SW:TOR First Impressions: The Leveling Game

Star Wars: The Old Republic sixty hours post-download:

• 14 Hours Played
• 1 Character     
• 27 Levels           
• 2 Companions
• 1 Stronghold
• 1 Starship
• 0 Other MMOs played

I'd say the experiment is going pretty well so far. I am definitely having fun. Even two days in, though, I can see where problems are likely to arise.

I sat down early this fine Easter morning to hammer out my first impressions of TOR's gameplay in bullet points. It turned out not to be that easy. For a start, "Gameplay" is a real catch-all category, covering just about everything from combat to crafting, decorating to PvP. I've scarcely scratched the surface so far but already it's plain from the small amount I've seen that most of the main gameplay elements deserve full posts not bullet points.

Added to that, we all know MMORPGs these days have a short wind-up and a long delivery. What we used to call "end game" is now just "the game". Everything that comes before is, at best, an appetizer. The gameplay I'm experiencing in the first few hours is unlikely to have much to do with what I'd have to get used to if I carried on for months. Or years.

That's an issue with many modern MMORPGs but it seems to me that TOR conforms even more to this back-loaded model than most. I'm going to hold off looking at the individual elements that make up the "gameplay" for a little longer and talk instead about my overall leveling experience so far.

At the stage I'm at, I don't think it would be an exaggeration to say that almost the entirety of the game consists of story. I don't really have a gameplay loop yet. More like a chapter list. Occasionally I find myself wondering whether the whole experience might be not better served by joining all the cut scenes together so I could watch them without a break. We could call it a "movie".

It didn't start out like that. When I landed on Ord Mantell, starting planet for Scoundrels, TOR felt very much like a regular MMORPG. I landed in the middle of a war between the planetary government and an armed insurgency known as The Separatists. As an independent, nominally operating under the flag of The Republic, I would have been very happy to play both ends against the middle, only the very first thing that happened was someone stole my starship. Since then I've been on the back foot.

With my ship gone, I needed to make some quick credits. I was ready to take anything on offer. I ran around grabbing missions from NPCs with markers hanging over their heads. Then I ran around completing them. Then I ran back to do the hand-in. As a set-up for the regular MMORPG gameplay loop of taking quests, killing mobs, getting rewards and leveling up it was a good one.

If the leveling game in TOR has a problem, it's not with the set-up or the execution. It's with the results. I can imagine how, back at launch, it must have felt like World of Warcraft in Space some people said it would be. It doesn't feel like that any more.

The point of leveling up is to become more powerful. The point of gaining new abilities and better gear is to be able to do more. This is progression as we understand it.

As a brand-new player in TOR today you don't need any of that. Neither do you need to prove skill, tactics or situational awareness. You can already do anything you want to. All you need to do is show up.

Games intended for very small children not excluded, TOR is by far the easiest MMORPG I have ever played. Whether this is a good or a bad thing I hope to cover in a separate post. For now, I'm just accepting it as a fact.

Leveling just happens. You don't need to do anything beyond taking missions and killing mobs. I was Level Ten before, entirely by chance, I happened upon my class trainer. I'd done ten levels using the two basic blaster skills I got at Level One. What's more, I hadn't even thought about needing anything else. Those two skills were more than adequate for all the missions I'd been sent to complete.

In retrospect I find the whole "Hot Bars For Sale" controversy deeply ironic. At Level 28 I am still using the single, default hot bar. The game has autopopulated it with various skills but I only use three or four of them: the two blaster skills I started with, an AE bomb and a stun. And I only use the stun because I like watching the animations.

There are probably a whole load more skills I could use but I haven't bothered to look. I think I last visited a trainer somewhere around Level 17. Why would I bother? I don't need any new skills. Everything dies so fast. Often before I even work out what I'm fighting.

If the game was ridiculously easy before, and it was, it became ludicrously so when I acquired my first Companion. I picked up Corso Riggs when I left Ord Mantell for the Republic Fleet. He's a healer. I found it impossible to die before he had my back; now my hit points never even go below 99%. Ok, this one time, on the last boss in the Story version (solo) of The Esseles Flashpoint, I did manage to get to 80% health but it was hard work. Corso is a beast of a healer.

As for gear upgrades, I am, as usual, wearing quest rewards and whatever drops. So far, I haven't bothered to look at the stats let alone think about what they mean. There's an automatic comparison between gear pieces on mouseover; I just glance at that and equip anything where more of the text goes green than red.

Leveling is not just easy; it's fast. Very fast. XP comes in bucketloads. When I started I had rested xp and double xp and then there was a patch and we got holiday double xp as well. Free xp boosters also turned up as rewards from time to time but I left those in my pack.

Examining my XP bar, I saw a lot of text in a very small font about bonuses and how they did or didn't stack and how F2P players did or didn't get them. I didn't attempt to unravel the details because I felt like I was being hosed down with XP already. The last thing I wanted was more. If anything, I wanted less.

At Level 20 I got my wish. There was a pop-up telling me from now on, as a F2P scrub (if it didn't actually say "scrub" it was definitely implied) I could expect reduced XP. If I wanted the good stuff I could either subscribe or spend real money in the Cartel Store.

Speed of leveling did slow down noticeably at that point. It went from crazy fast to just plain fast. It feels about right now. It will be interesting to see what happens when the holiday boost drops but by then I might be 50 already. I'm more than half-way there.

For a good, long time none of this mattered a damn because I was having fun! I ran around killing separatists and rescuing children and making moral choices right and left and I found myself enjoying it way more than I expected.

Apart from how easy it all was, the other overiding impression from my first couple of days was how incredibly huge the gameworld seemed. It's deceptive, because SW:TOR is anything but an "open world" game. The unit of territory might be the "Planet" rather than the "Zone" but all you ever really see is a sliver of each world. Even so, the terrain you cover is immense.

It's made more so by the inordinate amount of running you have to do. I cannot recall ever having to run this much in an MMORPG, something that seems all the more peculiar in such a high-tech setting.

On Coruscant even the gangland areas are like military industrial complexes in their own right. The ceilings are vaulted, the corridors stretch into the distance, elevators shuttle between levels and pathfinding, even with the map, can be a trial. Even the NPCs notice. Corso, trailing behind me on yet another ten minute jog from questgiver to target and back, wondered aloud how a street gang could find the money to fund a base on such a scale.

Yet, for all the running, I haven't been bored. Or frustrated. It feels oddly convincing. The absence of short cuts and fast travel (they exist, or so Tyler tells me in the comments, although I haven't investigated the possibilities yet) adds to the immersion. That, I know, won't last. Enjoyment of slow travel is a function of novelty.

When I moved on from Ord Mantell to Coruscant I was determined not to let the main storyline suck me in. Once again I ran around picking up random side missions. They were all reasonably interesting. They were also even more insanely easy than before because by then I'd discovered that The Scoundrel comes with an in-built cheat mode.

As a rogue class, The Scoundrel gets to sneak. You'd expect that. What you wouldn't expect is for "sneaking" to translate into "infallible invisibility". The abiilty, "Stealth", has no cooldown, lasts indefinitely and casts instantly. Nothing I have met so far, including bosses, sees through it. Once, in the Flashpoint, I encountered some droids that used a kind of ray that would reveal me but they had a huge telegraph and predictable pathing. Other than that, nothing.

In Stealth mode you move at 85% run speed. It's not even enough to notice. I often forget to switch Stealth off in safe areas. By sneaking I was able to do almost all missions without fighting anything other than my specific target mobs. When, as was often the case, I just needed to click on an object or find and talk to an NPC, I was able to complete the mission without any combat whatsoever.

I've played a good few classes with various forms of stealth or invisibility but never anything like this. It's the dictionary definition of overpowered. If it wasn't that the combat it avoids is entirely trivial anyway it would feel like an exploit to use it. As is, it just feels handy.

Eventually I ran out of side missions on Coruscant, just as I had on Ord Mantell, giving me no option other than to return to the main quest. I felt my agency as an individual slip away, subsumed into the pre-ordained narrative.

It's fortunate the story's half-way decent and the voice acting is better than average. What it reminds me of more than anything is watching a mid-season, filler episode of an 80s T.V. show; Magnum P.I, say, or The Fall Guy. Not a particularly exalted benchmark but above the reach of most MMORPGs that aren't The Secret World.

The whole thing is significantly enlivened by the famous BioWare "meaningful choice" mechanic and the accompanying Dark/Light dichotomy. I plan on dealing with that in more detail another time but for now, as a first impression, I'll just say that it's working a whole lot better for me than I ever imagined it would.

Some more recent reviews of SW:TOR suggest it's become little more than a slightly awkward single-player RPG. The suggestion is that, finally, the ill-fated MMORPG has morphed into the spiritual successor of Knights of the Old Republic so many wished BioWare had made in the first place.

I'm not so sure. There's certainly a huge amount of course-correction in place, the game trying its hardest to steer a new player down the optimal path of story, story, story. That, of course, was never  the original intention for the game. As firmly and irrevocably as TOR became associated with narrative, basing the entire game on story was never the plan, not even when BioWare famously or infamously touted their "Fourth Pillar" as the magic bullet that would save the MMORPG genre.

As many people argued at the time, supporting a live MMORPG on story wasn't likely to be sustainable long term. But then, it didn't need to be. Story, after all, was only the fourth pillar. The game also rested on three more: exploration, progression and combat.

I have to assume those still exist at the upper end of the game. I imagine there's the usual MMO endgame of grinding repeatable content (combat) to chase incremental increases in power (progression), punctuated by sporadic updates (exploration). New expansions, like Onslaught, due this Autumn, give a refresh to all four pillars and off we go again.

Down in the bilges of Free to Play, where all we have to sustain us is the original fifty levels, there's precious little sign of the missing three. The fourth pillar looms over everything, casting a long, dark shadow. But there are glimmers of light in the darkness.

I got my starship back yesterday evening. It was a moment, I can tell you. I may have said "YES!" out loud. Air may have been punched.

My next port of call should have been the planet Taris for ongoing narrative reasons. Instead I flew back to Ord Mantell, where I finished up a Bounty Hunt I'd taken on sometime back when I was about Level 18. Now I have my ship, I plan to go where I want to go, not where some NPC tells me I should. I worked damned hard to get my agency back and I don't plan on giving it up easily.

We'll see how long that lasts. I'm used to playing agaisnt the grain in MMORPGs. I have a feeling this time I'm going to get splinters.