This weekend I finally spent several uninterrupted hours in the heavy boots of one of Star Wars: The Old Republicâs more ruthless classes: The Bounty Hunter. Did the experience change my opinion that BioWareâs upcoming MMO is more akin to a single-player game that just happens to have other people in it? Not exactly.
BioWareâs approach to massively multiplayer online role-playing games is quite different from the approach other developers have taken over the past decade and change. Since the early days of Ultima Online and EverQuest, MMO developers have focused on giving players the very basic framework for a story and letting them iron out the details themselves. Where their character comes from, their ultimate goals, their basic personality, and the path they take through whatever world they may find themselves in was largely left up to the player themselves. Hereâs your world, now go play.
In recent years MMO makers have begun to experiment with stronger story-driven content, exchanging player freedom for a more powerful narrative. Games like Cryptic Studiosâ Champions Online did away with a completely open world in favor of more modularized content. Even the wildly successful World of Warcraft has, with recent expansions, moved in a more linear direction, giving players a set storyline to advance through rather that a series of loosely-related quests.
Star Wars: The Old Republic might be the ultimate realization of this idea.
The game opened like many a BioWare role-playing game has opened in the past. I created a character â in this case a female Chiss Bounty Hunter â and then I entered the story the developer has carefully crafted to introduce me to the ins and outs of being a material girl living on an Imperial world.
https://lastchance.cc/this-is-the-star-wars-the-old-republic-bounty-hunter-y-5860941%3C/a%3E%3C/p%3E
That was a worry of mine during my initial forays into the world of The Old Republic. Every class has a single story that all members of the class share. Every Bounty Hunter on the server was experiencing the same story I was, joining up with the same companion character, and facing the same choices I was facing as I advanced through my initial batch of quests. For some reason I thought this would cheapen the experience, but it reality it heightened it. I liken it to Kotakuâs Game Club, only instead of playing separately and coming together after the fact, we were all playing the game at once, spontaneously sharing our thoughts and reactions.
That strong feeling of story focus even remained when I grouped with other players to take on some of the start areaâs more challenging group missions; it was as if I was playing the optional co-operative multiplayer mode of a single-player game.
The Bounty Hunter class is a highly entertaining choice for fans of explosions. The equivalent of the Republicâs Trooper class, theyâre a mix of pure damage and subtle crowd control. Say I was taking on a group consisting of two shooters and a melee character. The melee character will rush forward while the enemies relying on firearms stick back and shoot. Iâd launch a rocket to knock the melee opponent back into the group and then unless a powerful area-of-effect weapon to take them out all at once. To put in in Star Wars terms, I wasnât quite Boba Fett, but I was much better than Jango.
The Bounty Hunter also has some rather powerful choices to make while progressing through their early levels, a reflection of the wide variety of personalities and temperaments lured towards the dirty profession. During one particular mission I was tasked by a mother to recover her son from his father, who had seemingly kidnapped him. Upon finding the father I learned that he was only trying to protect his Force-sensitive child from the often lethal brutality of the Sith Academy. I could choose to turn my head and look the other way, or kill the father and return the boy to his mother and a potentially dark fate.
The boyâs anquished cries as I shot his father dead made me instantly regret my decision.
The boyâs anquished cries as I shot his father dead made me instantly regret my decision.
They also signaled. I had crossed over to the darker side of the Dark Side, and from there on out when given a choice between good and evil, I chose the latter. Innocent civilians were killed. Wives were delivered their husbandâs heads in bags. After ten levels of missions I was wearing a set of armor vaguely reminiscent of Bobaâs finery, rocking a pouch full of credits, and bathed in the blood of more undeserving souls than I care to mention.
Thatâs not the sort of feeling Iâve gotten from an MMO before. Damn Dr. Ray for pounding the term into my head, but this is some emotionally engaging stuff right here.
https://lastchance.cc/mass-effect-2-will-be-incredibly-emotionally-engaging-5419323%3C/a%3E%3C/p%3E
You can contact Michael Fahey, the author of this post, at [email protected]. You can also find him on Twitter, Facebook, and lurking around our #tips page.
