Beta First Impressions

Meridion

Well, you know the deal. I had the chance to get to play a bunch of hours of SWTOR and I won't spare you my first impressions. My native language is German so don't bother complaining about grammar.

I'm coming from:

PC-based gaming, Pen and Paper, I'm 30 years old and claim to be an RPG enthusiast in general. My favorite game to date is TES:Morrowind, which maybe replaced by Skyrim after the initial dust settles. I also greatly enjoyed the classic Bioware games up until but not including Dragon Age II and all the old PC classics like Wizardry, Might&Magic or the Eye of the Beholder series. In terms of MMORPGs, I've pretty much played every AAA title, I'm a long term Lord of the Rings Online and EvE Online player. A game catches me if I get a certain feeling of atmospheric coherence and love of detail, it does by no means have to be a sandbox or an open world title (I've LOVED The Witcher e.g.).

First impression:

As this is absolutely first impressions with maybe 10 to 12 hours played all in all (Smuggler and Jedi class), I will keep this in prose and won't apply any scores or pro/cons whatsoever.

First major thing you stumble across after joining the game is usually the character creation. I usually have a character idea in mind when I start making one, because if there isn't a concept in the back of my head about what and who my character is I tend to lose interest in playing it really fast. So I wanted to create a rough human smuggler, not dashing swordsman han solo style, but some guy who has seen the ugly places of the galaxy and has probably been through a lot. Slim, beady eyes, maybe a goatee, greasy hair, maybe bald, scars, maybe one-eyed. Well, I soon enough found out that there was pracically no way my avatar could look like that, since it offered no options towards this appearance besides the slim stature and the goatee. So I said "balls to it" and just played around with the character creator. I ended up with a skinny woman but was left very, VERY unimpressed by the lack of character creation choices. As it is now, the character creator is inferior even to older bioware games like Dragon Age I and eons away from modern ones.

So then I entered my semi-savannah home-planet of Ord Mantell, started my backstory, enjoyed some cutscenes and did some quests.

What really impressed me was the fact that the outdoor areas don't look as bad as I had thought. They're somewhat simplistic, but the design in general works and delivers a genuine "clone wars gone MMORPG" feeling. That's what I was talking about when I mentioned atmospheric coherence. It felt right. Just like WoW felt right. Unfortunately, animations, especially character animations struck me as abysmally bad. While controls were very responsive and combat felt action-packed and balanced with the cover system being especially nice, idle animations, running and jumping were really an "WTF Bio!?" to me. The non-combat animations look like they've given hardly any work or thought, reminded me a lot of Morrowind, and that was almost 10 years ago.

The quests, cutscenes and dialogue options do feel as if they have consequences on future gameplay, they are well made; But the plot they try to convey is pretty papercut. I personally didn't expect anything else from a mainstream BIoware-MMO (After playing their third title with hollywood-like storyline I know they won't go for witcheresque depth). I didn't have any "whoow epic" moments ("Vader-and-Luke-on-Bespin-moments") as of yet, but those are maybe still to come. All in all, the story has obviously been given a lot of thought and doesn't cease to be, while being stereotypical, interesting for as long as the first 8-10 levels or so last. The actual execution is kill bandits 0/5, but that was to be expected.

The voiceovers are top notch, they've obviously been a major PR point of the game and they don't disappoint. 

I haven't delved into crafting so I can't comment on that. As I've been told, there is kind of an exploration system later in the game. Concerning my starter planet experience, exploration was practically non-existant.  It was extremely on rails and while that doesn't bother me if I'm told a nice story and have fun (like in dragon age I) I have to say it left a 'meh" feeling in my mouth.There were no roleplay related items or minigames, nor have I seen any roleplay going on, there was no cosmetic armor tab or any appearance setting I could find, not even speech bubbles. I don't know if Bioware is planning any additions in this category, but I wouldn't hold my breath. The game does feel, after 10 hours played, a lot like a mixture of KOTOR, DA2 and Clone Wars. They want to tell you a story and entertain you with engaging combat, salami-PvP (instanced and non instanced), dungeons, raids and maybe some crafting. I wouldn't expect anything sandboxy showing up anytime soon.

I cannot comment, for obvious reasons, on raids, crafting, mid-/late-/endgame, and consecutively later, supposedly more open, planets.

Will I buy it? - Yes, the storytelling is good enough for the first month and I'll go from there.

My prediction? - Nuclear Blast like launch with midnight sales and skyrocketing player numbers but will not be a smash hit that quadruples its subscribers within 6 months like World of Warcraft did in 2004/05.

M