Between quests, you have to make sure to equip your new gear, repair your old gear, and do some training, or you'll find yourself overwhelmed. You acquire a steady stream of new loot from your downed foes, some of which you use and the rest of which you sell to vendors. If you put together a team, you'll need the Holy Trinity of tanks, healers, and damage-dealers. The combat feels more like an algebra problem than a visceral and violent encounter you have to trigger as few enemies at once as you can, and then choose the right combination of attacks and abilities to take them down before they kill you. Some quests are too much for you to do alone, so you'll need to band together with other players. As you level up, you unlock new story content and are introduced to new areas. You walk around accumulating quests, most of which are simple errands like "Kill X number of Y enemy type," and every tiny action, right down to finding a new area on the map, feeds your addiction by earning you EXP.
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(At level 10, you'll also choose from two advanced classes.) After picking a species and making some (mostly minor) tweaks to your character's appearance, you're introduced to the game in a series of eye-catching cinematics.Īnd then it's on to the basic gameplay, which is, shall we say, "highly influenced" by the World of Warcraft/Everquest model. First, you take the side of the Galactic Republic or the Sith, and then you choose from among four different character classes. SWTOR contains eight different storylines, and you choose one at the beginning of the game. Because the game is so plot-focused, it's an open question whether you'll want to keep up a $15-a-month subscription for years to come, but there's no question that the initial investment is more than worth it. Sixty dollars is a steal for the chance to spend a month in this universe, and, unless you play the game full-time, you won't even be able to work through the basic story content in that amount of time. If you like Star Wars, MMOs, sci-fi action games, the Mass Effect-style ability to make decisions that matter, or the original KOTOR, BioWare made SWTOR with you in mind.īelieve it or not, the developer more or less succeeded-at least, judging by my early hours with the game. Star Wars: The Old Republic is a World of Warcraft-scale MMO, an attempt to finally provide a follow-up of sorts to the single-player game Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, a space-combat simulator, a Choose Your Own Adventure book, and a package of epic new Star Wars stories. If you do too much at once, you spread yourself thin-instead, you should find a couple of things you can do better than the competition, and stick to them.Īpparently, BioWare didn't get the memo. A cardinal rule of business is that you shouldn't try to be all things to all people.