As the crowd cleared before her, Zontara realized she was standing in front of her adversary, a gang leader who had stolen the holocron from the ancient jedi temple. She had tracked him to this planet, fought through bandits, thieves and hooligans until she finally tracked the device to this room. Her companion, a large lizard beast who had been at her side since she saved him from a fate worse than death when she was just a young padawan, training to be a jedi consular, fell right before her during this battle, succumbing to the blaster fire of one of the gang leader’s assailants before taking down the criminal himself in a final act of defiance, both bodies slumping to the metal floor.
This left Zontara, herself badly injured from blaster fire from the four men she and her companion had taken down previously before narrowing the odds to a simple one on one. As the gang leader raised his blaster to fire, Zontara raised her own hands and called on the Force, raising the ground as waves of debris fired as projectiles at the violent criminal. Then she called in on all of her energy to pull an entire boulder out of the ground, ripping up the earth around her, and fired it at the man, sending him flying back against the wall. Then the man rushed at her, planning to take the fight to blows rather than rely on his blaster.
For a second, Zontara was a padawan again, recalling the early fights on Tython, where she had beaten back flesh raiders and wandering wild beasts. Each fight back then had been a battle of epic proportions. And she had relied on her training saber, growing more and more adept with the instrument.
But that was then. And this was a different time. As the John Williams’ music began to fire all around her, playing that brilliant Star Wars action theme, she smiled. She wasn’t carrying a training saber now. As the man closed in on her, she pressed the button on her weapon and a green blade of flame emerged from the device, reminding her that she wasn’t just a padawan any longer. No, she was a jedi. And as the lightsaber reverberated in her hands, she rushed at the gang leader, the blade swinging before her.
No, she would remind him why she was a jedi. And only one person was coming out of this fight alive.
As I mentioned in my last post, I was now playing Star Wars: The Old Republic, and I have to say that it’s definitely living up to its promise of being a great game. Before, games attempted to recapture that Star Wars spirit, but finally a game puts you into the universe where you are experiencing the life of being a jedi, or a bounty hunter, or a Sith Lord. The possibilities are many, and they deliver on all.
Nearly a decade ago (2004, I believe), there was an attempt to do this with an MMORGP in Star Wars Galaxies: An Empire Divided. And in the beginning, they did a very good job. However, there was always something missing: The story. Basically, it put you in between the original movie and The Empire Strikes Back, or it might have been right after The Empire Strikes Back (don’t recall exactly). And you spent your time fighting as whatever you wanted to be, but you didn’t really get a choice of anything other than living in a sand box of the time period. There were no real quests. You just killed stuff and made stuff. And you flew around. And then you could fight space battles (eventually). But that was really it. And then they changed it to try to be more quest-like, except they had already destroyed the game before that point, and it just went down hill from there.
Star Wars: The Old Republic puts you 3000 years before Luke Skywalker started whining to Ben Kenobi about moisture farming. Revan was a great jedi that had gone to the dark side and then came back again (the original Knights of the Old Republic game) and he’s now a legend that has been gone for some time. That’s the universe you find yourself living in wit this game.
You can play on either the Republic side or the Empire side. I haven’t explored that much on the Empire side, although my friend Jason has, and he seems to enjoy the story they’ve developed. I look forward to trying it out myself when I exhaust the story lines of the Republic side. But right now, I’m having a blast.
There are problems with the game, including bugs that need to be fixed, but they’re not outrageous. I get the impression they’re trying to address them, even if they’re not addressing the community about the bugs being addressed. Unfortunately, community bases can be overreactive on these things, and reading the message boards is kind of dangerous if you use those as your gauge to figure these things out. But from me, I find myself enjoying the game and see many more hours of playing before I might get bored with it.
The graphics are excellent. The interface needs some improvement. Unlike World of Warcraft, there are no mods working on this game, mainly because Bioware hasn’t supported them yet. My hope is that they do support them so we can start add extra usability for this game. As a healer in the game, I can tell you that it is sometimes really hard trying to interface with the system as a healer, which can sometimes get a group killed faster than it should. Hopefully, they’ll work on that.
Overall, if I had to scale this game, I’d be giving it either 8/10 stars or 8.5/10 stars. But that is saying a lot because I’m extremely critical over games, and I haven’t played a game in a long time that I’ve given more than 6 stars on that scale. The original of this game is still one of the greatest games ever created, and I’d give that 9.5/10. The second of the series, KOTOR 2, I’d give about 7/10, as the story kind of went a bit down hill, almost as if it was written by the B team.