Star Wars: The Old Republic's Five Tricks for Success
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4: It's not about leveling.
On the game's official site, the team calls SWTOR "a story-driven massively-multiplayer online game." Given Star Wars' heritage, as well as every other game BioWare's done, it's fantastic if unsurprising news that the game will be more about the hero's journey than about camping the AT-AT spawn. But that means a lot of the popular game mechanics of the day need to go out the window.
Really, since MMOGs have been MMOGs, they've drawn from arguably the worst part of their RPG background: the advancement system. The whole "kill stuff so you can get stronger so you can kill bigger stuff" paradigm has only survived as long as it has, and at the forefront of most MMOGs, is because it's a lot easier to put people on a treadmill than it is to actually engage them with meaningful content. What's great about BioWare hitting the MMOG scene is they've succeeded in making this style of advancement vestigial in single-player RPGs.
When I was playing Mass Effect, leveling up was random; never once did I look at a progress bar or wring my hands at the thought of growing incrementally more powerful. I ran around and shot stuff and talked to people; aside from the annoying interface, the game's nuts and bolts were more or less invisible. If SWTOR is really going to be a Star Wars game, growing more powerful shouldn't involve grinding your way through 10 womp rats at a time, hoping they drop blaster parts.
