This story seems familiar doesn’t it?

Well, it should. Unless you’ve been living in a Sarlacc Pit for the past fifty years, you have probably heard of Star Wars. You know the Jedi. You’ve mastered the Force. You fear the Sith. And, if you’re that special brand of RPG player that was on the BioWare train before Mass Effect made the company hit the mainstream, then you’ve played the Knights of the Old Republic series.

Knights of the Old Republic was a series built on immensely detailed story and depth. To say that BioWare has good writers is an understatement; BioWare has great writers, some of the best in the industry. Baldur’s Gate (one of BioWare’s most famous and earlier projects) got past the chunky 90s graphics and gave us characters that we actually cared about. That isn’t easy when your character looked like a mutilated piece of pixel cheese.

BioWare’s efforts are shown in their more recent games as well. When Mass Effect's codex symbol flashes up every few minutes, you know that it means someone spent a creative shitstorm figuring out exactly what makes the Normandy work and why the Cerberus equivalent has leather seats. Details are important to BioWare.

That is why when I began to beta-test Star Wars: The Old Republic, I was ecstatic and excited. BioWare set out to create a MMORPG that is based around story rather than just mindless questing and grinding. They gave it the BioWare treatment, filled with rich characters and writing. For the first ten levels I was in awe. The questing was tight, allowing me to feel attached to my avatar in a way that World of Warcraft never allowed.



Quest dialogue should never be boring, and a lot of thought was put into Star Wars: The Old Republic’s story to make it interesting and engaging. In most other MMOs the quest dialogue is skipped over and collected like a psychopath’s shopping list: kill this, gather that, smell this, dig through that until you reach endgame. With The Old Republic, the intention was to make questing a fun and rewarding experience.

Like the monolith that is World of Warcraft, The Old Republic is designed to keep you playing, down to the hotkey combat, the point and shoot interface, and the fetch quests. But there’s also things that show BioWare has been paying attention to the desires of its player base. Equipment is heavily customizable and the crafting system is sleek and unobtrusive. But the Story, and I use that capital simply to emphasize its importance, is the real star of the show.

The Light Side:
For the beta, I played a Jedi Knight. I wanted THE Knights of the Old Republic experience. I also wanted to be a dark side Jedi because, hell, why wouldn’t you?

I was instantly engrossed. The story took off with a bang and there were several points where I simply forgot my level, the grind, the equipment, the level-ups, all of it. There was just me, my avatar, and his story. These moments made me feel like I was playing something truly different even though the control scheme was something I was all too familiar with. However, around level 17, once I had my ship and my galactic entourage started to grow, leveling and questing slowed down very noticeably.



The Fall:
It is around this time that I stopped feeling the tug of the story as powerfully as I had before. I was still engrossed in my storyline, it was well developed and powerful as expected from BioWare, but I was leveling too slowly for the story to maintain any sense of momentum. Side quests became numerous and, honestly, tedious. I stopped caring that a spice trader could be stopped if I blew up ten of his stockpiles. Nar Shaddaa could fill to the brim with spice and I cared as much as a steaming pile of Bantha poodoo. I wanted to continue my epic Jedi adventure. But no, I had to level.

The Journey:
BioWare seemed to recognize this issue, and put in several distractions to allow for some quick leveling. For example, there are rail shooter missions which, I have to say, are pretty damn fun. Or you can barrel roll your way to the level you want, take part in flashpoints (The Old Republic’s word for instances), or you can grind and do the side quests. All good options, but I feel that it misses the point. I thought the idea of The Old Republic was to create an immersive and engaging storyline? Why would I feel obligated to perform random tasks when my real goal is so important? The side quests in Knights of the Old Republic, for example, while they were occasionally tedious, made sense in connection to the story. I cared about Mission’s brother and so I helped her find him and beat the snot out of the bugger. But in The Old Republic, except for small moments of clarity, that isn’t the case. I just didn’t care. I want MY story. And while that’s what I wanted, the game constantly made me step back and reminded me that I was playing an MMO and not the RPG I remember.

A New Hope:
Star Wars: The Old Republic has begun something wholly new and important in the MMORPG genre: placing importance on story and character. The development team is already hard at work fixing some of the problems that popped up in the early post-launch days. Despite my issues with it, I still have hope for The Old Republic. I do, and it is all because of a single quest that I took. A single quest that had nothing to do with my main plotline, that I took simply out of curiosity. It involves the protagonist of the Knights of the Old Republic and, spoilers aside, it was powerful, moving, and completely immersive. The mechanics of the game, the quest objectives, and the story all merged together into a masterful experience that left me swelling with emotion. That is what The Old Republic strives to be. I only hope that those smaller moments will eventually grow. Maybe not soon, maybe in an expansion or not even in The Old Republic itself, but BioWare has begun a movement. A movement of story that will spread and permeate the genre. That, my fellow protagonists, is why Star Wars: The Old Republic is A New Hope.

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