As my first contribution to our new blog here, I’d like to recap my first impressions of SWTOR after having played through 15 levels of my first toon. Let me first preface everything by saying I have been playing WoW for a while now and raid 1-2 times a week. So I will no doubt be making comparisons as WoW is the standard to which all MMOs that come after it will be judged. That being said, lets see what Bioware has brought to the table.

Inevitably, the first decision that you make in this game is gonna be, are you gonna play as a good guy or a bad guy. What seemed to be the consensus among my good buddies here at the blog was that we were gonna go to the Dark Side… Muah Ha Ha Ha. Empire it is. I chose to roll a Sith warrior, I’ve always been partial to melee DPS ass kicking in RPGs. There is a decent amount of choices for customization, I went Human with a red Mike Tyson face tattoo and an evil parallel universe goatee.

Right out of the gate, the Empire is pretty cut throat. You are competing with other Sith wannabees, most of which threaten to kill you when nobody is looking. I will say, I love that every quest has a speech associated with it. I think I can count on my hand how many times that I’ve actually read a quest in WoW. However, in SWTOR I actually want to listen to the cut scenes. Also what makes conversations (and questing in general) more interesting is the fact that the decisions you make during said conversations can affect game-play by pushing you further towards the light or dark side of the force. This makes questing significantly more entertaining and fun, and significantly less like a chore you have to just muddle through so you can get to endgame content (hint hint blizzard). That being said, the combat system isn’t anything revolutionary. At level 15, it feels very familiar. It’s essentially WoW with light-sabers.

Multilayer questing is an area where SWTOR has a great system. If your in a group, one player can start a conversation with a quest giver and regardless of where the other group members are, they can remote in holographically to be part of the conversation. Though this feature can be buggy at times, (I’m sure this will be fixed at some point in the future) I found this to be a great feature for group gaming. During these conversations, the group members may have different responses to questions during the cut-scene. The computer will then roll to see whose response is given and social points are awarded to you based on who else in the group chose a similar response. Now what the social points are used for I’m not entirely certain as of yet, but I’m sure it’s something cool.

As for graphically, most new games from a major publisher are going to be an upgrade over WoW, and SWTOR is no exception (Slaynatic’s temporary 640×480 experience possibly being the only one). It looks great, render distance is nice and far, the Star Wars look and feel I think is achieved. Keep in mind of course I have all of my settings set to max, so I should be seeing everything as it was intended to be seen. I can’t speak for the common folk and their lesser machines.

All in All, i’ve enjoyed my first foré into the SWTOR universe. There is still much to see in the game, the level cap being 50 and such. As to whether or not this game has fun and challenging things to do at endgame is really what is going to be the deciding factor as to its longevity. It is this that has killed many of the MMORPGs that have come before it and it is this that is why WoW is still king of the MMORPG. Say what you want about Blizzard’s cash cow, they still do raiding (and/or its equivalents) the best in the business. Being a Star Wars game doesn’t hurt though.