Star Wars: The Old Republic

It sounds like a recipe for guaranteed success: the most renowned RPG developer in the industry with a license for the biggest IP in the history of the world, takes on what has proven to be one of the most profitable mediums in gaming… potentially, at least. As much as we hate to trivialise Star Wars: The Old Republic, we still feel obliged to put the question of whether The Old Republic will just be a standard MMORPG in a Star Wars skin to the man in charge of the project.

“The Old Republic is a massively multiplayer game,” BioWare’s director of design James Ohlen replied, “but it’s one where we wanted to take story and bring it to the MMO space. We feel that role-playing can be divided into four parts, and at BioWare that’s our philosophy: there’s the exploration filler, the combat filler, the progression filler and the story filler. But we’ve always thought that with MMOs the story filler hasn’t been there, that it hasn’t been focused on. So by bringing story to an MMORPG we do feel we’re creating something that’s a lot different.”

Of course, by story BioWare isn’t just talking about a tenuous Star Wars-themed plot that links generic quests together and nudges the player towards the level cap. This is the developer that throws its coffee pot in with every RPG; characterisation in particular is something BioWare prides itself upon.

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Class: Trooper
Force alignment: Jedi Order
Role: Tank
Republic Troopers are skilled members of a highly specialised military force, equipped with the latest weapons and technologies. They are equipped with a robust suit of battle armour, designed to withstand a heavy assault and which they use to wade into the thick of battle. Troopers always have the latest in blaster rifles to hand, use thermal detonators and even have the ability to call in air strikes to blanket-bomb mobs.
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Principal lead writer Daniel Erickson told us that The Old Republic has over a dozen writers working on it and that it’s “Larger than every RPG BioWare has ever made – put together,” while BioWare co-founder Greg Zeschuk quantifies this by saying The Old Republic has: “Hundreds of thousands of lines of spoken dialogue, thousands of voice actors, studios all over the world and a whole army of people supporting all that… we thought that if we could pull off a (MMORPG) with that much VO, it would really change the whole playing field.”

Without an extended beta play test, we can’t confirm or deny its ambitions, but the time we had with The Old Republic left us with no doubt that this would be a signature BioWare title. The hallmarks of a decade of triple-A games are all over it and beyond the “styled realism” art style that lends environments an unusual watercolour effect, The Old Republic boasts familiar shades of what has made BioWare the heavyweight it is today. As a Sith Inquisitor, we began our hands-on in the apprentice training grounds – a very early beginning to our dark side experience. The Sith Academy on Korriban is situated in a dusty red, Martian-style landscape whose native fauna comprises mostly of force-sensitive Tuk’ata, otherwise known as Sith Hounds.

… continued