A rundown of my experience with SWTOR (LONG)

I’m going to be largely comparing this game to WoW, not because WoW is my favourite game (it isn’t) but because it’s the game with which SWTOR, unsurprisingly has the most in common. For better or worse WoW is a benchmark today, it speaks to a wide audience and most games take influence from it; I’m not getting into any squabbling about its quality or originality.

I’ll say from the outset going into the game I had very low expectations, I’m not a big fan of Star Wars nor of Bioware games – not that I particularly dislike either, just don’t really go out of my way to be involved with them. So, on to the review (of my experience, I’m no games reviewer).

Character Creation

Having passed the login screen and chosen a server I was greeted with a fairly typical character creation screen. You pick your side, then you’re presented with your choices of class, up top there’re a variety of tabs giving you information about the class you’re viewing, but overall these weren’t particularly helpful beyond the most basic information they provided – like which rolls the class (and its follow on advanced classes) could fill and what equipment they would use. After this we pick our race and gender and move onto the customisation screen.

The character customisation was passable at best, those of you who like to put a great deal of care into this stage of the game will be thoroughly disappointed. You pick from a selection of presets with four body types, several hairstyles and colours, etc. There are no sliders and relatively few options in each field, forget about adding a personal touch to the appearance of your character, it’s not an option.

There are enough options to create a relatively unique looking character, I didn’t encounter anyone who looked a great deal like me for example, but character creation is a chore – I went through looking for the hairstyle I disliked the least, trying to decide whether to be ridiculously huge or a little disproportioned. If like me you don’t care much for long winded character creation you’ll be satisfied, it’s certainly deeper than character customisation in WoW, but for a modern game it’s rather lacklustre.

Appearance

While the game isn’t graphically stunning it is more than acceptable, much like Blizzard Bioware have forgone photorealism for an aesthetically pleasing, immersive and system friendly look. The animations are not too extravagant but they’re enjoyable to watch and flow quite well, most of my Imperial Operatives combat animations looked reserved and realistic very befitting the game’s context. In many ways the game’s appearance reminds me of Everquest 2 or Vanguard, particularly the characters – the way they point their body at the target, the dynamics of their clothing and their overall look were all striking similar. I’ve never been one to pay too much attention to the details of graphics, and I don’t know about the technology so I’ll just say that from where I sat the game looked very good.

Gameplay Basics

Where SWTOR really shined for me was in the actual gameplay - precisely where I had thought the game would fall down. While it didn’t stray far from the standard formula the implementation was exceptional, everything felt smooth and responsive. Controlling your character feels almost identical to how it does in World of Warcraft, which I feel was one of the areas that WoW genuinely excelled, and SWTOR has done well to reproduce it. They haven’t done anything revolutionary in the basics of the character control and user interface and I think this is a good thing, a lot of games I’ve played just ‘feel wrong’ for lack of a decent description – this one does not.

Levels 1-10 were very easy, which I think is a good thing for those people who might take some time getting used to the game. A lot of mobs will die in 1 shot, but you’ll take on several at a time – this fit in well with the game’s description of your character as being a general badarse who’s here to take names. You’ll see a few heroic quests which require teamwork (or out leveling) to complete, but these aren’t really necessary so you won’t find yourself standing around the lowbie zone looking for a group.

At level 10 you should be finishing up your class quests and heading to (in the case Empire players) the imperial fleet. Perhaps too little direction is provided here as I encountered a plethora of players unable to find their advanced class trainer, which is probably going to be the first thing on your mind on arrival. Personally I had no trouble and I think anyone who pays a little attention would find the same, though it can be slightly overwhelming I suppose. You’ll also find that you’re ready for your first flashpoint and for instanced PvP.

Instanced PvP

I loathe instanced PvP with every fibre of my being. It forms the backbone of my (I’ll admit it now…) hatred of World of Warcraft for its (large) part in introduction of this form of ‘PvP’ into the mainstream of gaming. I cannot fathom how anyone ever thought this was a good idea and I don’t think I ever will. If I do though, I’ll have SWTOR to thank for it as the implementation here was thoroughly enjoyable.

Not one to let my own biases get in the way of a potentially fun time I decided shortly after hitting level 10 to give the instanced PvP a whirl. I was immediately enthralled and ended up levelling to 20 this way. The games I had access to during this time were (each of these being 8v8);

Huttball (Rugby)

Large stadium full of fire and green death water obstacles with two lines at the far sides. Each team must attempt to take the ball from its spawning place in the centre of the stadium over the opposing team’s line. Holding the ball will give you a movespeed debuff and access to the ‘throw ball’ ability, which uses a typical AoE targeting circle to chuck the ball to team members (or the opposing team, or air), killing the ballhandler will gain you the ball.

King of the Hill (no idea what this is called)

A king of the hill variant with three turrets in line along the centre line of the map, each team must try to control these turrets to destroy the enemy ship.  Fairly standard fare here but I had a good deal of fun doing it.

Rush (again not sure of the name)

One team defends while the other attacks then you swap. Attackers try to bomb doors to pass through to the next area, defends try to prevent the planting of bombs or defuse bombs that have been planted, the final room has a computer terminal you interact with to complete the round. The team that spends the least time achieving this goal on their attacking turn wins, with a timeout for the first team after a goodly time.



I played a good deal of each of these both as stealth and healing specs, each was a lot of fun. The class balance felt good, there was no one class I felt I didn’t want to fight, and no class I thought was a pushover. If I had to pick something as overpowered (in case any of you are hoping to play the most OP class at level 20 at release) I’d probably say Jedi Sage, they pelt you with these damnable pebbles that slow your move speed and deal massive damage.

Flashpoints (Instanced Dungeon Crawls)

As I said I mostly PvPed so I only experienced one genuine flashpoint (I strolled through the level 10 2 man one having outleveled it just to see what it was like in there also). The one I did do was a level 19 flashpoint called “Hammer Station” I won’t go into the storyline points. The flashpoint featured three bosses and a moderate number of mobs. The bosses were quite interesting fights, they had a variety of mechanics including add spawns, conal AoEs, random target bursts and rings of death. The fights weren’t pushovers and we wiped more than once (though to be fair we weren’t exactly a crack team) it all seemed very promising of an enjoyable and challenging end game raid environment.

Other than that I don’t have a great deal to say. I thoroughly enjoyed my experience with the beta and were it not for the failure of a global release I would play the game at release, in fact it was enjoyable enough that I will almost certainly buy a copy from the US anyway, but until I cave I’ll be admonishing Bioware for their failure to cater to players outside of the US and Europe, completely unacceptable in this day and age and they should be ashamed. I’m baffled as to why I (as a ‘red zoned’ Australian) am accepted into the beta, yet not allowed to pre-order the game. Anyway for those first-class citizens living in the US or in the parts of Europe Bioware has deemed worthy to purchase their game I’d highly recommend it.