Wewp beta review! :3
So straight off the bat I'd like to say that it's
a very good game. But it's not quite a
great game. It could be better, and even though it's only a beta the outstanding issues I have with it tend towards the fundamentals of the design of the game rather than those little bugs here and there that can easily be fixed come the release of the actual product. And I'd like to say that even though I'd probably play this over whatever sludge Blizzard comes up with for WoW, I don't think this will take over the MMO market. I'm guessing it might get a nice slice of the MMO pie, but I'm sort of getting the idea that with the raw statistics WoW will continue to dominate in subscription count.
But overall it's a very good game. There's a bit of grind here and there, and the quests are your obligatory "kill enemy X, Y number of times" or "obtain item X to retrieve for NPC Y" but there's enough frequency of them and variety in the actual quests to keep the average player from noticing that they're mostly doing the same things over and over again against different enemies and occasionally in a different environment every now and then.
They have combat refined to a tee, though, and when people get together on either PvP or PvE the game becomes a beautiful thing. There seem to be cooldowns after every action a player takes but most are so short (milliseconds) it just becomes a mechanic to pace a player's actions and weight abilities of differing significance. More powerful abilities seem to have have an additive cooldown on top of the short pause that occurs after every ability, and it's a nice thought towards being able to balance the game. Other comparable MMOs I've played tend to do the same one way or another, though, but some have longer ones, and others have shorter ones that tend to give the combat a clusterfucky pace. At first it seemed to me to be slightly longer than I'd like, but A) it was easy to get used to and B) part of it was probably my lag anyway.
There's not a
huge amount of lag on the servers I played on (Ebon Hawk, PvP and Canderous Ordo, PvE) despite most of them being listed as "full". Loading screens at the moment seem unacceptably long (counting in minutes rather than seconds), but I'm hoping that might simply be an issue on my end - or something that Bioware will get around to optimising before the final release. Gameplay itself tends to be smooth enough, although my client seems to habitually lag every time I enter a new region of the game for the first time. The number of bugs are alright for a beta, the usual culprits being a crash to desktop after quick travelling, but also some really odd ones:
... Yeah, that's a 3-inch high midget NPC we're saluting in that cutscene.
ed: okay, maybe not 3 inches. Maybe 6. or 10. Fuck, it's a bug, okay? lawl.
Level design seems to be fairly standard. I'm really enjoying the idea of sections of the map specifically allocated to a particular class or character in the party; it really hammers home the idea that this MMO plot is highly player-character driven. Of course, the significance of it all sort of lessens when you remember that the plot to your character will be the same as several hundred thousand other characters in the game, but it's a nice gesture nonetheless. The voice acting which has been marketed a hundred bajillion times during the game's promotion, is fairly top-notch; my first character is a female trooper, so I'll be listening to Jennifer Hale's voice a lot.
A lot. I might even get sick of it later on.
The writing, plotwise itself is... actually fairly average for a Bioware game. That isn't to say that it's
bad, it's not filled with as many cliches as you would from, say, Dragon Age: Origins, and it's still miles above a lot of other RPGs, but the dialogue is comparatively ho-hum by Bioware's standards.
Some characters here and there have appeared to have been a labor of love, and there are certain interactions between the player and specific NPCs that have that familiar witty Bioware charm, but all in all a lot of it seems to have been tied down by that Star-Wars-prequel prose dialogue, which is a shame since the KotOR series has always had writing and dialogue comparable to the fun that the original trilogy had.
Here it feels like the voice talent are simply going through the motions, because the quests themselves are simply so straightforward. There's glimpses of genius in a few scenarios, such as one where a refugee who's lost her family heirloom actually being an Imperial spy looking for her hidden communication device, but there's none of that moral ambiguity or emotional impact that the quests in Dragon Age and Mass Effect have had.
And that's also a shame, since the actual setting of The Old Republic is such a gold mine for that sort of thing - it's set in a Cold War were the Republic and the Sith Empire have formed a shaky treaty, and are using a whole bunch of proxy armies, mercs and bounty hunters to wage their wars. The storylines for certain classes hint at internal corruption and bribery, dirty interrogations and that sort of thing, but it doesn't really have the same navel-gazing effect as the KotOR games did, so so far the bulk of TOR seems to focus on fetch quests and murder-everything objectives.
Keep in mind that this is really only my very first impressions; this is me about 10-ish hours into the game and I'm sitting at about level 9 for both my characters. Levelling seems to be
okay for the early stages of player characters; but I've yet to discover the entire levelling curve. And again, it's a very good game. Even a very good MMO. The Star Wars/KotOR fanbase will virtually guarantee good sales, but it doesn't quite have the magic I've known most of the Bioware games for having.
. Of course, I'd enslave you / make you my bitches / have you pay me moneys in eve because I'm awesome.
