Page 7 • Star Wars: The Old Republic • Gaming • MMO • Eurogamer.net

Shiner 26 Nov 2011 22:36:36 62 posts
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I'm also keeping my pre-order.

I've enjoyed what I've played so far and for me at least it has the Star Wars atmosphere. I'm intentionally not delving too deeply as I still want it to feel fresh come launch.

Will I still be playing in 6, 12 or 18 months time? It's impossible to say from a weekend dabble but I'm fairly confident that I'll enjoy it sufficiently to splash out on a pre-order and a month-by-month subscription; if I decide to knock it on the head at some point down the line then it's no great shakes to me if I feel I've enjoyed the journey and therefore had value for money.

Carlo 26 Nov 2011 23:34:16 21,801 posts
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I'm impressed. Really impressed. Love the smuggler role, all the voices and acting, the humour of Han Solo's character is spot on.

the quests feel varied; they are all the same 'go here and collect etc' But the story behind them all is what makes them feel different.

6 levels in and I'm really pleased. Performs wonderfully too on my modest hardware. Can't wait to get out if the newbie zone and get my ship back but its a perfect introduction to the IP and an impressive beta.

oh and I really like that cover mechanic for fighting!

Edited by Carlo at 23:49:19 26-11-2011

Dave_McCoy 26 Nov 2011 23:44:00 3,410 posts
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I agree, loving it. It's like WoW but good, I know that sounds like flamebait but while I thought what WoW did was good, I couldn't get into the world. It was just so boring. For a Star Wars fan this is much better. I will be pre-ordering now since it seems very solid in beta form.

Dgzter 27 Nov 2011 00:57:11 3,736 posts
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I was enjoying the little bit I was able to play (Sith Inq to about level 11), but the performance on my old laptop is just too horrendous (3 year old XPS m1530). The graphics are woeful, frame rate is borderline unplayable, texture pop up is rampant and environmental textures just don't pop up at all. A real shame, as I vainly hoped that due to the more stylised graphical route they had taken that my laptop could handle it just as it does WoW, but not to be it seems

Can't afford to upgrade at the moment so going to give this a miss, but I did like what I could see and imagine a lot of people will enjoy this at launch.

Dizzy 27 Nov 2011 01:56:23 3,716 posts
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Did some PvP and.... it is TERRIBLE. I love the SP part of the game (despite the fps problems)... but the PvP is just atrocious. CC everywhere.... have they not learned?

Psychotext 27 Nov 2011 02:33:43 70,652 posts
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Hmm... really not convinced by this. Played it for a little bit today and it's really shonky.

I like certain aspects, like the mini instance story stuff and the voice acting, but the graphics are really ropey (low poly) which hurts the art style. Combat flow wasn't great either, which didn't help, and I prefer the WoW style of movement (I guess this might be fixed with an option that I missed?)

Had a bunch of technical issues too, which wasn't great.

Still, I do think it has a hell of a lot of potential... but it's no-where near where it needs to be.

Carlo 27 Nov 2011 08:42:05 21,801 posts
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Dgzter wrote:
I was enjoying the little bit I was able to play (Sith Inq to about level 11), but the performance on my old laptop is just too horrendous (3 year old XPS m1530). The graphics are woeful, frame rate is borderline unplayable, texture pop up is rampant and environmental textures just don't pop up at all. A real shame, as I vainly hoped that due to the more stylised graphical route they had taken that my laptop could handle it just as it does WoW, but not to be it seems

Can't afford to upgrade at the moment so going to give this a miss, but I did like what I could see and imagine a lot of people will enjoy this at launch.

I'm not surprised. That laptop barely meets the specs IIRC. My Acer laptop is an i5 430m and Mobility HD 5470 gives me a solid 30~40 fps, which I'd consider modest hardware (it's 2 years old) and good framerate. Saying that I just wiped and rebuilt it for Skyrim, which done wonders to its performance. The GPU is slightly overclocked too. Texture popup is (IMO) likely because of the amount of memory on your GPU (especially given that some textures never load at all).

Then again, it DOES say beta so maybe it will improve?! My recommendation, if you really want to try this game out, is to format it, get Win 7 Sp1 on it, and update all your drivers to the manufacturers ones.

I personally use an owners forum to find all the drivers out, and find out what everyone else is over clocking their GPU to. I was about to throw down some not insignificant upgrades to my laptop (i7 & Solid State HDD) to try and get a boost, but it turns out it'll run games with only a few drops to details.

EDIT: Had a look at the graphics settings, and it looks like Depth of Field, and Shadows settings are ones that should be left off/minimised on all but the most powerful setups.

Edited by Carlo at 09:34:43 27-11-2011

Lovemoose 27 Nov 2011 08:55:39 1,002 posts
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It's an odd one for me. The bits I like, I like more than I thought I would and... the bits I dislike, I dislike more than I thought I would.

The KOTOR feel is great, but the level of immersion is lacking, mostly due to the MMO trappings, and they can't help that while people call themselves things like "dickbringer" and "optimuspr1me".

sirtacos 27 Nov 2011 10:18:36 8,279 posts
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I'm liking it more than any MMO I've ever played so far.
However, that's like saying "this guy is the most open-minded member of the EDL". Not much of a compliment.

The bad:
- Graphics are shit. Plasticky, charmless, shit.
- The ubiquity of voice-acting doesn't compensate for its mediocrity.
- Character creation is nicely simple, but offers too few options.
- Little sense of being in a grandiose storyline of galactic proportions, with swashbuckling, wise-cracking and Star Warsing.
- It's a fucking MMO.

The good:
+ Has a bit of a Star Wars feel.
+ Holds potential for interesting character development.
+ I'm getting roped into it, which is a good sign, and a rare one. I usually get bored before my trial subscription ends (happened with WoW, LOTRO, Galaxies, EVE, Rift)).
+ Short queue times. Never more than 5 minutes.
+ Surprisingly stable build. Highly playable.
+ Combat animations are more varied than I expected them to be.

sirtacos 27 Nov 2011 10:21:38 8,279 posts
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Playing as the Sith equivalent of the Jedi Knight. This is my 3rd build. Looking forward to see how it pans out once I leave Korriban.

Dgzter 27 Nov 2011 11:25:32 3,736 posts
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Carlo wrote:
I'm not surprised. That laptop barely meets the specs IIRC.
[...]
Then again, it DOES say beta so maybe it will improve?! My recommendation, if you really want to try this game out, is to format it, get Win 7 Sp1 on it, and update all your drivers to the manufacturers ones.

Heya,

It meets the Minimum Requirements fine, but you're right and I wasn't really expecting too much. I'll prob take your advice and do a fresh install - the machine has Vista on it but I could probably look at getting Win7.

Btw the client seems to be running twice (simultaneously) during this Beta weekend and it is absolutely nailing my CPU usage: is that normal?

Cheers

Garfy 27 Nov 2011 13:39:57 1,558 posts
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I'm enjoying the Imperial agent spy storyline. Ice cold badass.

Kostabi 27 Nov 2011 14:15:52 5,926 posts
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Garfy wrote:
I'm enjoying the Imperial agent spy storyline. Ice cold badass.

Nice, might give that a go before the weekend is up. I really enjoyed the opening of the bounty hunter as it's proper gun for hire. Anything that lets you count to three then shoot someone in the face gets my vote.

THFourteen 27 Nov 2011 16:01:05 54,987 posts
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hiddenranbir wrote:Nice load of bugs reported, like stuck in my underwear, unable to hold a sabre properly,

is that a bug? happens to me every sunday.

although i can always hold my sabre properly.

spamdangled 27 Nov 2011 16:13:00 31,803 posts
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Enjoying this.

It's wow, but with all the branching conversations and alignment consequences you expect in a bioware rpg. Very good.

Very laggy though, but then obviously its a beta and this is a stress test weekend

Got two chars atm, a Jedi Knight and a Sith one.

Fallen_Angel 27 Nov 2011 17:04:50 89 posts
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Started off and wasn't too impressed after an hour or so last night. Knocked it on today and I've played for about 3 hours straight and really getting into it now. I'm loving the multiplayer conversation system, and the fact theres a bit more to the quests storyline than a text box. I'm also loving the smuggler gameplay, the cover system makes it feel different. Its got to the point I'm considering ordering it.

Edited by Fallen_Angel at 17:05:53 27-11-2011

Kostabi 27 Nov 2011 17:12:50 5,926 posts
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THFourteen wrote:

hiddenranbir wrote:Nice load of bugs reported, like stuck in my underwear, unable to hold a sabre properly,

is that a bug? happens to me every sunday.

although i can always hold my sabre properly.

glol.

[maven] 27 Nov 2011 20:48:42 5,799 posts
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My beta impressions so far, after getting each class to 10-12, bar Jedi Knight / Sith Warrior (which I found bland and boring up to 8):

The general motto of the game design seems to have been "If in doubt, do it like Vanilla WoW". And they seem to have had a lot of doubt. This is both good and bad.
The story-telling is obviously their main selling point, and it's largely well done. It doesn't lead to different out-comes, but it's interesting the first time around. After that, if you roll an alt, you'll be hitting SPACEBAR a lot, except for the occasional class quest.
The way the seamless instancing is done (instanced areas for class quests, some group quests and some normal quests) works well, especially as it supports grouping through those still.

Combat
Pretty normal MMO combat. Some things are interesting
- Cover for Smuggler / Imperial Agent means you care a bit about positioning, but it's also cumbersome / annoying from time to time because if not in cover then you cannot use many of your abilities.
- Trooper / Bounty Hunter was good fun, you can feel pretty awesome if your sticky-grenade explodes and you managed to keep the group together with your knockdowns so everyone takes damage from the sticky explosion.
- Jedi Consular / Sith Inquisitor are an odd mixture of melee and ranged (until the Advanced Class selection), but was pretty fun.
- Yes, way too many abilities by level 10.
- Maybe it's just because it's new or I'm bad at it, but you can die in combat. There are group quests, which (depending on class I guess) you can fell awesome about solo-ing (or with a companion). Rare (?) world elites and so on. The difficulty so far I really liked.

I enjoyed the first instance Esseles (but yes, after run #3, you'll be bored of the story bits and waiting for the pubbies to finish their dialogue); it's not all enemy mobs like WoW, but also has some friendly mobs and a tiny bit of variation. They way the instance and its story was integrated into your quest-continuation was a really clever idea; not sure if that'll work for most of the others.
Of course, with the 1-2 talent points people have at that level, there are no proper tanks or healers yet, but you will want to have someone healing in between DPSing (which I did, and seems a fair amount more fun that "just" healing).

At first I thought everyone has fast regenerating energy (except for Warrior / Knight), but some Advanced Classes change your resource (e.g. going from Consular to Sage increases your Force pool from 100 to 500 which makes it more like mana). But there are seemingly also healers that just fast-recharging energy (e.g. Trooper / BH's Heat / Ammo).
There don't seem to be any non-combat fun abilities (so far), stuff like Slowfall / Blink / ...

The graphics feel slightly bland in style (and way too much rim-lighting w/ glued plastic hair and beards), and turning Shadowing on sucks performance for very little visual pay-off. All the environments seem slightly too large, as if made for people 1.2x larger than the actual inhabitants / players.
Sound effects and music are awesome Star Wars.

Edited by [maven] at 07:51:15 28-11-2011

[maven] 27 Nov 2011 20:56:58 5,799 posts
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Double post: Goons are always good for enjoyable propaganda videos:

Edited by [maven] at 21:11:51 27-11-2011

Dr.Haggard 27 Nov 2011 22:31:46 4,640 posts
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I've been playing on and off since Friday and I really want to love it, but they don't half make it difficult.

It'll still be my christmas game this year but a lot of things about it have disappointed me this weekend, not least the utterly dreadful character design and customisation options. If come launch I can make a character that doesn't make me cringe every time I look at him/her I'll consider that a plus.

It feels like no love has gone into the game, just like Dragon Age 2. Thanks to well designed and executed mechanics (and of course the license) it's not a complete wash out, but graphics/art wise it's horrible. Even the loading screen image looks like amateur fan art.

Mr_interesting_2011 28 Nov 2011 12:28:41 112 posts
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I've played a little more and also want to love it but I'm still not sure...

The art direction is really disappointing. Everything looks a bit plasticy, sterile and uninteresting. There is nothing particularly 'wrong' with the gameplay but I expected so much more than the usual 'kill X of these' style quests but with cutscenes.

I had originally opted for the stupidly expensive Collectors Edition as I was so hyped for the game. I'm gonna cancel that now but cannot decide whether to pick up the standard edition or not.

I'm really not sure how well this will do. It will obviously sell really well initially due to the license and hype, but after the first month is up will it 'die' like so many other MMOs as aside from the license it doesn't offer anything new?

Spekingur 29 Nov 2011 10:49:48 483 posts
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I did not get that plasticy feeling others seem to have gotten. I went in to the game without any hype at all, if anything I was prepared for something that was bad. I have been pleasantly surprised and am happy with my pre-order decision now.
There are minor issues that I have with the game, all of them seem to be limited to the beta itself though - like low texture quality (higher quality was apparently turned off during the beta), couldn't write special characters when others could (��) and some other buggy stuff.
I fully expect there to be bugs and general chaos for the first three months of release, just like with every other MMO.

Spekingur 29 Nov 2011 10:52:15 483 posts
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rodpad wrote:
If it stays with the montly sub model it's going to tank and won't dent WoW in the slightest.

This could do very well with the freemium model though.

That's just a silly statement. No facts for this statement are provided either.
It doesn't need to dent WoW, what gives you the idea that it should?

Immaterial 29 Nov 2011 11:18:40 2,626 posts
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[maven] wrote:
Double post: Goons are always good for enjoyable propaganda videos:

Rouge squadron? Do they need some mascara with that, or is it a knowing, ironic spelling fail?

Psychotext 29 Nov 2011 11:45:45 70,652 posts
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Spekingur wrote:
I did not get that plasticy feeling others seem to have gotten. I went in to the game without any hype at all, if anything I was prepared for something that was bad. I have been pleasantly surprised and am happy with my pre-order decision now.

You must have had some sort of hype if you already had the game on pre-order.

Would be bloody strange to preorder a game that you weren't excited to play.

spamdangled 29 Nov 2011 11:47:27 31,803 posts
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I'm gutted I can't log in anymore. I'm definitely going to preorder now.

Where can I get the collector's edition from?

Dave_McCoy 29 Nov 2011 11:54:08 3,410 posts
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I've pre-ordered today. I thought is was great, I need a new MMO since giving up on Star Trek Online and this'll fill that gap nicely. I thought it was in great shape for a beta but I would hope it would be 3 weeks from release.

The story stuff seems well done for the most part. A lot of Jedi running about (I'm part of the problem) but at least it's set when there were more, not like the masses of Jedi in Galaxies when they're supposed to be wiped out. The flashpoint I did in a group was a lot of fun and the rolling for dialogue seems to work nicely.

Seems to be a lot of content there too. The prologue until I got my ship took me a while and you can times that by another 7 if you decide to try each class. I'll give it a try for a few months and see how I get on. My girlfriend goes travelling in a week so I have to amuse myself for 2 months anyway

Star Wars: The Old Republic • Page 7