On Day 2 of E3 2011 I had a chance to sit down with Bioware’s MMO Star Wars The Old Republic.

At the demo I played an Imperial Agent which was specialized as an operative and was level 26.

The short demo took place on Tatooine and I had a chance to play 1 mission which was to find a Sith lord who was kidnapped by the sand people.

When you start the mission you have the typical Bioware chat setup which allows you to give 1 of 3 responses, your responses can affects your standing with your companion character.  So after accepting the quest you are sent to get a compass which can be got by killing Sand People in a particular area. The area you need to go to can be seen on  the world map.

So to get to the area I grabbed my speeder mount, the speeder looked a bit awkward with the  female imperial agent as it looks to big for the character. So speeding to the area I dismounted and used the stealth ability to hid myself and I sneaked up and began my attack. I opened up with a backstab and then a syth  attack followed by a rapid fire blaster attack and rinsed and repeated and each sand person I did it to they dropped easily and after each fight I used the passive healing ability which made the combat easier, so after getting the compass I activated by finding it in the quest item section of the inventory and revealed a cave I had to go to.

Now this is an area I found funny and made me thinking the Imperial Agent may need some work, the mobs in it were level 23 and my character was level 26 and all I had to do was activate stealth and managed to get passed all the mobs no problem and reached the Sith lord, the Sith expanded the story about how he was looking fir a secret on Tatooine and through the conversation I got a choice which was to kill him and I selected it, selecting it had my character shoot the Sith Lord and dropped my companion rep and I got a giant red down arrow of +30 which I think meant that I was doing something dark (not 100% sure on it) and after that my 20 minute play test was over.

In all from a 20 minute demo of the game I can really see SWTOR being a game that could take more people from World of Warcraft. Now I really must say I didn’t expect much of SWTOR going into the demo and I commonly referred to it as “WoW with a scifi theme” and after playing it I will keep saying it, but I will use it as a good term because the game plays like WoW and honestly this is not a bad thing because people know what WoW is like and so people will be easily be able to pick it up and play.

Pros and Cons:

Pros:

• Easy to pick up and play.
• NPC interaction is fun and there are multiple ways a conversation could go.
• Graphics style seems to suit the game really well.

Cons:

• Combat felt boring, it offers nothing new to the mmo feel unless you are using one of the characters that can use cover (Operative didn’t need to use cover).
• Over sized speeder, I don’t know if it was me but the speeder felt way to big for the character size.