In The Old Republic, your class determines your story, your voice, your companions and your abilities. But the latter aren’t completely decided by your initial choice: as you level up, you’ll come to a point where you have to make a key decision about your character’s future. You can evolve your skillset into one of two more specialised classes, suiting your character better to the way you prefer to play them.
Ohlen gives an example: “The Sith Inquisitor is the more agile rogue character: he doesn’t wear heavy armour, he’s much quicker, and when he gets to a certain level, he has to choose between two different paths. One path is more like Darth Maul, where you have the dual-bladed lightsaber and you’re all about acrobatic lightsaber moves. Or you can choose to do another path which is more of a ranged path, and more of a Emperor Palpatine path. You’re less about the lightsaber, more about the range and force powers.”
It’ll be nice to make such a major choice late in the game: usually we’re asked to make the biggest decision about our style of play before we have any real idea what it’s going to be like. And it won’t be your last opportunity, either. “Once you’ve made that choice, you still continue to make choices about how to customise your character from there... There are certain powers that you can unlock or have locked away from you as you level up.”
The biggest worry right now is presentation. The simplified visual style looks great for environments but rather ugly for the plastic-wigged, big-nosed characters. It’s presumably related to the sheer amount of content they have to create: more than their five biggest games put together, yet their team is “not a huge amount” larger than Mass Effect 2’s. “It’s not like we’re double,” Ohlen says.
The Smuggler class can use a rudimentary cover system, but the others seem to stand in the open whittling people’s hitpoints down – like most MMOGs, but unlike other BioWare games. There’s a lengthy video of some normal play so you can judge for yourself whether this stuff is going to bother you.
Since the game’s not due this year, BioWare are being careful about saying too much too soon. Ohlen reckons that “Fighting and questing is going to be 90+% of what you’re doing,” but he’s vague about the other 10-%. “We’re going to have some open world PvP. As for the more structured PvP, I can’t go into details on that, but we will have it. We have talked about crafting, that’s something we are going to have in the game. And we’re fans of trying to manipulate the economy of an MMO. That’s something we definitely want.”
It’s a similar story for endgame content -the stuff that keeps players happy once they’ve hit the maximum level. “We’re looking at classic systems, but we’re also doing something brand new, that hasn’t been done in an MMO before. So we’re going to mix those two together. I can’t really give you any more details on that, from the look [brand manager] Deborah’s giving me right now.”
Above: Hopefully the Republic Trooper's story arc is more than just "I'm a clone? Do I have a soul?"
He did say, though, that they want the player to still be questing. “We want to make sure that the endgame isn’t completely differentfrom what you’ve been doing. So there will be a natural progression... We want to make sure that when people play ToR they feel like they never run out of content, they always have something to do, that it’s an epic story.”
Weget the impression that even if The Old Republic doesn’t tick all of our MMORPG boxes, if it feels a little weird to be chasing a personal story alongside thousands of others doing the same, it’ll still be a great BioWare game.We hope that’s their priority: we’re drowning in MMOs that ape the WoW template, and while plenty of them are nice enough, most of us are still waiting for something worth paying a monthly fee for. A Knights of the Old Republic with eight different stories, multiplayer conversations and near-limitless quests would certainly do it.
Mar 26, 2010
