GameSpy's Concerns About Star Wars: The Old Republic

Until today, BioWare has kept the majority of the details about Star Wars: The Old Republic locked away as securely as a Skywalker on Tatooine. Now, with a little over a month left before players discover if the game lives up to the messianic reputation it has built up over the last few years, BioWare has opened the gates and allowed us to speak our minds about the full project.

I've already spoken in the game's defense elsewhere, and I'm happy to join the chorus of journalists who claim that the game's story brings you closer to your character than any other MMO that's come before. It's the other aspects of SWTOR that worry me. After jumping back into this little corner of George Lucas' imagination after a two-week hiatus, I find myself a little less in love with the game than I was before, and that feeling has prompted me to compile this list of concerns.


Lackluster Character Creation

For a series known for its many quirky races, the character creation system is lacking. For one, there are only eight races to choose from, and most of these look more-or-less human. In other words, don't expect to play as a Rodian bounty hunter or a Wookie smuggler. Even the cyborgs are only distinguishable by glowing eyes or spiffy visors. In BioWare's defense, I suspect they're saving other more exotic races for future expansions.

Yet there's also another minor nag with character creation that I wasn't aware of until I tried to make a stout, grim bounty hunter. The voice for your character is always the same. This was all right when I made my sagacious Jedi Consular, but I winced at the realization that my hulking badass sounded less like the Juggernaut and more like Ewan MacGregor. It's a valid concern, I think, but one that would require thousands of hours (and maybe millions of dollars) to remedy.


Tiresome Voice Acting

I'll qualify that by saying there's nothing really wrong with the voice acting; indeed, it's the game's best quality. There's probably better voice acting in this game than there's been in the last few Star Wars movies. No, the problem lies instead with the fact that there are just so many voiced quests. Every time you want to pick up a standard "kill 15 droids" mission, you need to listen to some schmuck talk about how he hates being out there and misses his family and yada, yada, yada. And you'll almost always have to respond to him or her at least twice. While it's exciting and immersive at first, it grows tedious around the 30th level. Worse yet, it creates a jarring clash between the game's MMO groundwork and single-player elements when your friends are calling for you to hurry up and join the raid and you're just trying to enjoy the story.

The problem is most apparent in flashpoints, the game's version of instanced dungeons. If one person wants to sit and watch the "conversations" that periodically occur during key moments of each flashpoint, everyone has to sit and watch the cinematic with them. Dungeon cinematics have never worked particularly well in other games (think of the ones in WoW's Throne of the Tides) and they clash with the multiplayer experience in SWTOR. I've already experienced people leaving groups because they complain that "some people don't know how to use the spacebar" (meaning that they don't know how to skip over the cinematics). Those people fail to realize or refuse to acknowlege that seeing such things is no doubt new for some of the weekend testers. Good to see that the community is already off to such a great start.


It's Too Easy

This one, I admit, might already be out of date. Here I am, writing only a couple of hours before the embargo lifts, and already I'm learning that yesterday's build features much harder enemies scattered throughout the universe. Before, playing SWTOR felt like playing God of War on easy mode -- even though the game throws at least three enemies at you at once (a welcome change from the standard single pulls of MMOs), you could almost always slaughter them all just by keeping your hotkey busy. And if you happened to have one of your NPC companions with you, combat was a breeze.

Again, that might have all changed. One thing that likely hasn't changed, however, is the tendency for boss fights in flashpoints to feel like you are whacking your lightsaber against a target dummy. This worries me. Dungeon boss design is always one of the things that keeps me coming back to a game long after I've leveled through the content and received some decent gear, and I'm currently not seeing any memorable mechanics in SWTOR. I suspect this decision springs from a desire to make flashpoints achievable with two players and their NPC companions alone, but when you're playing with a full group, there is no challenge.


Decisions Without Consequences

By now we're likely all aware that some of the inescapable hallmarks of MMORPGs are quests that require you to "kill X of Y" and collect "Y of X" for fun and profit, but many games at least hide it well. Strip away the hours of dialogue and the wonderfully animated cut scenes, and you'll find that The Old Republic presents this formula in what may be its most quintessential form.

That would be fine had it felt like your decisions in the conversation wheels for each quest had any real impact on solo play. Players could once lose their NPC companions if they made too many decisions that ran contrary to that NPC's disposition; now they just get a stern reply or two and a loss of buddy points. Without any real consequences, the entire decision-making aspect of the game and questing in general feels hollow.


You're Stuck With the User Interface

This is a relatively minor concern for me since I'm one of those nutballs who usually doesn't have a problem using a game's native interface, but many players cringe at the thought that you're essentially stuck with the tools BioWare gives you. That means that you can't resize your hot bars, you can't move many items to a different location on the screen, and, at the very least, you're stuck with a cheery blue interface that just oozes with Jedi pomposity when you're playing as a Sith character. It's not unworkable by any means (and you can move some items, such as the chat window, to another location), but the hardcore MMO crowd is likely to be up in arms about this one.


Paper Thin Replayability

Maybe it was the many hours I spent roving about Skyrim throughout the last few days. Perhaps it was the time I spent tiptoeing through Lordran before that. At any rate, the thought of leveling a new character and sitting through countless hours' worth of the same basic cinematics and voiced dialogue in SWTOR seems tedious beyond belief. While it's true that each class has its own story, most of the quests in the world beyond are the same for every character. There's even some overlap. Jedi Knights and Jedi Consulars share many of the same experiences in the starting zones, for instance, as do Troopers and Smugglers. If my experience is in any way typical, then leveling alts as a way of getting the most out of the game may not be as enticing as originally thought apart from switching factions.

Do these concerns destroy the game? No, but they might be cause for alarm for veteran MMORPG players. A common pronouncement with SWTOR lately is that you won't like the game if you don't like MMOs -- regardless of whether or not you love Star Wars and enjoy a good story. I worry that MMO players will label it a single player game masquerading as an MMO. And if that's the case, perhaps we really would have been better off with Knights of the Old Republic 3.


Spy Guy says: We've told you before how much we love the storytelling in SWTOR, so it was time to be critical of what could be one of the biggest PC games ever. So what are your concerns about Star Wars: The Old Republic?