Why should I be interested in playing this game?
Star Wars: The Old Republic is a massive multi player online PC game that takes place over 3000 years before The Phantom Menace and about 300 years from the Stars Wars: Knights of the Old Republic storyline. It allows you to create and choose to side with the Republic or the Empire. It has an in depth character creation to customize your character. It has a number of races and classes to select the play style you desire like being a Jedi or Bounty Hunter. Each class has a unique storyline that can only be experienced if you play each class. It provides an all voice narrative for all your quests. It even provides the famous Bioware dialogue branching system. For new people that means it gives you a dialogue option to respond to a quest in neutral, aggressive or passive approach. Some responses can even lead you to the light or dark side and the response can impact what happens in the story. It has a companion system, allowing you to customize equipment of your followers that battle along side you. Each class has a subset of companions that will follow your character and provide unique skills to help you craft items or do crafting missions to level your crafting skills. The crating system is easy to understand but will require some research on what skills are required. It also provides player storage system and an auction house to sell or buy items, to owning and customizing your own ship and mount vehicles. No creature mounts so far.
How is the gameplay?
The first 10 levels is all about learning the game for it's your traditional newbie levels. Newbie levels end around 9-10th level, which guides you out of the newbie planet and onto the main story of your character. The game is pretty straight forward. If you ever played Word of Warcraft, Everquest or any MMO, the game has a lot of features we are accustomed to seeing in MMOs today. For new players, what this means is you accept a quest. You then go to that location and complete the quest. This could be a task to kill a number of creatures, investigate an area, to retrieving an item or confronting an enemy. You earn experience points as you kill and complete quests, adding to a character experience pool needed to level. Once you level you have trainers for each class you can learn new abilities. These abilities can be assigned to a task bar to click on when engaging in combat. Enemies drop random loot that can be sold or used to equip your character or companions. And yes you will get your first companion during the newbie levels.
What makes this game different from other games?
The voice narration for all quests presents a better story experience than other MMOs. This alone makes you character feel more part of the story and prevents players from having to read a block of text which some MMOs tend to saturate. The other difference is the famous Bioware dialogue branch system. This changes the course of you character story based on how you respond. Also seeing what the story was like before the Star Wars movies makes the game mysterious and worth exploring.
Is it worth playing?
If you love Massive Multi player Online games, the Star Wars Universe and have time to play, its definitely worth checking out. The game doesn't force you to group for it can be played solo. However, some of the best rewards and story experience comes from the flashpoints that require groups, but you can still skip these quests to move your character forward.
I give Star Wars: The Old Republic 'First 10 levels' 4/5 (4 - worth experiencing)
