Star Wars The Old Republic

As Day two of PAX East ends I come to realize that I only played three video games today, and stood in place for several hours. This article is about one of those games: The Old Republic.
After standing in line for a few hours I was finally able to sit down and play a segment of the game called a Flashpoint. The segment had four players fight their way on the ground as part of a Republic strike force against a Sith outpost on Taral V. The Republic is looking for an ancient Gree computer to learn how to navigate a system to find a Sith prison. The demo had four choices of classes; Smuggler Scoundrel, Jedi Knight Guardian, Jedi Consular Mage, and Trooper Vanguard. The Smuggler was the team’s healer, the Jedi Knight was the team’s melee DPS, the Jedi Consular was the team’s ranged DPS, and the Trooper was the tank. The Jedi Knight was shown here as a DPS rather than a tank but it still held heavy armor so it could take enemies blows. I have never played an MMO and two of the other people I was pair up with haven’t played in years leaving only one guy who knew what he was doing; he was automatically made the healer and I was made the ranged DPS. Generally, the Jedi Consular is the healer class but the way the Smuggler class had been set up for this demo was so it could heal with Kolto better than the Consular did with the Force. The demo starts with the players being briefed by a Jedi master on their next mission. This showed how the fully voiced MMO works in a dialogue with more than one player in the party doing the same mission. Whenever a dialogue selection toolbar appears each player chooses their response and the game rolls a number between 1 and 100. The player with the higher number is the one that speaks out loud for that dialogue. After the briefing the mission soon begins and I am thrown into the combat. The HUD was easy to use and understand and the combat fun. Since I was the ranged DPS I would simply stand back and use the Force to hurl large objects at the enemy using the Force. The Consular powers I was slotted with consisted of only Force based ranged attacks, with two buff actions, two healing actions, and several recover actions spread across the bottom toolbar. The combat, I found to be fun and entertaining. The final part of the demo required the group to fight two bosses simultaneously that, if one boss died long before the other, the living boss would become enraged. The team rallied together as the Trooper tanked the melee combat boss and the Jedi Knight held the ranged combat boss’s attention as Smuggler and I switched between targeting the two bosses and healing our allies. In the end we succeeded in killing the bosses and beating the demo. Also previewed at the booth (but not playable) was space combat. The combat could be initiated by simply arriving in a sector of the galaxy and looking for an icon that signifies a space battle. You enter battle in your own private ship and given an objective to complete, in the preview’s case; kill 60 Sith fighters. The preview showed the Republic Smuggler driven freighter dodging Sith fighters and asteroids before charging a Sith capital ship. Player driven space-craft have two weapons, turbo lasers that just fire as the main weapon and homing rockets. Completing the objective will switch objectives to merely surviving the combat by getting clear of the area. The previewed showed the Republic freighter barely surviving with the commentator explaining that the player’s companions would make comments and damage reports according to how well the ship was faring up. In the end though, I am more excited for this game and I have greater faith in its doing well as, in the words of our team’s Trooper, it will attract MMO fans, Star Wars fans, and BioWare fans.