Star Wars: The Old Republic

2 Ratings: 5.0

Video Games

Star Wars: The Old Republic is a Massively Multiplayer Online Role-playing Game (MMORPG) for the PC gaming platform, set in the Star Wars universe. The first game of its kind, in it players choose from either the Galactic Republic or Sith faction, … see full wiki

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More than "World of Warcraft" with a "Star Wars" skin

Dec 16, 2011

by CRSwanson
posted in The Gaming Hub

Rating:

I got to play the Thanksgiving beta weekending with TOR, and loved it. Then I bought a copy and finally got my early access today. Yay, me! So what do I have to say about this?

I've been playing MMORPG games for a few years now. Like many, my first time was with "EverQuest", but I didn't play it long. I finally got back into the genre with "World of Warcraft" back in 2008 and loved it to death. I still play daily. Since then I've also dabbled in "Lego Universe" and "DC Universe Online", and while both have their advantages, neither are anything that I'm really interested in playing long-term.

But this...this is something different. I played and enjoyed "Knights of the Old Republic" when that first came out, and also played the sequel. This game owes more than a little to those, and thankfully more to the first than to the second. It also owes quite a bit to WoW.

The game is pretty much the same as most of these sort. You pick your side, your race and your class. Each class gets a secondary upgrade class. As you go through the game, you level up, you get exp, you get new gear, get a ship, a mount, a crew, etc. So in that respect it's pretty much the same a "Star Wars" flavored version of WoW.

But the difference is the storyline. With WoW I never felt like I was really part of any larger epic. My character ran quests and did stuff, but none of it seemed to matter and none of it seemed to fit within a bigger narrative. With TOR, that's changed. Right away I feel like I'm part of something larger. It helps that the quests are given by people telling you, verbally, what needs to be done, as opposed to a couple paragraphs on a quest-giver screen. It also helps that the game seems to have been constructed with a more epic storyline in mind.

About the graphics and gameplay I cannot say enough. The graphics look simply gorgeous. The character models are excellent, too, with my only complaint being that, as usual, you have right-handed characters. One would think with the customization options they offer, they could let you have a left-handed character, but apparently not. The gameplay is also incredibly good, and uses the WoW model of hotkeys, your mouse and keyboard. This is much different from the "DC Universe Online" way of doing things and I like it a lot more.

Overall this is not likely to be a "WoW Killer" in the sense that it will dethrone WoW from the number one spot in gaming. What it likely will do, however, is stick around a lot longer than most games (the aforementioned "Lego Universe" is closing down after only a bit more than a year), and it will likely have time to really make a good impression on the gaming world.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have some game playing to do. :)

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