Category: Star Wars: The Old Republic

Use The Force and you may be able to find this beta application page available to fill out when you click the link.

If not, you have failed the test young Padawan. I am sorry.

– Ethic

Sometimes, I wish I could see a nice before and after of the work being done on SWTOR behind the scenes. I mean, we get to see the Sith Warrior on IGN, and people complained about his walk being too hunched-over, or his light-saber hilt being too big. But we won’t really find out until the game ships if these things have changed. The next time they show us stuff, it’ll probably be a new planet or a new class. It’s not like they’re going to do the whole live-demo again with the same classes and do all the same things.

Oh wait, they did.

I’m sure those who want to nit-pick over tiny details will eventually go through the video and pick out every little thing which has changed. I’m not one of those detail-oriented people, but I can say that the new video of the game looks better. Forget the video quality for a moment… the PAX version of the walk-through just looks like a better game than the live-demo they did months ago.

Bioware treated hungry MMO fans by letting them see quite a lot of SWTOR’s gameplay. Well, to be honest, they just provided a link to IGN who were really the ones to provide the video. Some people on the forums were disheartened to realize that SWTOR is just an MMO, and not the second coming of Jesus. But my reactions were more positive.

It’s an MMO in Alpha, yet it looks very solid. And while the blaster bolts seem to just spray in an enemy’s general direction until it’s out of health, the melee combat looks extremely satisfying. A Sith Warrior can leap across the room, whack you with a saber and impale you. A smuggler can kick a man in the groin to stun him. I don’t need to see see someone’s health bar drop to know that hurts.

I’m not one to take a quote out of context and over analyze it, but I wonder how much exactly was revealed in a statement by James Ohlen of Bioware. He said quote,

“At E3, we did show off a Sith, and today, we are revealing that the Sith that was shown at E3 was specifically the Sith Warrior. Darth Vader was the primary inspiration for the this character class.”

How very nice to reveal that the thing we saw at E3 was a “Sith Warrior”. We saw the red light-sabers, so we’re not surprised it’s a sith. But a Sith Warrior. Is Sith Warrior a class all on it’s own or a sub-class within the greater Sith class? Perhaps there are two kinds of Sith… a warrior and a healer. I really don’t know.

Maybe, just maybe… Sith Warrior is one of three kinds of Sith to be. I guess I’ll get more of a hint if they officially reveal either Sith Warrior as a class or just plain ol’ Sith.

EDIT: While I was reading a thread this morning on the SWTOR general class forum, a thread I was reading was actually moved to a newly created Sith Warrior class forum. This ends all speculation of “Sith Warrior” as being a mere subclass. Subclasses, don’t get their own forum.

I was reading an article on IGN about an exclusive interview they had with the SWTOR people. Question after question was met with, “We can’t talk about that yet.” They could have used this opportunity to tell me about some pixel shader I’ve never heard of or a tid-bit about jet-pack based vehicle in their game. Such tiny tid-bit would have me drooling and talking to my friends about the article.

Instead, I’m left feeling like this game is ages away from release because there aren’t any details about even the simplest systems and I’m writing a blog about how upset I am with it.

-Ugh.

I was recently looking at the guild recruitment forums in SWTOR. Considering the game isn’t launching any time this year, it’s a surprisingly active forum. The first recruitment thread I clicked on had a link to a website which just dropped my jaw. The leader of the guild has invested in custom art for his slick website and a Ventrilo server. There was so much effort expended on this recruitment effort that I actually had to take a step back and wonder. Why do guilds recruit pre-launch at all?

Continue reading Guild Recruitment Pre-Launch

In a recent interview, the developers over at Bioware mentioned that any good star wars mmo would have a “space experience”.

Threads on the SWTOR boards declared, “Spare confirmed!” and people there are discussing possible ship-types and asking each other whether characters should have abilities that affect their ship or whether space-combat should be fully twitch-based. Of course… those questions assume that space combat will be mainly twitch-based and that there will be combat in space to begin with.

In their single player KOTOR games, the “space experience” amounted to having all your companions stored on a space and the occasional turret-based minigame. The closest you came to piloting your ship was when you selected a destination from a menu. Is there any reason to believe this isn’t the kind of space experience the developers are talking about?

The same interview promises that every line of NPC dialog will be voice acted. This is great news, but there’s no reason to believe they will implement it differently than they did in KOTOR. In Kotor, much the dialog was spoken by species other than humans. Most of the time, this amounted to a Wookie npc speaking in the same recycled track of “rarr, Rarr, rarr” over and over with subtitles. The gibberish sounds were so familiar that when you saw a Twi’lek speak something other than Twi’lek, you sat up and said, “This quest must be important!”

Is there any reason to believe we’ll meet a Hutt in SWTOR who speaks something other than Huttese? I imagine the important NPCs are likley to speak in common, and all the rest will speak the same gibberish lines. It’s just too much of a financial investment for them to make all voice dialog unique.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m excited for SWTOR. Like everyone else on the SWTOR boards, I can be caught day-dreaming about the possibilities of what the perfect MMO might be. But at a certain point, we have to stop asking whether it will just be “be Everquest in space”, and start asking “Will it be KOTOR with friends?”

I love guessing games, and that’s what keeps me thinking about SWTOR (Prounced Sweator according to Yivvits and Mr Bubble). This time I’m guessing at the targeted release date. Developers like to say a game will come out “when it’s done”. After all, that’s what Blizzard says and look how well it worked for them! But I’d be pretty surprised if they didn’t have a particular quarter or holiday season targeted at this point. So when is it? Their site updates hold the clues.

You know Bioware has it all planned out. Their online comic book, their revealing of classes, their revealing of planets, and their updates are all ticking down to release time.

Nal Hutta was announced the 2nd Friday in February. Bounty Hunter was announced the 3rd Friday in March. Ord Mantel was announced second Friday in April. Then Trooper was announced the second Friday in May. It alternates between a planet and a class each month.

This is why Smuggler hasn’t been announced officially even though it’s been unofficially announced as a class. We just had trooper announced last month, and they prefer to alternate between planets and class announcements. If anything, with such a fantastic E3 trailer, they could stand to skip this months’ announcement and let people continue to talk about it’s awesomeness till July.

So lets assume they continue to alternate between the remaining 6 classes in their announcement schedule… That gives them 12 months to reveal 6 classes and brings us to E3 2010. At this point, with all classes and planets revealed, it’s time for a playable demo and an announcement of a release date. At this point the team makes a decision, “Can we get this out in time for Christmas?” If things are going well, and the answer is yes, then the closed beta begins to prepare for it’s debut on shelves the day after Thanksgiving: the last Friday of November.

Ever since the announcement of Star Wars: The Old Republic, there has been a lot of speculation as to what classes would be included. So far the Republic Trooper and Sith-serving Bounty Hunter classes have been officially announced. Republic Smugglers, Jedi, and Sith have not received an official announcement, but are known to be part of the line up. That leaves three classes not accounted for.

Opposite the Smuggler, I would not be surprised to see a spy, criminal or scoundrel. This is because I see the Smuggler as being either a utility-class with special abilities other than DPS, tanking and healing, or else the smuggler could be a stealth-based DPS class. Something along the lines of a spy would make sense from a balance point of view.

But that still leaves two open slots: One who works for the Republic and one who works for the Sith. To round out the holy tanking/DPS/healing trinity, the final classes would have to be some kind of healer. But who’s to say that SWTOR is going to include a dedicated healing class? With the addition of NPC companions following you around, it could be the case that each character has their own personal healer that they have to level up and depend on. That would free up the two slots to allow SWTOR to have players play something more iconic than a role normally filled by droids in the movies.

If that’s the case, what iconic professions are left? Mandalorian? Officer? Droid? Senator? Moisture farmer? Lets be honest, there isn’t any obvious choice.

But then, perhaps my count is wrong. Perhaps I’m wrong to assume there will be only one force-sensitive Jedi class and one force-sensitive Sith class. People are expecting 3 sub-classes for Jedi and 3 sub-classes for Sith, but that hasn’t been confirmed. For all we know, there may be no sub-classes. We may see each side have a Jedi-healer and a Jedi-warrior

Maybe that’s why they have yet to officially announce the 2 most obvious class selection options… because it’s actually 4 classes.