Spartan Daily

New Star Wars game brings life to ‘Old Republic’

Spartan Daily, Spartan Daily

“Star Wars: The Old Republic” features a whole new timeline of stories unfamiliar to most longtime fans, incuding the above Republic team versus the Annihilation Droid XRR-3. Screenshot courtesy swtor.com

Spartan Daily, Spartan Daily

“Star Wars: The Old Republic” features a whole new timeline of stories unfamiliar to most longtime fans, incuding the above Republic team versus the Annihilation Droid XRR-3. Screenshot courtesy swtor.com

Star Wars and Bioware fans can finally rejoice, "Star Wars: The Old Republic" has arrived.

"Star Wars: The Old Republic" is Bioware's new groundbreaking massively multiplayer online role-playing game that goes where no MMORPG has gone before, by adding a myriad of story choices for its players.

What sets this game apart is its attention to the story. When playing the infamously addictive MMO, "World of Warcraft," you're an unknown hero, helping to defeat the dragon and save the world, but because you did it with help from others, you're just one nameless face among hundreds.

Not so in "The Old Republic." In this game you are the hero, and you're playing your story, which, depending on what class you play as, has its own unique allies, quests and villains.

When starting the game you first choose your faction, either The Galactic Republic or the Sith Empire. Then you move on to your class. Each faction has four classes with its own unique stories. Though every class has a kind of "mirror-image" on the opposite faction, they're all incredibly fun and immersive.

After you choose your class you choose your species. Humans are the only species that can be every class while the other species are very human-like. The individual species have no special abilities and are mostly just cosmetic, unlike other MMOs such as Warcraft.

After choosing your species you choose your gender before finally going into character creation to customize your character's hair, eyes, skin color, scarring, tattoos, and other details depending on the species.

Finally, you can choose a name and start the game. You begin on your "starting planet" which varies based on class. You get an introduction to your character and his or her current job. After finishing the starting planet, which happens at about level 10, you go to your faction's capitol world and eventually get your ship.

Though every world shares the same quests for your faction, your class quest is the reason why you go from planet to planet. You can choose to help out your faction or solely focus on your class quest, though if you don't do other quests, you might find the game difficult as you'll be at too low of a level to continue your individual class quests.

After getting your ship you can start participating in space combat missions which are simple rail-shooters (your ship changes direction automatically, though you can move your ship to avoid things) with various objectives depending on the mission, which could net you a bit of spare cash or experience points.

Another feature is the Player-verses-Player system which consists of three "warzones" with their own objectives while fighting the enemy team.

The PVP element isn't very fleshed out at this point unfortunately, the missions are short and have a few bugs. I have found them to be enjoyable however, and this is coming from someone who doesn't typically enjoy PVP.

Once again, the main draw here from other MMOs is story. This game lets you be your own hero making your own choices in your own personal story. The idea is so simple it's a wonder that it's taken this long for a story-driven MMO to come out.

There are some downsides. This is a brand new game and as with most brand new MMOs, "The Old Republic" isn't bug-free as the designers continue trying to balance the classes and patching the game without causing more problems.

Also the combat system, while fun, isn't exactly revolutionary. New players to the genre will be thrilled but MMO veterans will find it all too familiar to the MMOs they left to play this.

Bioware has finally stepped into the MMO market with a true contender to tackle the giant of "World Of Warcraft" using its award winning focus on story to bring a new epic saga from the series we love from a galaxy far, far away.