Star Wars: The Old Republic Initial Thoughts

I got started on the game yesterday and played for about 6 hours after work. I'm pretty sure that's more time spent in one sitting than I played Final Fantasy XIV and Star Trek Online combined. Time will tell if it manages to keep my attention but for now my reaction to the game is positive and I think a lot of the people I played World of Warcraft with would like this game too. Here are my first few thoughts about the game...


Looting monsters in the game is done very well. Final Fantasy XI had the best looting system in an MMO that I've played (you didn't have to loot any corpses as the stuff just appeared in your inventory or in your group's loot pool for rolling) but SWTOR is a close second. The closest comparison is WoW where a monster with loot would have a little sparkle appear on its corpse. Right click on it to open the loot window and then click on the loot. Someone made a mod to remove the last stage so you just had to right click the corpse and you'd automatically take the loot. Blizzard eventually added that option to the client. SWTOR comes with that option as well, and a second one beside it in the option menu: autoloot all nearby corpses on right click! AE down a bunch of dudes? One click will loot all the corpses instead of needing to click each one individually! I think back to farming Dire Maul for librams to get the Insane in the Membrane achievement and wish so badly that this option existed in WoW.

There are a couple other good things about loot, too. In WoW you know a corpse has loot when it sparkles but the sparkle was designed to be pretty unobtrusive and therefore could sometimes be missed. SWTOR punches you in the face with the knowledge that loot exists by making a giant pillar of light shine out of any corpse containing loot. The cool part of that is the pillar of light is coloured based on the quality of loot on the corpse. There's no way you'll ever miss a magical item now! I can remember playing my hunter in WoW and having to walk up to every corpse in case it had good stuff... In SWTOR that isn't going to happen. If I don't feel like looting everyone that's fine since I'll always be able to tell when a corpse has good loot from a distance. The other great thing with loot is you can send your 'pet' on a trash run where she'll take all of your vendor trash items from your inventory and run off to vendor them for you. Talk about convenient! I again wish I had that option when farming in Dire Maul.



I like how the control system is customizable and can be made pretty much identical to WoW. One of the worst parts of playing a new game is relearning how to move around in the world. Final Fantasy XI was particularly bad for this but really any change at all takes time to overcome. (I remember playing Ocarina of Time and Dead Rising 2 at the same time and dying a lot when switching between games since they aimed differently.) At any rate in SWTOR I can walk forward by holding down both mouse buttons. I can steer with the mouse. I can strafe with A and D. Jump with the space bar. Just like I moved around in WoW! (The only downside is my character refuses to do a flip when I jump.)

A neat thing with rotating the camera is it made the sound come through different parts of my headphones depending on where I was looking. Maybe I'm just really out of touch but it made me smile when I discovered it.

The game actually feels polished. It's certainly not as smooth as a WoW expansion launch would be, for example, but it feels like this is actually a product ready for sale. (Contrasted with Star Trek Online, Final Fantasy XIV, and Magic Online v2 none of which felt like a product that had even been tested let alone ready for sale.)

The voices actually help a lot with immersion.

My character has a nice butt. This seems silly, I know, but the game is played in 3rd person view and you spend most of the time watching your character run around from behind.

I don't know if I can resolve the tension between the gamer part of me that wants to twink out my dark side points and the moral part of me which doesn't want to do evil things. At one point I was given a prisoner as a guide, and was given a shock collar control so I can shock her if she gets out of line. She was being snarky to some dude I was killing which I think is awesome. But I knew that if I was nice to her I'd probably gain light side points so I kept choosing the option to shock her which gave dark side points. She didn't understand why I was torturing her for no good reason and I don't understand it either. Maybe I'm just not cut out for being evil...

The difficulty seems a tad on the easy side so far. I wandered into a quest hub for level 7s when I was level 4 and was able to clean it out without much trouble. Well, I had to use my self-heal button after every fight... (Which in and of itself is awesome. Out of combat I can channel a heal on myself which fills me up in a few seconds. No need for bandages here!) Everything, that is, except the two group quests which murdered me. I came back and 2-manned one of them at level 8 with another level 8 and did the other one when I was level 10 with a pair of level 7s.


I still don't know anything about what the end game is going to be like. I don't know that I care. The game is certainly fun and I'm really liking the cutscenes and such so playing this as a short term game seems entirely reasonable. Diablo 3 is coming out presumably in the next month or two so I'd be switching to that anyway. So the endgame is pretty much irrelevant!