Star Wars: The Old Republic Preview

GameSpot joins the fray by posting their own hands-on look at Star Wars: The Old Republic, and once again it's based on the trooper-focused build presented at last week's GDC.
We tore through the first few separatist troopers on the map quickly while seeking out our contact; she was staked out in a nearby control room clearly located on the game's minimap. After speaking with her and getting our orders to deactivate the bomb's force field, we headed out to the base's entrance. Again, it was clearly marked on the minimap, and we fought the occasional skirmish with nearby separatist troopers. Interestingly, The Old Republic will actually custom-tailor hunting quests based on your play patterns, so if you happen to repeatedly slaughter, oh, let's say, Ord Mantell separatist troopers, the game will craft a miniquest for you that will reward you for killing a few more of them (in this case, a total of 20). Fortunately, our powerful character had little trouble patiently isolating individual targets and filling them with holes like interstellar Swiss cheese.

Because of our powerful character, we didn't have a great deal of trouble dealing with the base's defenses, which were primarily separatist colonists and robots. Thus, we soon got on the trail of the bomb. On our way to the center of the base, we found a small party of injured (and terrified) separatists, who begged for their lives. We gave them the benefit of the doubt and let them escape. At that point, LucasArts producers informed us that we'd normally receive light side points (this wasn't implemented at the time we were playing). Soon, we found our main target--a control room where a frightened separatist soldier claimed that the bomb had been moved and that Republic scum like us would never find it. At this point, we entered into a three-sided dialogue with the soldier and our commanding officer--who had also tracked down the target--and gave us an order to pull out our weapon to shoot the man on the spot. Rather than take the dialogue option of agreeing to the order, we chose to refuse in favor of interrogating the man thoroughly (which would probably have earned us more light side points). He folded and revealed that the bomb had been moved to an unknown location and his separatist commanding officers had fled.