Star Wars: The Old Republic Preview, Part One

After spending a couple of weeks with BioWare Austin's Star Wars: The Old Republic, the folks over at Rock, Paper, Shotgun have cranked out the first part of a lengthy preview series for the highly anticipated sci-fi MMORPG. A sampling, as usual:
You can turn down a quest, unless it's core, but if you take it you're either going to take it gracefully or like a dick. Either way, you'll still be doing the quest, of course. How you feel about yourself is by far the most affecting factor, and it's an effective one. But then of course, there's the familiar KotOR Dark/Light divide, and that's at play here too. Certain decisions you make, that usually define how you'll end a quest, will score you points on either side, and upset or please the person you're dealing with appropriately. Then on top of that, you've got companions, and how you behave will change your relationship with them albeit in a crude numerical system, but it means you're constantly aware that your behaviour is having an effect, no matter how hypothetical it may be in that moment.

As my investigations continued, it revealed an ancient race of droids, dating back to the original Force War. What this means for the Jedi, desperately attempting to recover from a large war, is unknown, but plenty of people want you to find out more. Of course now you're just hitting droids instead of Flesh Raiders, but. You get the idea.

This is all moving toward passing the tests, that (like in every other game BioWare have ever made) you don't do because something more serious breaks out, and your eventually proving yourself to be a bit rather special. That rings no more true here than it ever has before. In fact, it rings a lot less true, because you can see all the other a bit rather special Jedi wannabes running around you doing the same quest. But hey, we're all capable of suspending our disbelief for such things, and so consider mine suspended. (I like to think that all the other players are getting back and being told, (Well, you did a terrible job compared to John.)

And being a Jedi means: lightsabre! Which is why it was the only option. Oh, and you get an R2 droid as a companion, who bleeps and bloops to you as you trundle about. That's rather fab. Come level 10 you're endowed with a specialist class, a choice from two for each class. I chose Sentinel, because, well, it gives you a second lightsabre. You can probably see my approach.