I have seen in the tralers and pics so far. (You will not be disapointed). My Character was designed with several horns on her head and some nice looking facial markings. Other characters I saw on other peoples screens were just as well designed.

Once I had picked my class and clicked on play I was then presented with a loading screen. Once complete you enter the game. As aTrooper you enter the game straight into a interactive cut scene with your superior officer. Wont tell you the story any further so not to spoil anything. The conversation gives you a good background as to where you are, what your doing there and what you need to do. this presents you with your first quest and then your off into the open world.

First impressions on the open world is "OMG" its glorious to look at. I clicked "M" and opened up the map. looked very small but then realised i had to click on the Zone Exit icon (There are little icons which show different zones of the map) when you click on this it showed me the whole of Ord Mantell and Boy oh Boy is HUGE!!!!! By the time i finnished the play session I got to level 5 and was not even close to opening up more than 1/8th of the map. I started out doing a few quests in a little contested camp (NPC vs NPC). Once you have finnished your batch of quests you go hand them in and then get a new batch of quests in the next area up the path. I found this very linear but as it is a starting area I expected as much. I just hope later in the game quests take you al over the place on a pure herioc adventure. not just go here, do quests. go up the road to next village and do more and rinse and repeat. but time will tell.

Traveling from Zone to Zone is seemless, even on computers connected to the US servers and having a large ping. I didnt experience and loading screns or delay as i transitioned between them. Was very impressed with that.

Ok, more about the trooper - Dont read if you dont wanna know

You start of with 6 abilities : Flurry of shots, Explosive shot, Reload, Attack Buff, Travel, Heal

The flurry of shots does what it says. fires a flurry of shots dealing about 30-60 dmg each hit. Can easily kill a mob in 3-4 uses of this.

The explosive shots is not only a big hitter but is also a knockback and an AoE. does higher damage to targeted mob and reduced dmg to surrounding mobs.

Reload replenshes a % your ammo bar during combat. The explosive shot uses a chunk of your ammo bar (Bit like a mana bar). The Flurry of shots does not use ammo from what i could see.

The attack buff gave you an attack bonus for your next shot. once fired it is consumed. hard to use this before every shot so I used it as an opener to deal larger damage.

The Travel is like a Path to the last safe area or when you have been bound to.

Heal is the standard out of combat heal. takes about 10 seconds to fully heal and replenish your ammo bar.

Targeting with the trooper was a little awkward. it would sometimes target random mobs after you have killed your target and bring in more mobs which is not good. Tab is a good way to switch targets. You do less damage to mobs who take cover so you need to flank them or they will destroy you. I did'nt actually know that Troopers can use cover like the smuggler. However for a trooper you see green circles on the floor. if you stand in that circle you take reduced damage. Smuggler cover system work very different but is good to see a trooper cover mechanic in the game. The sound effects of your weapon fire is perfect and sounds very Star Wars. Pew Pew' everywhere and with surround sound headphones you really hear then flying about.

Ok, now to talk about mobs. I came accross 3 types of mobs while I played. "Normal", "Strong" & "ELITE". Normal mobs go down very quickly, 3-4 shots each mobs. Strong mobs are a little tougher. you can manage 2 of these bad boys but you will need to use cover and maybe a medpack for any more than that. Then we have the Elite. I only found one of these. He was a level 5 Twil'lek with a 2 handed vibro blade. I managed to kill him by kiting him while running backwards in circles. When he got to close i would fire my knockback and then spam my flurry of shots. rinse repeat. Elite dead. not easy but nice I got to see one.

You really need to highlight each mob before you fight anyone. you need to check if they are normal, strong or elites as each fight is unique. you cant just go running in guns firing or your dead. you have to treat each fight as a unique encounter. At level 3, having to do this is awesome and shows you need brains to play. You can easily see the type of class when you highlight them. Strong mobs have a Silver Star in the corner of thier description box and Elites have a Gold Star. Normals are just normal. no stars.

After nearly 1hr 15mins of play time we were treated to a Q & A session with Stephen Read and Daniel Errikson. I have listed below the points I picked up from this.

- The game will run on Mac's (If you use Backdoor)

- Social Points are gathered by playing in a group. these can be spent later in the game for items not yet disclosed

- Valor points are similar but obtained from PvP

- Once you pick your Advanced Class there is no turning back. they did say tho that you are asked several times if your sure you want to pick the class to stop ppl from making the wrong choice by mistake.

- Your companions can Die. Dont know if this is a reveal but we was told, during a quest there is a chance your companion can snuff it. if your companion dies. he is dead FOREVER. they didnt tell us if you can replace your companions tho.

Bugs

Ok, so I know the game is not ready but I did find a couple of bugs. Most are graphical which we was told are the final bugs to be fixed. the main bugs they want to fix are what they called "Path Blockers". these are bugs which stop you from continuing your quest line/achievment etc.

The graphical bugs i found were issues with shadows looking jagged, A couple of times i could see through the head of an NPC. could see lines of the back of the NPC's head on thier face. very weird. Also when you run into the water you just keep running like water doesnt exist. you could stand on the sea bed and look up and see the water graphics but run around like you was on land.

The main bug I found was that you could not target mobs through doorways. The game would tell me I had no line of sight. In one case, a mob stood on the border of the doorway. I could stand face to face with him and he would not attack me. The moment i placed a foot accross the border of the doorway he would become active and attack. but then if i stepped back he would reset. I also couldt shoot anyone through an open door way and had to enter the room fully to attack them. This needs to be fixed as I found it very annoying and hard to combat ppl I wanted to keep at range. If you can see someone in a house or building. you should be able to target and shoot them. Hope this gets fixed.

MMO.Maverick · April 2011

DeathCorp:

I played at the 7pm event, which I will start with saying was absolutely fantastic. Brilliant evening, so thanks to all of the BioWare team for that!

But lets do a basic synopsis.

I played as the Trooper as well as the Sith Warrior (don't ask how). The Trooper was going to be my main, but now I cannot decide. Firstly, I played the Trooper first. It was amazing.It reached all of my expectations and I have no doubt this is going to be a brilliant game. However, I am not considering changing to a Sith Warrior.

Trooper

Playing was the Trooper felt very different to playing as the Sith Warrior. Firstly, while the combat is fun and fast paced at some points I felt there wasn't very much 'weight' behind my attacks. My grenade launcher did AoE damage and knocked over the main target, but didn't do the damage I felt it should. Personally, I think it should be higher damage, but slower cooldown. The cooldowns are very fast and are only limited to how much ammo you have.

This I expect is because currently Ord Mantel is unbalanced (something being worked on, confirmed by Stephen Reid). I was most powerful as a trooper using a combination of CC attacks and movement - constantly coming in and out of line of sight to be closer to the enemy. However, I can say I actually enjoyed the challenge. I felt like, while I was taking on groups of about 3 - 6, my tactics had a real impact on my performance.

At one point I grouped up with 3 other Troopers. I had a lot of fun with this group, even though it was hard to stay together as everyone kept getting lost/seperated. At one point, we all used our grenade launchers on a group of about 3 separatists. That was absolutely beautiful and lived up to my expectations of a trooper group. I felt very powerful. They all died instantly and the fireworks were glorious.

I have no doubt the full-trooper groups are going to be very common and very fun.

The story. The story for the Trooper I found less engaging than the Sith Warrior. And even though it was a huge step up from previous games and was still very high quality writing, with deep decisions it wasn't quite as good as the Sith Warrior, which I will touch on in a while...

The Sith Warrior

The Sith Warrior, was deep, fast paced and straight to the point. Instantly, you realize you have been dropped into plot-line involving deception and sith-like politics (killing people). Clearly they've kept with the iconics, you are, literally, The Sith Warrior. Your art is in killing, not manipulating.

I quickly connected to a lot of the characters in The Sith Warrior storyline, not so much with the Trooper.

One of the first quests you can do you are required to interrogate a group of prisoners. The answers you make are varied and have a large effect on the outcome of conversations and your Masters views on you. The answers on a lot of the questions are quite deep, they make you think. There are a lot of dark themes with the Sith Warrior questline, as you would expect.

The combat, was fast, but you felt like you had weight behind your attacks. I was taking on about 10 Korr'Slugs at one point, but the difference to the Trooper was that your attacks had real weight behind them. The animations felt powerful. Auto-attack? So glad it is not in. You feel like you are in real control of the combat, timing your skills has a lot of effect on your performance.

Other Points

Then came something else, DUELS. That's right, my first little glimpse of PvP!

So duels are in and I dueled about 5 people throughout the whole event. PvP is fast and competitive and skill seems to be the deciding factor at the moment.

Valor/Social Points and Ranks. I questioned them about in the Q&A at the end. Social Points are the points you receive for.. well doing social things. Flashpoints, multiplayer dialogue and all those fancy multiplayer things they have implemented. Social Points allow you to do all sorts of things to aid you in socializing. There is a vendor called a "Social Items Vendor". This Vendor sells what I believe was clothing/armour (not sure how strong) that was quite nice looking; I saw this on the Sith Warrior. Perhaps Social Clothing.

Valor points are to do with PvP. They resorted to the 'not ready to talk about that just yet' (he checked with marketing). Clearly, it is some sort of reward system with PvP although they will talk about that later.

At first, I found the questing interface a little hard to get the hang of. There isn't much in terms of tutorials or instructions in the game just yet. Once you have the hang of it though, it's quite easy to use and you appreciate the way it works.

The UI I believe is getting an overhaul soon, so we should see some interesting things happening that side soon!

The game is clearly not ready for release just yet, there are a few bugs and mechanics (swimming) that haven't even been started on yet. Swimming currently involves running across a flat empty plane. The visuals for above the water look fantastic though. (I ran through the water from one side of Ord Mantell for the other, right to the other side of the volcano!) There was a little bit of lag because of US servers, but no doubt that will be gone later.

Overall, I really enjoyed playing The Old Republic, so thanks for a great evening BioWare, I will see you in-game. It has lived up to my expectations, and perhaps exceeded them too. The BioWare are for the most-part really friendly people (Daniel Erickson is the most charismatic person i've met, I wonder if he's used to being interrogated by nerds yet)

Vixone:

Firstly I chose to play the Sith Warrior (I would have chosen Jedi but all Republic set-ups where taken).

(By the way some of the point I'm putting here may be old news, just noting things).

Gameplay

• For me questing wasn't as straight forward as WoW, you don't have arrows and notifications popping up everywhere showing you exactly where to go, It takes some getting used to, it makes you explore and find objectives for yourself.

• The combat was fun, and I mean FUN. The attacks and blocks seemed flawlessly choreographed, for instance the mob would recoil when hit and the combat seemed alot more significant. However sometimes the combat did seem quite easy, with a high crit I could 1-shot weaker mobs, but they were very closely packed and in big groups sometimes.

• While questing I came across another Sith Warrior (obviously also playing at the event), we dueled a few times and (unlike WoW) the duel gets ended when either of the players enters combat with a mob, to be fair this did save both of us multiple times.

• One of the first quests in the Sith Warrior chain is to go into a cave of Kor'Slugs and destroy their egg chambers to stop them spawning. When you activated the bombs the explosions had amazing visual detail and realistic sound effects. I mean how many times have you detonated a bomb in say WoW and the most pathetic cloud of smoke rises, In TOR the whole cave shook with rubble and dust falling from the roofs.

• Flight cut-scenes were the most dissapointing part of the game for me, the take off and flight seemed very clumbsy and unrealistic.

• Satele Shan is in game, she's a quest giver in the Jedi Counsular and Jedi Knight starting area.

• I only managed to gain 5 levels in my hour, so I didn't notice a pattern in learning new abilities, but It seems to be 2 abilities every 2 levels. Training abilities don't cost credits either.

• On a average mob I looted 20 credits, gives you a insight into how many credits you will have at higher levels.

• Humanoid mobs seemed to drop alot more armour and clothing than mobs in other games, however the armour was generally lower quality than quest items.

• I was impressed by how much the choice in dialogue effected the quests, in one of the quests I had to choose whether to torture, murder, fight or free prisoners. Choosing to fight and inevitably kill the prisoners, the sith commander was displeased with me for not using the prisoners for answers, therefore sending me to a higher order for training and not presenting me with further trials yet.

• Many sections of the Sith Academy were only accessible by certain classes, each class had their own section of the academy.

• I started with 2 buff abilities as a Sith Warrior.

-Force Vitality and another which I cannot remember the name of. Force Vitality reduced all damage the warrior and party/raid members takes by 3% (lasts until cancelled).

• There was also a out of combat healing ability, which could be channeled to regain all health. Called Channel Hatred.

• I found myself becoming very immersed in conversations with quest givers, due to strong facial detail and unique vocals. I know I sound like a Bioware employee here but I really did remember NPC's because the vocals and dialogue gives each NPC unique characterics.

• During combat I was also suprised to see mobs running behind cover and blocking my melee attacks. Also I found that mobs seemed to walk quite freely, almost as though they didn't have a preditermined path to follow.

Q&A Session

Daniel Erickson was asking people for questions, however I was so focused on playing the game that I only managed to take in a few questions.

• Daniel Erickson confirmed that there WILL be alot of world PvP.

• He also stated that there is ''Social Point'', which you gain from questing with other players. Which apparently you can use to buy ''cool items which can be used to purchase social items''. I imagine this is RP gear.

• Daniel also stated that the game is 100% grind free, he went on the mention bonus quests. For instance you would have a main quest, to reach a temple that was behind lots of mobs, therefore there is a quest to kill those mobs, so you don't feel as if your wasting your time clearing mobs on your way to this temple.

Conclusion: From the time I spent playing the game was simply awesome, the combat was flowing and enjoyable and every class was easily identifiable against others. I just can't wait to get my hands on it and start building my own character background.

Helderash:

I was lucky enough to play a female sith warrior at the 7pm event. This one is going to be brief I'm afraid as I'm currently at work.

General Impressions

The game seemed incredibly well polished compared to any other MMO I have played at beta, and more polished than many MMO's at release.
The stylized graphics work very well, and were a step-up over what I was expecting. I was nicely surprised.
If you've played other MMO's you'll feel fairly comfortable here. In many cases the game stays fairly close to the trend set by others (similar UI, similar controls, similar questing). However, the cinematic scenes topping and tailing each quest really help make the quests more interesting. I also noticed that you'd typically mop up the smaller (collect x, kill y) quests while running through one of the larger class quests. This definitely removed the tedium you typically find in other MMO questing systems.
The voice acting and story telling was a joy. It very much enhanced the MMO experience for me personally.

The Sith Warrior

I made it up to level 5 (I think) during my hour, and I did enjoy playing the class. As expected, you typically face off against multiple opponents and combat was fast paced. I had a good combination of damage dealing abilities and CC abilities (e.g. area stun). Force leaping across the battlefield made me grin every single time.
I won't spoil anything, but the opening story was very engaging and I really wanted to continue playing for the story alone by session end.
There were some fairly challenging encounters on Korriban, more challenging than I'd typically expect during the starting levels of an MMO. I had a few "oh crap, oh crap" moments in fights where my HP was dangerously close to zero. This was a nice surprise, given that most MMO's from WoW onwards have made things overly easy for the solo player in my opinion.
Sith lords didn't seem to like my humerous conversation choices much... spoil sports.

Problems

This is most likely a side effect of 100 people hitting the same area simultaneously, but I experienced some serious lag a few times. This was particularly a problem at the start, where conversations would hang for up to 20 seconds at times, or I'd initiate combat and then find I was just dead. I'm hoping this was just a side-effect of the demo conditions however, and it did mostly clear up after the first 5 minutes.

AgripAA:

OK so I won’t post a massive impression post as many others have done that already … also I am currently at work so I would like to be able to keep my job at least until the game comes out (EDIT – ffs, just started to reread my post and realised I have ended up posting a wall of text… sorry!).

I have very little to add to the gameplay impressions that have already been posted as they are pretty comprehensive (Kandycane). What I did spend time doing was looking at the scenery, trying to explore parts of the world that people might not have gotten to right away or skipped over as it wasn’t on the main quest lines. I picked an inquisitor as earlier in the day a friend and I had been talking about Magika and how much fun it is to play with lightning in that. So I loaded up and got dropped off on Korriban, my character the last to step off the shuttle. Our “greeter” Sith was suitably snide and condescending and was determined to remind me at every juncture that I was a former slave and that everyone will treat my character like nothing has changed. All the conversation options I was presented with seemed suitably toxic and soon I was trading barbs with anyone and everyone. After a while of being surrounded by and speaking with the academy Sith it became natural to match their cynical and disparaging remarks with a spiteful comeback. After all being rude to the bad guys is good… right? I quickly realised that I was starting to mimic the behaviour of the characters I distained and yet in mocking their general demeanour I was quietly becoming Sith myself. I was greatly impressed by a conversation system and script the allowed me to drop so easily into this.

As for quests: They were in the style of “go to here and kill x of y” however the quests carry you through from one hub to another. I never had to turn back to a quest hub to hand in, something the caught me out at first as after a finished one quest I started running back to the quest-giver NPC by mistake (note to self: pay more attention to quest tracker and map). Also mini instances that relate to your character class are rather well done, you are in a general area with other people and see a section that looks like it has a green or red force field in front of it, a quick mouse over the field gives you the entry requirement for the area behind the field. Rather obviously though, green means you can enter red means you’ll end up rubber-banding against the field. The instanced stuff also means that key points or battles cannot be interfered with by other players, that does also mean that you can’t get help from random kind passer-by’s when in this area.

Anyway I spent most of my play time on the surface of Korriban, the scenery is quite brilliant. A Star Destroyer hangs in low orbit above the academy, the faint outlines of a couple of moons are also visible and I was generally very happy with the draw distance and the expansive area that spilled out before me. The actual Valley of the Dark Lords is much much bigger than previous KOTOR games, so much so that there is a fast travel system in place to get from one side of the valley to the other, there is also other fast travel points that are discoverable as you go along. When I took time to look around the external Valley area it was the first time I noticed the background music. It was relatively low key and non-intrusive adding an appropriate ambience to the arid imposing setting that is the Valley of the Dark Lords. While I was half hoping for a hint of the epic John Williams-esq music with the memorable melodies that we all associate with Star Wars, the ambience stuff probably does more for enhancing the game experience.

I won’t talk too much about gameplay as other people have done that extensively. For my part I found gameplay and controls suitably intuitive without being particularly innovative. Also the fights were straightforward enough but you generally always pull groups so it’s quite easy take on more than you can handle, I managed to survive one fight with 5 hp… thank god for in combat consumables and the out of combat regen skill.

Bits that some people might not like:

• People who rush to max level will not enjoy this game. If you skip dialogue and breeze through the game with the sole goal of levelling up then you are simply not playing a massive bulk of the game. This was mentioned by someone who was in the earlier session and took the time to speak to people waiting outside when he was done. Sorry I didn’t get your name whoever you are. Many thanks to you for taking time to chat!

• 300-400 ping to server which I'm assuming is US based. I'm guessing UKs/Euros that want to play with US clan mates or visa-versa might not like that at all. Frankly I wouldn’t have expected anything different from transatlantic gaming but thought I’d put this here in case it’s relevant or important to someone else. (EDIT - Please also be aware that I checked it a few times over the course of an hour but I wasn't exactly monitoring it closely, 300-400 just so happened to be the reported ping at the moments i checked).

• I didn’t see or experience any auto-move-to-target on skills, if you are out of range your character doesn’t run after the targets to get into range. Not a problem for me but I know others won’t like it.

AbKi:

I found that the graphics were brilliant, I found a balcony with an impressive view where I could see other players running around beneath me, giant Sith statues in the distance looked clear (there was no lazy obscuring the view with fog here), there were ships flying overhead, and I could glance up to a balcony above me and target the NPCs chatting there. Bioware seem to have captured the feeling of being in the Star Wars universe very well, which bodes very well for roleplayers indeed. It was great to wander by NPCs and listen to them going about their normal business, I am also pleased to say that I actually jumped when a mouse droid skittered and beeped its way past me.

I am hoping that my experience of having a Daniel Erickson pep-talk commentary will be a launch feature. He kindly kept an eye on me when he saw that I was getting flustered with the frustrating camera (anyone else feel like the camera was too sensitive?) and guided me through the game as he wandered past, advising that I really shouldn’t go in strange caves at my level and making sure I remembered to buff after each inevitable incompetency-induced death. When watching me pick up items he offered the thought of whether I should be accepting the items I could use now as quest rewards or perhaps the things I could use a little later. He even offered a ‘well done’ after making it out alive, bless him.

Overall the graphics are great, the voice acting is stellar, I played a Sith Inquisitor but I was jealous of Imperial agents when it was pointed out that your accent would change as you masqueraded as different people. You sounded angry when you made an angry choice, nonchalant when you made an average choice. I didn't notice any instancing or loading at all in my hour, my only obstacles were the areas fenced off with an energy shield which were areas for different classes and for groups, and the irritating camera. It is all incredibly slick and well done.

One of the things I found really interesting was then they said that when witnessing the beta players, some players would often log no keyboard activity for half an hour. This was when they were making a game-changing decision.

Fectious:

The combat animations were beautifully fluid and it was very apparent how much work had been invested; to create so many different versions of the same move. This was none more apparent than when an NPC was engaged from a different tangent then the direction your character was facing.

I’ll admit that I was disappointed to hear that there will be no Dev-driven Live Events (we were spoilt back in the day of SOE’s Matrix Online) but I can understand Daniel’s point; that the sheer number of servers would prevent that level of personal touch. It was also nice to clear-up that level 10 is solely the juncture for the profession split and not the assumption of a rank title (e.g. Darth).

Noteworthy things:

- exploration seems to be encouraged, with hard(er) to reach places and permanent skill bonuses and artefact holocrons when you reach those locations.

- open world pvp will be present and possible in abundance

- you can queue up for a Warzone from L1 upwards.

- this has been reported before, but no loading screens at all, everything is seamless.

- you get social points for doing social stuff like flashpoints, multiplayer dialogues etc, which can be spent at special social vendors.

- apparently troopers can also make use of cover, although not as specialised as IA's and smugglers (note: BW rep Zoeller stated that the cover option for troopers was a bug and not intentional)

- there can be several different combat animations for the same attack, depending on the angle you are at with your opponent.

Unknown · April 2011

my favorite one i read last night(haven't read any since though) was where this player found some dev tools left on and literal had an "I win" button. XD

maskedweasel · April 2011

I read this on the official forums but I have to say, after hearing about the exploration and permanent stat boosts.. I think I fell in love. That is one of the bests things I've heard in a long time.

DarkPony · April 2011

Awesome to read these write-ups. Seems overwhelmingly positive. Thanks for posting, Mav.

Love the exploration rewards bit + everything seemless / without loading screens. Also the positive feedback on combat and skills is great to hear.

Amazing how much detail people are able to remember by the way, I could never do that

Beanpuie · April 2011

Troopers can cover now???

not like bounty hunter covering (hide around corner to break LOS then fire back) but actual cover cover???

screw this, i can now call my trooper Shepard!

sJenksFTW · April 2011

A lot of good information here. The combat system may not be revolutionary, but the small details like exploring hard to reach areas, and the knockbacks really seem to add something missing from other games. Plus, the stories seem to be very well written by what I have seen and heard.

Plus some people took them over an hour to get level 4 ish, hopefully won't be to quick of a progression.

Good stuff thanks maverick!

Unknown · April 2011

Originally posted by sJenksFTW
A lot of good information here. The combat system may not be revolutionary, but the small details like exploring hard to reach areas, and the knockbacks really seem to add something missing from other games. Plus, the stories seem to be very well written by what I have seen and heard.

Plus some people took them over an hour to get level 4 ish, hopefully won't be to quick of a progression.

Good stuff thanks maverick!

while i wont say to take this as is since they have been cpnstantly balancing things on starter worlds and this was back in november, but during the jedi immersion event most people seemed to get between lvl 7 to lvl 10 during their 6 or 7 hour play session. now of course some of that time was spent hand recording things like skill tool tips, but it can be used as somewhat of a guide as to how long it will take.

edit: just wanted to add that alot of people mentioned having skipped side quests and just did the main storyline so who knows how much this would speed up or slow things down.

Unknown · April 2011

Originally posted by Beanpuie
Troopers can cover now???

not like bounty hunter covering (hide around corner to break LOS then fire back) but actual cover cover???

screw this, i can now call my trooper Shepard!

well its been said for a while that they could take cover but they didnt gain the extra skills or defense bonus that smuggler and agent get so they have been featured it in videos and the like(i know i had heard it said a long time ago, so maybe it was removed and then put back in and that is why it hasnt been mentioned in awhile). also i dont think they will get a portable cover and they will just be to use fixed cover postions.

edit: sounds like it might have been bug that let troopers and BH take cover

from daniel erickson:

-There was an odd bug that was causing cover points to appear for Troopers and Bounty Hunters. These have not become cover classes.

ktanner3 · April 2011

I just finished watching that Pax East video. WOW! I can't believe how many people came to that event just to play TOR. As much as I'm looking forward to this game, there is no way I'd travel that far out nor wait 4+ hours just to play a demo.

The exploration is something I'm really looking forward to. I hope in the future we get to see more planets because those shots of Tatooine and Hoth were nice.

arieste · April 2011

The feedback from a single-player-protagonist perspective seems to be overwhelmingly positive. Good to hear that this game is at least as good as KOTOR and will entertain while you doing the story. Will definitely buy it just for that.

Still looking forward to hearing some feedback about what makes this game good as an MMO and how all the individual stories work together with the stories of a thousand of other players. How will my actions in the storyline effect my interactions with other players? If I am Dark Jedi, will i be unable to group with light jedi? Will i be unable to receive heals? If I am cold-blooded killer, will there be a group detrimental if i were to group with a highly principled altruistic person? All these things work fine in a single-player game, but i wonder how they'll work in an MMO...if i killed an NPC and another player is friends with that NPC, what will happen? All these things make it very diffuclt for me to understand how BioWare's story focus will funtion in an MMO.

In games like EQ2, the story is garbage, so most people ignore most of it, but when a game (like TOR) makes story the main focus, you can't simply ignore the majority of the game...

Unknown · April 2011

Originally posted by arieste
The feedback from a single-player-protagonist perspective seems to be overwhelmingly positive. Good to hear that this game is at least as good as KOTOR and will entertain while you doing the story. Will definitely buy it just for that.

Still looking forward to hearing some feedback about what makes this game good as an MMO and how all the individual stories work together with the stories of a thousand of other players. How will my actions in the storyline effect my interactions with other players? If I am Dark Jedi, will i be unable to group with light jedi? Will i be unable to receive heals? If I am cold-blooded killer, will there be a group detrimental if i were to group with a highly principled altruistic person? All these things work fine in a single-player game, but i wonder how they'll work in an MMO...if i killed an NPC and another player is friends with that NPC, what will happen? All these things make it very diffuclt for me to understand how BioWare's story focus will funtion in an MMO.

In games like EQ2, the story is garbage, so most people ignore most of it, but when a game (like TOR) makes story the main focus, you can't simply ignore the majority of the game...

you being a dark jedi won't prevent you from being able to group with someone that has made light side choices and will not effect if someone can heal you. In fact Daniel erickson recently commented how much fun he found it when two opposing alignments were grouped up and doing dialogue. they have also said that while LS/DS points will determine what skills you can use, it won't affect it in a way at the end game that it would prevent you from being able to group with people because you dont have X skill that you would get if you went light side(as opposed to dark side). at least thats what has been said by devs.

as for npcs that you killed but they didnt, i don't know how this will work. its probably been talked about but cant think of it right now.

arieste · April 2011

Originally posted by gaou
you being a dark jedi won't prevent you from being able to group with someone that has made light side choices and will not effect if someone can heal you. In fact Daniel erickson recently commented how much fun he found it when two opposing alignments were grouped up and doing dialogue. they have also said that while LS/DS points will determine what skills you can use, it won't affect it in a way at the end game that it would prevent you from being able to group with people because you dont have X skill that you would get if you went light side(as opposed to dark side). at least thats what has been said by devs.

So basically when it comes to the MMO portion of the game, none of the story or choices matter? Seems kinda crappy for a story-focused game where the main selling point is that "choices matter".

MMO.Maverick · April 2011

Originally posted by arieste

So basically when it comes to the MMO portion of the game, none of the story or choices matter? Seems kinda crappy for a story-focused game where the main selling point is that "choices matter".

? Aren't you being a bit unrealistic? What do you expect, a virtual reality a la Tad William's Otherland or the Matrix?

It's a revamp or upgrade of the questing system, when you do AoC Destiny quests, LotrO Book missions or WoW's Cata story infused quests like the Worgen starter quests, do you have much choices?To answer it for you, no you haven't.

It's either do the quests and progress along the 1-directional railway those questlines will take you along, or refuse to accept and finish the quest and level in another way. Those are your choices.

Let alone that what you do in a quest in those MMO's has impact on your relationship towards other players, as if everyone has unique, 1-time use only quests, all for themselves.

The difference is that SWTOR's story quests have cinematics, cutscenes and that your choices matter in the sense that there are branching questlines, leading to several different quest storyline developments in the course of your leveling/questing, depending on your choices. That's it.

If you want to make a comparison, then compare SWTOR's story questing with questing in other MMO's, that's the only relevant comparison to make.

maskedweasel · April 2011

Originally posted by MMO.Maverick

Originally posted by arieste

So basically when it comes to the MMO portion of the game, none of the story or choices matter? Seems kinda crappy for a story-focused game where the main selling point is that "choices matter".

? Aren't you being a bit unrealistic? What do you expect, a virtual reality a la Tad William's Otherland or the Matrix?

It's a revamp or upgrade of the questing system, when you do AoC Destiny quests, LotrO Book missions or WoW's Cata story infused quests like the Worgen starter quests, do you have much choices?To answer it for you, no you haven't.

It's either do the quests and progress along the 1-directional railway those questlines will take you along, or refuse to accept and finish the quest and level in another way. Those are your choices.

Let alone that what you do in a quest in those MMO's has impact on your relationship towards other players, as if everyone has unique, 1-time use only quests, all for themselves.

The difference is that SWTOR's story quests have cinematics, cutscenes and that your choices matter in the sense that there are branching questlines, leading to several different quest storyline developments in the course of your leveling/questing, depending on your choices. That's it.

If you want to make a comparison, then compare SWTOR's story questing with questing in other MMO's, that's the only relevant comparison to make.

Well, theres this, and then some, take into consideration also that these quests also deal within alignment and how other players see you -- and how the world sees you. This will also be prevalent in world quests too. Your alignment is directly related to your skills as well, so while other players that aren't grouped with you might not be able to see that you, killed your master, for instance, they will be able to tell you're a really bad dude.

Likewise, I can't help but think that in game factions (aside from the 2 main ones) will also be reflected on alignment. Not sure how that will play out, but I'd suspect you may have less chances to receive items and rewards when these come into play. That last part is mostly conjecture based on what we've seen when dealing with sub factions like the hutts, and the jedi order we do know you interact with them, it would only be logical to assume that your choices will affect that in the long run.

Sovrath · April 2011

Originally posted by ktanner3
I just finished watching that Pax East video. WOW! I can't believe how many people came to that event just to play TOR. As much as I'm looking forward to this game, there is no way I'd travel that far out nor wait 4+ hours just to play a demo.

The exploration is something I'm really looking forward to. I hope in the future we get to see more planets because those shots of Tatooine and Hoth were nice.

I was at Pax East, on crutches because of an operation, and looking at the HUGE throng of people waiting in line to get at one of the terminals. There were so many people that I just decided to watch as I figured I would be in line for some huge amount of time.

And it was hot.

People seemed to be enjoying themselves and everyone seemed excited.

arieste · April 2011

Originally posted by MMO.Maverick
The difference is that SWTOR's story quests have cinematics, cutscenes and that your choices matter in the sense that there are branching questlines, leading to several different quest storyline developments in the course of your leveling/questing, depending on your choices. That's it.

Right, so in the MMO sense, your chocies do not matter, just like most other MMOs.

Also, i'm not being unrealistic, i'm not the one promising to "bring choices that matter to MMO gaming", the makers of this game are. I'm just trying see realistically what that means in gameplay terms.

And it sounds like - in gameplay terms - you have choices that only you know about and that effect only you and have no impact on your interaction with the MMO world as a whole.

As far as expectations go, I don't think it's very farfetched incorporate the stats based on your choices into your interactions. Many games already have this in the form of being flagged kill-on-site to certain people, etc. It certainly doesn't require any kind of matrix-type virtual reality in order to program something like a light side healing spell having lesser effects on dark side players or making it impossible to perform a certain "evil" action while in a gorup with a "good" character without compromising the group.

There are all kinds of ways to do this with technology that has existed and been used for many years. No need for futuristic VR or anything like that. All it takes is a design choice. And if the design choice is to have your choices NOT matter for the majority of your gameplay time, well, it's the developers' choice, not a technical limitation.

MMO.Maverick · April 2011

Originally posted by arieste

Right, so in the MMO sense, your chocies do not matter, just like most other MMOs.

Your choices matter in the questing you do, that's right. Which isn't like in most other MMO's. Is that clearer?

Also, i'm not being unrealistic, i'm not the one promising to "bring choices that matter to MMO gaming", the makers of this game are. I'm just trying see realistically what that means in gameplay terms.

If you didn't know what BW meant with that, you haven't been paying attention at all to the game, or you're just wilfully acting ignorant, just to make a point. Playing dumb, as it's being called, I believe.

And it sounds like - in gameplay terms - you have choices that only you know about and that effect only you and have no impact on your interaction with the MMO world as a whole.

Let me spell it out, in case you missed it: SWTOR will be a themepark MMO, with most of its features resembling the ones we encounter in most themepar AAA MMO's.

SWTOR is not a sandbox MMORPG.

If you're looking for sandbox features, or if you passionately dislike themepark MMO's or MMO's that build further upon themepark oriented gameplay aspects like questing is one of them, then SWTOR will not be a game for you.

@maskedweasel: it could be, but until I read more about it that hints at that direction, it's not something I'll include in my expectations.

Hengist · April 2011

Originally posted by arieste

Right, so in the MMO sense, your chocies do not matter, just like most other MMOs.

Also, i'm not being unrealistic, i'm not the one promising to "bring choices that matter to MMO gaming", the makers of this game are. I'm just trying see realistically what that means in gameplay terms.

Okay, let's go slow and illustrate with video. (pictures are worth 1,000 words, right?)

Kill the Captain
&
Spare the Captain

In that example, if you watch the gameplay video of The Black Talon Flashpoint do you see how your choice actually impacts your game? You've got a choice, and depending on that choice your path diverges. Most other MMO's do that? Really?

Taral V then is an example of how multiplayer conversation happens. So suddenly it isnt just your choice, but that of the group. Now we've never seen an alternate for this, but decisions arent just hidden from everyone.

So realisitically, what other MMO's (and you did say most, even if I cant think of a single one that is released currently) actually have something different happen based on a person's choice?

Hengist · April 2011

@OP

Before folks get carried away, may want to note that the Trooper/Cover was not intended, and actually a bug.

Georg ZoellerHi guys,Just to clear up some confusion here:First, cover is still being worked on, so it's interface and gameplay may still change in the future.Second, the Trooper class seeing the cover bar in the UK build is a bug, not a feature (sorry to those that got excited there )Third, currently - portable cover is slightly inferior to hard cover. Players in hard cover will not take damage from most types of attacks, while players in portable cover will take damage mitigated by the portable cover's energy shield. The way cover works is that if you get shot while exposed (e.g. you're taking a shot yourself), you can get hit and take damage, but if you are fully in cover (really hiding), you don't get shot. There's still a number of edge-cases here, and performance issues (e.g. lag induced by playing from the UK on our US server) will cause visual artifacts such as blaster bolts hitting players who are in cover.Another thing not seen in the UK demo is AI upgrades we have made that allow smarter enemies to react to cover in a more realistic fashion - such as lobbing a grenade or trying to aim and headshot the player in cover.As mentioned, cover is in active development and you're going to see changes to it over time until launch based on Game Testing - but it's a Smuggler/Imperial Agent only game mechanic.Let me note that even without cover, Troopers can use line of sight to their advantage - enemies will not shoot at targets they can not see - although that can cut both ways for a ranged class.

Linkage

Beanpuie · April 2011

Originally posted by Baikal
@OP

Before folks get carried away, may want to note that the Trooper/Cover was not intended, and actually a bug.

Georg Zoeller

Hi guys,

Just to clear up some confusion here:

First, cover is still being worked on, so it's interface and gameplay may still change in the future.

Second, the Trooper class seeing the cover bar in the UK build is a bug, not a feature (sorry to those that got excited there )

Third, currently - portable cover is slightly inferior to hard cover. Players in hard cover will not take damage from most types of attacks, while players in portable cover will take damage mitigated by the portable cover's energy shield.

The way cover works is that if you get shot while exposed (e.g. you're taking a shot yourself), you can get hit and take damage, but if you are fully in cover (really hiding), you don't get shot. There's still a number of edge-cases here, and performance issues (e.g. lag induced by playing from the UK on our US server) will cause visual artifacts such as blaster bolts hitting players who are in cover.

Another thing not seen in the UK demo is AI upgrades we have made that allow smarter enemies to react to cover in a more realistic fashion - such as lobbing a grenade or trying to aim and headshot the player in cover.

As mentioned, cover is in active development and you're going to see changes to it over time until launch based on Game Testing - but it's a Smuggler/Imperial Agent only game mechanic.

Let me note that even without cover, Troopers can use line of sight to their advantage - enemies will not shoot at targets they can not see - although that can cut both ways for a ranged class.

Linkage

Boo..

MMO.Maverick · April 2011

@Baikal: ah, good point, another poster had already quoted the dev that it was a bug, but I'll also mention it in the OP.

Ah. there was some other interesting stuff in that link you gave:

First, cover is still being worked on, so it's interface and gameplay may still change in the future.

Second, the Trooper class seeing the cover bar in the UK build is a bug, not a feature (sorry to those that got excited there )

Third, currently - portable cover is slightly inferior to hard cover. Players in hard cover will not take damage from most types of attacks, while players in portable cover will take damage mitigated by the portable cover's energy shield.

The way cover works is that if you get shot while exposed (e.g. you're taking a shot yourself), you can get hit and take damage, but if you are fully in cover (really hiding), you don't get shot. There's still a number of edge-cases here, and performance issues (e.g. lag induced by playing from the UK on our US server) will cause visual artifacts such as blaster bolts hitting players who are in cover.

Another thing not seen in the UK demo is AI upgrades we have made that allow smarter enemies to react to cover in a more realistic fashion - such as lobbing a grenade or trying to aim and headshot the player in cover.

As mentioned, cover is in active development and you're going to see changes to it over time until launch based on Game Testing - but it's a Smuggler/Imperial Agent only game mechanic.

jeremyjodes · April 2011

Can't wait for this game! Awesome to read it here. The Tor forums has it but for some reason you did it better here maverick. Sounds so dam fun can't wait.

arieste · April 2011

Originally posted by Baikal

Originally posted by arieste

Right, so in the MMO sense, your chocies do not matter, just like most other MMOs.

Also, i'm not being unrealistic, i'm not the one promising to "bring choices that matter to MMO gaming", the makers of this game are. I'm just trying see realistically what that means in gameplay terms.

Okay, let's go slow and illustrate with video. (pictures are worth 1,000 words, right?)

Kill the Captain

&

Spare the Captain

In that example, if you watch the gameplay video of The Black Talon Flashpoint do you see how your choice actually impacts your game? You've got a choice, and depending on that choice your path diverges. Most other MMO's do that? Really?

Taral V then is an example of how multiplayer conversation happens. So suddenly it isnt just your choice, but that of the group. Now we've never seen an alternate for this, but decisions arent just hidden from everyone.

So realisitically, what other MMO's (and you did say most, even if I cant think of a single one that is released currently) actually have something different happen based on a person's choice?

both you and the other person that responded seem to be missing my point. but anyhow, my question has been answered, so thank you.

(also FYI, there are several instances in eq2 where one person's conversation effects the entire group or raid.. for example, in one conversation with a dragon, your dialogue choices can result in you siding with the dragon in which case you are challenge to a friendly fight while if you threaten to kill the dragon he attacks you with his full force resulting in a different encounter altogether. I've also seen this in other games. I do assume that SWTOR does this a lot more extensively and elaborately, just as they do in their single-player games.)

MMO.Maverick · April 2011

Originally posted by arieste

also FYI, there are several instances in eq2 where one person's conversation effects the entire group or raid.. for example, in one conversation with a dragon, your dialogue choices can result in you siding with the dragon in which case you are challenge to a friendly fight while if you threaten to kill the dragon he attacks you with his full force resulting in a different encounter altogether. I've also seen this in other games. I do assume that SWTOR does this a lot more extensively and elaborately, just as they do in their single-player games.

I can't recall it being used in other games, if so then it has been extremely rarely.

I suppose the way that BW will do it will be like in their single player games, althoufh they did mention that if you'd follow completely a darkside path it'd differ completely from a lightside path in your questing experience as if you were playing a different class.

Originally posted by jeremyjodes
Can't wait for this game! Awesome to read it here. The Tor forums has it but for some reason you did it better here maverick. Sounds so dam fun can't wait.

Thanks, you're welcome

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Gameplay impressions from the UK Community Event

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Gameplay impressions from the UK Community Event

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