What’s Good About Star Wars The Old Republic
What is the weirdest idea or series of ideas that you can think of? For some, it’s the idea that the most powerful source of knowledge in the history of the human race is used mostly for both entertainment and cat photos; others think that it’s the idea that the world is flat or that vaccines cause autism. For me, it’s the idea of that time that Bioware, the studio known for such gems in the RPG genre as Baldur’s Gate and Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic making an MMO based on the latter of those. And it ended up being pretty good?
Now before you click out of this while thinking I’m a clown for bringing that up; first off, I’m not completely a clown, I never got fitted for the shoes, and second The Old Republic is probably one of the weirdest and most interesting examples (to me at least) of an MMO more or less becoming a single-player RPG when it was realized that it could not compete with the giants of the genre. This is done through both of the expansions focusing on them until now hidden empire of Zakuul and how its existence just sort of throws the whole Republic vs Empire conflict out of whack when a third, more powerful entity is showcased in this context.
But I am getting ahead of myself here. Bioware was not so subtly bucking genre trends by straight-up putting fully voice-acted cutscenes and characters, stylistic choices of their output into the context of an MMO. And while for the most part a lot of these are still kind of the same “COLLECT TWENTY BEAR ASSES” for the side stuff and some of the story stuff, it’s often accompanied by more interesting story beats that make the grind of that nonsense feel not so bad. Since the major pivot to being more of a single-player experience has taken place, the Old Republic has been rebalanced to allow for all of the old story dungeon content (referred to in-game as Flashpoints) to be run with your NPC companions and a “Combat Support Droid”, to top it off all companions can now do all of the roles of healing, tanking and DPS so you can change the other two to fit the other roles you are lacking in your abilities.
The main reason I decided t get back into this aside from all of those changes I mentioned above is that I wanted to play more of the class stories that were in the game when it first came out. There are eight playable stories based on the various facets of the Republic and the Empire, mainly the Jedi, Sith, a specific organization in each faction’s respective military (Special Forces for Republic Troopers and Imperial Intelligence for Imperial Agents) and the Bounty Hunter and Smuggler for your criminal underworld needs. For the character I’m playing right now I decided to go with the Sith Inquisitor because I never played a ranged class before (I’m more of a “jump in and murder with lightsabers” kind of guy) and good god, I was pleasantly surprised by how much fun playing as the Sith Sorcerer subclass is. A huge part of it has to do with the fact that there’s an entire skill tree focused on just Force Lightning (aptly entitled “Lightning” to boot), meaning you can light jerks up like how Palpatine tends to often do.
The story that class gets is interesting too, it starts as you, a former slave who was recently discovered to have force sensitivity is whisked to the Sith Academy on Korriban to become Sith or die trying, later focusing on the more mystical aspects of the Dark Side of the Force. The main thing I like about playing this story is that it gives you the option to be a total snarky dipshit to everyone you meet. This makes a lot of sense because if you went from “basically property” to “basically part of the ruling class” you would too. Or maybe that’s just me projecting?
The Old Republic isn’t a perfect game by any means. The population of players is so small that any chance of doing MMO stuff in this MMO is more or less impossible without large queue times and the way it was monetized post-free-to-play conversion is pretty fucking gross (the option to hide your helmet being locked behind the subscription is something that ruffles my feathers a bit), it’s still got a pretty decent set of stories that can be experienced if you so choose to, whether it’s through the Force and a lightsaber or a simple blaster. And to top it off, there’s enough story content in there for several KOTOR games, so that alone makes it worth checking out.
