It's lunchtime during the first of two Star Wars: The Old Republic immersion days at the EA Redwood Shores campus, and the game designers leading the event are panicking: Everyone is talking about Portal 2. Instead of discussing the three exclusive hours of SWTOR we just played, most of the writers are chatting about the Portal 2 release and single-player campaign, which everyone feels pales in comparison to its co-op.
[partner id="arstechnica"]Eventually one writer prompts another with, "So, what do you think of TOR?" (All the BioWare representatives refer to it as TOR.) And the reactions are positive: The voice acting is great, gameplay is fun, and maybe the trash planet Hutta doesn't make for the most impressive starting area, but there are few complaints beyond game balance tweaks.
SWTOR has seen a lot of hype since it was announced in 2008. Everyone from Knights of the Old Republic fans to disillusioned World of Warcraft players has been anticipating its release, and so far, all the gameplay snippets the press have been afforded have lived up to the high expectations, if not exceeded them.
But SWTOR has been just out of reach for a little too long now. As a story-driven MMORPG, we can only connect to it so well with pieces of plot and teases of the innovative concepts that litter the game. Spending hours at a time with the game is a little better, but to dig any deeper emotionally, beyond the blushes of fanboyism we get with every trailer, we need the thing in our hands, we need a character that's ours. Fortunately, BioWare recently confirmed the game will be out before this year is over, so we won't wait much longer.
That's not to say that there has been anything but consistent effort from the team behind the game. SWTOR's story, which takes place 3,500 years before Star Wars IV: A New Hope, has been in development at least since 2006. According to Daniel Erickson, SWTOR's lead writer, the writing team has generated 16 novels' worth of written content for the game, one for each class specialization.
And that's in development of the role-playing part of the game that plays to BioWare's strengths. Creating their MMO, and then weaving the stories into its persistent landscape, has proved to be the most challenging part. The team has relied heavily on its members' experience in developing past MMOs, aping off their solutions to common MMO problems, like how to place resurrection areas or distribute enemies and quest goals, and customizing them to fit BioWare's style and various plots.
"They are sort of our canaries in the coal mine," Erickson said of SWTOR's designers and developers. Without them, he said, "you might start going down a path that someone already tried in an MMO and failed miserably." The team has brought knowledge of many other non-MMO games as well, even looking to console-based sports games as inspiration for reward systems.
But Erickson notes too that editing is an important aspect of development, as it's easy for MMOs to become overextended with mechanics and concepts that ultimately go unused. Of the game mechanics selection, Erickson noted that they needed to make sure "the ones you use are right for your specific game."
One of BioWare's biggest concerns is how MMO players, notorious for valuing cold minimization of effort for maximum results above everything else, will respond to their MMO interpretation, where story is supposed to be the main attraction. "MMO players will do whatever is the most efficient, even if it is the most boring," said Emmanuel Lusinchi, an associate lead designer.
Because of this, the team has paid special attention to mechanics that will drive players back to the story, such as a holo-communication system that makes dialog with NPCs easier for groups, and have tried to make the storylines as compelling as possible. "It's always story versus gameplay versus immersion," Erickson said, and changing one will always affect the other two.
While we couldn't fully attach to our characters over the two days we were allotted with the game, we were given free reign to get as far as possible in the PvE campaign, talk to any NPCs, take on any quests, and run any flashpoints we could find (but no one got more than one). And the game is looking great -- expansive, immersive, even a little moving in parts.
There are still portions of the game BioWare won't discuss, indicating it still has a long way to go before the launch this year. But the gamemakers have accomplished the meshing of online play and RPG better than any of their predecessors.
Roleplaying Conversations, Not Quest Text
With a past that includes games like the Mass Effect and Dragon Age series, it makes sense that BioWare would come at an MMORPG leaning heavily on the "RPG" part. The company touts Star Wars: The Old Republic at the first ever fully voiced MMO, where the characters and quest-givers engage in animated conversations, and there is nary a window of quest text to be found.
The interactions are identical in form to BioWare's other RPGs: Players engage in conversations with other NPCs and are given a set of responses to use, with certain directions affecting the outcome of the conversation. The format lessens the feeling of always being the quest-givers' errand boy, but more importantly, it conveys the story much better and makes the RPG aspect feel very fleshed out.
Playing SWTOR felt much closer in spirit to BioWare's other RPG titles than to an MMORPG, and the single-player experience was absorbing. The benefits of grouping aside, it seems like players could easily ignore others wandering the planet around them and focus completely on the story as it unfolds.
As a Chiss imperial agent, I played a character who started out on the trash planet Hutta tasked with infiltrating the operations of Nem'ro the Hutt. I assumed the identity of an out-of-town operator called the Red Blade, and my character's voice swung between English and American accents depending on whether my conversation partner knew the real me or a cover.
The storylines are very deep and, true to life, you deal with the consequences of the conversation and action choices you make. In one instance, a character confronted me saying that if I was the Red Blade I said I was, I owed him money. The subterfuge and compensation choices abounded -- did I reveal myself as an impostor to avoid the payment, to the possible irreparable damage to my cover? Did I pay to save face? Or did I have to remove the opportunistic jerk from the equation?
Even better are the options that arise when it comes to aligning yourself with the light or dark side. The developers emphasized that your storyline, Imperial or Republic alliance, and choice of quests would not be the deciding factors in your alignment. Instead, what you do while on those quests establishes your moral fabric.
For instance, a woman might ask you to go out and retrieve her son from his father, because the son has the potential to achieve renown and glory by attending the Sith academy. But when you find the father and son, the father pleads for you to lie for him, because the Sith academy's training process is grueling and soul-crushing. If you choose to cover for the father and lie to the mother that they've skipped town, you gain light side points; if you kill the father to return the son to his mother, you turn to the dark side.
The ability to tune your own storyline through quests in this way, though minor, engages your attention much more than quests with simple kill this/collect that objectives. There weren't always consequences for the choices I made -- for instance, I let the father escape, no one was the wiser, and I still got my quest rewards.
It seemed like the quest-giving mother should have been able to see through my lies, though an imperial agent should be nothing if not a good liar. But still, the ability for choice and story participation in SWTOR makes you sit up and pay attention, rather than forcing you to sit with your eyes half-open, relentlessly clicking a number of sparkling objects until you have the requisite number.
That doesn't mean the game doesn't have its fair share of by-the-numbers quests. It was difficult to judge how appropriate they were in the scope of the game, as their difficulty is one of the easier aspects to tweak. In the build we played, the mobs had an abnormally large aggro range, and I died several times while trying to make my way into a quest area. Frustrating though that was, I never had to think twice about finishing the occasional "kill X number of guards" quests.
The game is often centered on the aforementioned story quests, which seemed to culminate in a central location that was difficult to get to. The story quests were then supplemented by the more rote collection and killing quests that you could fulfill on your way into or out from the next plot point in the story.
A very minor downside to the tight storyline each class follows is that play will still be very linear, compared to other MMOs like WoW. While you can exercise choice in your moral path, you can't do much to change your geographical one. Characters that begin on one planet will always follow the same planet-to-planet trajectory as the story progresses, and will have no navigational options, though there are some opportunities for action on the side, like space combat and flashpoints.
On the same note, the fact that you're not playing in a bell jar of a single-player campaign means you won't be able to push the game to extreme situations just for the fun of it, only to return to the safety of your last save point. Any havoc you create with your choices will be there to stay.
You Can, and Should, Take Her With You: Companions in SWTOR
BioWare is also translating another of its favorite gameplay concepts to the MMO: companions. Not unlike pets or minions in combat, every player gains a companion while still in their starting world, around level 8, with whom they form a (possibly romantic) relationship through conversations and combat.
According to Erickson, your first companion forms around 40 percent of your firepower while you're flying solo. Their abilities are very pared down, with an autoattack, special attack and passive mode, and they can receive heals and buffs.
One of the most useful aspects of companions is that your character outsources all skills and crafting to them. When you pick up a skill, such as diplomacy, you gain skill points by sending your companion on errands. While on an errand -- say, currying favor with a visiting Sith lord -- the companion is absent and can't be called into combat or contacted. At first, errands take only five minutes, but on the higher end, Erickson says, the tasks can take up to 24 hours.
The length of tasks at the higher end are meant to compensate for time that players can't be logged in. If they know they'll be away from their computers for a long time period, they can send companions away on the advanced 24-hour missions, and the task will be carried out even while players are logged off. While this won't be too favorable for players who are enamored of the single-player experience, it will encourage group play a tiny bit (players can't use companions in groups anyway), and is one of the few mechanics encouraging players to log off, as there is currently no concept of rest.
Another side note on your companions: Wherever you are in the galaxy, you can always send your companion on a one-minute errand to sell all of the gray trash items in your inventory. Amazing.
Like other BioWare companion implementations, you gain and lose affection points with your companions based on the interactions they witness. Different companions approve of different things, but you can always bolster relations with gifts.
Some companions, but not all, will be killable, if you choose to go that route. The BioWare staff noted that this was part of the difficulty of conflating their dedication to storyline with a persistent MMO world: Everything is permanent. In a regular RPG, you can create some catastrophic event, go back one save point, and suddenly it never happened. In an MMO, a choice like driving away or killing a companion is permanent. Erickson noted that there are many conversation gates cautioning you about the consequences of making drastic decisions, like killing a companion, before the game will let you do it.
Take Your Carbines to Town: Combat
As an imperial agent, almost all of my attacks involved shooting guns, and most of my survivability hung on the implementation of cover mechanics. The inspiration for cover in SWTOR comes more from Tabula Rasa than Mass Effect; that is, side cover in doorways and other more vertical spaces is not an option. Instead, agents are always looking for things to crouch behind.
It's a little unrealistic, but cover still works even when enemies are standing above or behind you. They have opportunities to get their shots in during attacks that are extended or require aim, like sniping, where the agent has to stand up.
The imperial agent could execute most of its attacks while running, which made the necessity for cover a little bit of a shame. BioWare indicated that there will be separate sets of gear for PvP and PvE purposes, so we're hoping the PvP sets can bolster survivability enough to let imperial agents run circles around their would-be attackers.
In lower levels, imperial agents have to plot their path through knots of enemies very carefully, making sure there's a rock to roll behind before they start shooting. By level 10, they get an ability to drop their own blue light shield to huddle behind, as well as a stealthing ability to creep past mobs.
But even without the higher-level abilities, a covered imperial agent could take out groups of three enemies one or two levels higher than itself. Trying to work without your companion or group is survivable, but it's slow going.
As I found when we played through the Taral V flashpoint at PAX East, the global cooldown is still a little bit slow for my taste, and there will not be any sort of stackable stat to increase it, a la haste in WoW.
I found the imperial agent not quite as thrilling to play as the Jedi knight, but lower-level characters, with their small range of abilities, are naturally less exciting (the knight I played was level 32). At the end of the second day of play, I had only just reached the point where I could specialize my class.
There are eight classes in SWTOR, and each has two potential specializations. Each of those specializations then has three skill trees you can distribute points in, providing a pretty serious level of customization. According to Erickson, the design team intends for there to be a large range of viable skill builds. An example he gave was an imperial agent of the Operative specialization with most of their skill points in the Medic tree, making them a "sneaky doctor."
Grouping With Others: Highly Recommended
We've harped a couple of times now on BioWare's proficiency with RPGs, so we haven't been surprised that the showing there has been excellent. What we were more curious about, or worried about, was how the RPG emphasis would get along with the MMO part of the game.
But the development team appears to have given the integration of multiplayer aspects to their normal single-player approach a lot of thought. The mechanics actually stand to work better than the way groups of players currently deal with each other in MMO play.
The most innovative concept is the holo-communication between players. When a player begins a conversation with a quest-giver, a window automatically opens on the screens of other players in the group, asking them to join the conversation. If they stop what they're doing and accept, a hologram version of them appears at the side of their group member, and they're able to watch and participate in the dialog that follows.
Seeing the dialog is not strictly necessary to getting the related quest, as there is still a "share" button in the quest log to loop in stragglers. But it's a great solution to preserving the RPG experience when dealing with a group of players without forcing the entire group to, for instance, move around a city together. Instead, the group can scatter to complete class quests or visit trainers and vendors, and at the same time pick up quests for the group in the areas they travel. They still get to experience all of the story with a fraction of the legwork.
Group holo-interactions allow every player to respond to a prompt from an NPC, though it does time out after a few seconds so everyone isn't left waiting for negligent players. They then roll a random number automatically, and the highest delivers their answer to the NPC. Each player receives "social points" when their answer wins, though the BioWare reps were cagey about how the social points were going to factor into the game.
As far as group mechanics, few classes are cut and dry, which makes it easier to run heroic quests or flashpoints with a cobbled-together group of players. I ran a level-10 flashpoint, Black Talon, with another imperial agent and two bounty hunters, and we never suffered for lack of a particular class mechanic. The bounty hunters made decent makeshift tanks as we ran around saving the Imperial ship from Republic attackers, and since all classes could heal themselves out of battle,
Between the flashpoint and heroics, it was very apparent that working as a group has a distinct advantage in leveling speed over playing alone. While groups did not always move as quickly through the content as single players did alone, by the same point in the story, they would be between one and two levels higher. At lower levels this wasn't that big of a problem, but the lost experience over time could stack unfavorably against lone wolves, to the point that they won't be in a position to pass up nonessential quests, and might have to grind extra experience from enemies.
Still, Erickson stressed that none of the multiplayer game experiences are compulsory. "You never have to play PvP, you never have to play a heroic, you never have to play a flashpoint," he said.
But since you lose none of the single-player experience by grouping up, and you get access to heroics and flashpoints you would otherwise have to miss, there isn't much reason not to try it. Players that are trying to hit max level, level 50, as quickly as possible are going to want to get in on the group action.
A Long Time From Now, in a Galaxy Much Like This One ...
Despite the fact that BioWare has pinned this year as SWTOR's release year, it seems like it still has a profound amount of work to do. There are still some big aspects of the game the developers won't speak about yet -- achievements, for one, seem to be a sore spot, likely a heated subject of debate in the privacy of BioWare's offices.
"I think every game should have achievements" was as far as Lusinchi would venture into the topic. It's clear that there are many similar mechanics the team would love to include, but at this point it's a matter of what can realistically fit in the timeframe they've set for themselves.
Likewise, dual specializations are something that the company would add if they could, but it is not promising them for launch. Macros are another feature the gamemakers are looking at, but they are unsure whether it will be in the shipped game; at any rate, they're not going to hold up the launch to include it. Lusinchi says only that there will be limits, so "you can't automate your entire character."
One inclusion the company will certainly include, but is reluctant to talk about, is endgame content. Very little has been said on the topic at all, if ever, but it's such a draw for many MMO players that it must exist in a big way in private builds of the game.
BioWare is being cautious about how it integrates endgame content, making sure that the rest of the game is locked down before the developers decide how to begin the end of the story. "You have to know what works in your engine and what works in your game before you can do endgame content," Erickson said.
I was surprised to hear that BioWare is so concerned about what players will do when their leveling stories are over; the stories are very apparently great, and it seems almost a shame that there will come a day when their "end" could just be looping endlessly through endgame dungeons.
However, if BioWare is relying more heavily on what comes before endgame content in their own game, rather than takeoffs of standard endgame content, it stands to be some impressive stuff. Even if the endgame content is mind-blowing, the designers hope that the story along the way will stave off "the mentality of racing to the top," Erickson said.
Though it sounds like BioWare is starting to get ruthless with feature cuts so it can finally get the game out and prove its value at some level, the designers say what goes in post-launch -- achievements, cosmetics in character customization, Chewbacca costumes for your companions -- will be entirely based on what players demand. "Whatever we do post-launch will be from fan feedback," Erickson said.
But we are getting ahead of ourselves. We've waited this long, and now we're down to the final months. We should take this time to play Portal 2, and talk it up as much as we can; it's clear at this point that by the year's end, we'll be talking about something new.
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