I decided to take advantage of the free weekend to see for myself what The Old Republic was like. After having invested a few years in LOTRO, I wanted a new MMO to offer some new gameplay elements as I was well aware LOTRO and WoW were very similar. Bear in mind though I never actually played WoW, so I refer more to LOTRO in this article.
To maximise the difference between my TOR experience and LOTRO, I chose a PvP server and a bounty hunter with an allegiance to the Empire.
Naturally, you start off with a big flashy intro movie, but for some reason half way through the client minimised itself returning to the desktop. Switching back, the screen was black but the audio was still present. So I had to skip it and could not see a simple way of replaying it.
TOR is a more polished experience than LOTRO once the "WTF do I do?" moment has passed.
There seems to be less skills to worry about and the quest objectives are a lot less grindy, I only came across one "Do x20 something" quest and that was an optional side quest.
It is also nice that the game has no problem with adopting an immoral stance. You can be a right bastard if you want to be, killing targets in cold blood and returning his head to an unexpecting wife. A nice contrast after the morally sound LOTRO.
Just being in the Star Wars universe firing a blaster and rockets is also nice after all the medieval hacking and slashing.
It is also nice that every quest given pulls out a simple cut scene using the in game engine with voice acting, your own avatar also has his own voice and personality (although you have choices in almost every dialogue). Much better than just a window of text!
However, mechanically TOR is pretty much the same game as LOTRO (or WoW), in almost every way.
Quest hubs, trainers, taxis, countless mobs (they also respawn a lot quicker than in LOTRO), it's all there.
Combat with blasters at range feels nice initially, but I could imagine repeatedly bashing the same two or three icons could revive that familiar fatigue we all know and love. You stop strafing in combat fairly early on when you see laser bolts twisting around to home in on you - it's not your dodging skills that determine the outcome if you get shot, it is of course the dice-roll.
I didn't get a chance for group play or for someone to kill me in the short PvP area I was in. But I got to level 8 and managed to escape Nal Hutta (a rather dreary, swampy dirt hole) for the brighter Imperial capital.
It goes without saying that the graphics are nothing special, far inferior to current non-mmo titles and surprisingly TOR has very similar graphical capabilities to five-year old LOTRO.
I understand that there are MMO fans out there that are happy to play the same format but in different colours and perhaps with an extra lick of paint, but once was enough for me. I'm not counting of course the other MMO's that were actually different. I enjoyed Planetside and Eve Online as they offered very different experiences to WoW/LOTRO/TOR.
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| The forthcoming Planetside 2 |
I will probably have another go with TOR at the next free weekend as I did enjoy myself, but not enough to pay a monthly fee, for that I await the next generation of MMORPG if indeed there is another pay-per-month MMO.
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