Star Wars: The Old Republic was available as a playable demo at PAX East this past weekend, allowing groups of four players to run through the instance, or "flashpoint," Taral V. We went hands on with the melee-damage-dealing Jedi Knight class and found that the game is shaping up to be a formidable entry to the ever-growing MMORPG space.

SWTOR committed to having scalable instances a while ago, though the demo was set up specifically for groups of four. Healing, damage-dealing, and tanking abilities overlap more than usual, as if BioWare is picking up on the growing affinity for hybrid classes and trying to mitigate the inflexibility of pure damage-dealers. The demo allowed us to jump right in as level 32 characters with a wide range of spells and skills.

As a Guardian-specialized Jedi Knight, I was primarily a damage dealer, but could also function as an off-tank with taunting and threat-building abilities.The class was very, very fun to play, particularly the leaping slash attack the Jedi Knight could execute from long distances. The taunts and attacks that threw all nearby enemies away from where my character stood gave him a nice amount of utility, and two of the other players that were primary and off-healers were able to keep me and the dedicated tank alive.

It was hard to gauge the difficulty of Taral V from our one run in a group with a rookie tank. Regular mobs gave us little trouble, but we wiped twice on a boss that required us to tank the mob and its pet with separate characters and kill them almost simultaneously; if we didn't, killing one gave the other a massive buff.

The character's fighting animations looked great, but the global cooldown for abilities felt a little slow. The timer may have been intentionally increased for the demo to mitigate the fact that players were jumping into a complete set of unfamiliar abilities, but we hope that it is set a little lower for the actual release to make fighting players seem more coordinated.

According the representatives at the SWTOR booth, the game is meant to be story-oriented, but the demo only showed a small piece of that. There were only two short interactions shown in the demo, one with a Yoda doppelganger named Master Oteg and another with a Jedi master's channeled hologram, so we didn't get a very good sense of how the interactions affect the story of the game as whole.

SWTOR is also intended to facilitate more group cooperation than many of its competitors. For instance, in the Mass Effect-style NPC interactions, each group member chooses a response independently, and then one of their responses is randomly chosen as the one given to the NPC. The format makes us wonder how often pick-up groups will be sabotaged by a jerk who always chooses the jerk answers.

The group interactions persist throughout the game, and even an elevator to a docking bay couldn't be moved until all of the group members had pressed the button. In a sense, forcing group interactions is nice because everyone has to be on the same page, but at the same time, it could let an inexperienced player who could have otherwise gotten the gist of events by following everyone else's lead slow the whole group down. It seems like this style will require both a little more preparation and patience than games that only require one player to trigger events.

Lastly, the landscapes and environment of SWTOR are extremely well-done, and look very solid— we noticed few, if any, instances of the old foot-sinking-through-the-ground-surface blips that often plague MMOs. The foliage looked incredible, and mobs were very detailed, particularly the lolloping Skinflayers.

The release date for SWTOR is still unannounced, and beta signups have not even begun. Current speculation pegs the game for a third quarter launch this year.