Beta Impressions, 'cause frankly I’ve never cared much about NDAs. These are impressions as I took a Jedi Consular/Sage to level 11. It’s likely just to be a bunch of random impressions.
Impression Below
[spoiler]I think you can go online and see enough screenshots to get a feel for the graphics. It has an interesting art style, but not one that I really like. It looks a lot like the KOTOR games and I’m not so sure that’s a good thing. They’re passable and they’ll work ok in the long run - giving the engine a chance to age gracefully like WoW - but I’m just not a big fan. There’s something about the muted colors and textures that I don’t particularly like.
There’s enough clips available that you can tell the musical score is good and there’s generally very good voice acting. The score builds appropriately during combat and they quiets down to a whisper when needed. I’d give the sound two thumbs up.
It’s important to say that a lot of stuff works and I ran into only a few glitches, but the ones that came up were kind of annoying (like not being able to roll on loot at least 3 times). I never had a crash to desktop or a lag out, but I played at off times. While in the world, I did a lot of PvE and very little PvP (more on that later). I did no crafting and didn’t join a guild or anything like that. In other words, I stuck to a fairly basic game play experience. It’s also important to say that I think I very well may be burnt out on the whole MMO mechanic. Rift was the best MMO I’ve seen on launch and I couldn’t play it more than 30 days. It’s going to take something fairly special for me to get energized by a MMO again. It’s going to take some pretty dynamic game play.
So what of the game play? Well, it’s like most every other MMO in recent years. You get a quest or two, go out into the world and do it. Kudos that there weren’t many kill x number of mobs quests that I encountered. Of course, there were an ass-ton of fedex quests. So what’s different about questing? Well, this is a story-driven MMO, so there’s actually a reason to go to certain areas and kill mobs or fetch a package. The story I played through was pretty well done. It wasn’t Shakespeare, but it did help give it a purpose to going somewhere and doing something. It also kept things a bit more interesting. As I mentioned before, the voice acting was pretty darn good throughout.
As the same time, I wasn’t at all pleased with combat. I really didn’t get any visceral feel during the combat (like I did in WoW) and I often felt if I were just waving my blade around aimlessly while numbers popped up on screen. There wasn’t much strategy to combat either at that level. It’s nice to see multi-mob pulls, but “pulling” techniques aren’t needed since mobs generally stand still until you walk right up on them. Even though I wasn’t lagging, the response time felt “mushy” and the animations were just ok. The lack of any real auto-attack (my character never once auto-attacked) means I just ended up spamming a couple of keys for most combat. I also didn’t like the targeting and often had a hard time figuring out whether I was actually “locked on” to an enemy.
I think PvP is going to be a major challenge. I jumped into a PvP battle and had 3 of the opposition rush at me. Now I don’t expect to win a 3 on 1 ever, but someone cast something on me that froze me instantly while the other two proceeded to wail on me. While I have any escape button, I wanted to see how long I could get held while taking damage. The answer is about 20 seconds, which is how long it took me to die. If there’s that kind of crowd control possible at level 11, then PvP is going to be a mess at higher levels IMO. Being CC’d to death is never fun and if damage doesn’t break it, people just aren’t going to have fun.
I also did a flashpoint with a group. Love the story-line concept, but the “on rails” aspect of it left little room for replay. Actually, that tends to extend to all of the areas I saw. There’s very little here for explorers. Narrow paths lead you to the next “area”, which is usually nothing more than an open area with mobs standing around. Once you’ve done your thing, you take the next narrow path. I never once was able to really explore in ToR like I could in WoW, EQ or Rift. I always felt hemmed in, channeled towards the next area. It’s rare for me to test a MMO and use the fast travel options because I like to wander off the beaten path, but since there was no where to go, using the fast travel options just saved time.
The multi-player conversations in groups is interesting. It wasn’t working correctly, meaning that one player almost always won the roll in the groups I was in. But it was kinda neat rolling to see who got to answer the quest-giver while in a group.
So what is ToR? It’s a single player MMO for the most part. At one point, I looked over and 4 of us were huddled around the same quest giver, each receiving our own individual instructions, all of us wearing the exact same clothing. Just four identical mice, all hitting the same lever so we can all get the same food pellet. And since we’re on rails, we’ll all be back within 5 minutes of each other to collect our food pellet and hit the lever again. I guess that could summarize every MMO to some extent, but SW:ToR takes that to the next level. For the lack of a better word, it felt a bit soulless. You listen to the quest, go perform it, come back and repeat. Every once in a while, you’ll do a Heroic quest with a couple of folks or a flashpoint. Then you’ll go back to your single player life. As a soloist, this should appeal to me but for some reason it doesn’t. For me, SW:ToR isn’t the sum of its parts - at least not yet. Instead, it felt a bit hollow and scripted. I’ll probably give it another go during the next beta (assuming I’m not banned, but if I am then so be it), but at this point I’m impressed by the technical achievement, but I’m still looking for the fun that will actually motivate me to subscribe. [/spoiler]
