Normally I wouldn't write much about other games (... well mainly because I only play WoW at the moment) but I enjoyed playing the Beta of Star Wars The Old Republic last weekend.
I decided to play a Sith Marauder, turning evil etc ... and they have the coolest ship.
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| Sith Marauders' Fury ship |
You start out with some normal weapons and after a while you get lightsabers.
At around level 10, It depends on your pace of doing your class quests, you get to choose your specialization
Being a Marauder gave me 2 => Double awesomeness.
The loads of stories make this game really cool but sometimes tedious. Especially on group quests where you already had the talk several times. A way to speed such things up and make your conversation choices faster would be nice in such cases.
Another thing that could be better is the long distances of travel on foot. At a certain level you get Sprint that allows you to run faster out of combat but sometimes its still a long run having mounts a bit earlier would be nice in my opinion.
One of the starter gloves did bug out and seem to form some graphical bug, which annoyed me that much that i just equipped the item. It didn't occur on any other gloves though.
Other bugs i encounter was that my weapons fully or sometimes partially were no longer visible. My companion had this problem as well. Her guns weren't showing and she was blasting stuff from thin air.
At around level 15 you get your starship then. It allows you to travel to different planets, which basically some animation and then a loadscreen.
It also allows you to participate in some space battles, But it's rather limited in my opinion.
You fly on a set route and you can only fly for yourself to dodge a rock, which you cant actually decide on which of the rock you want to go to dodge it.
This feels really like a small arcade game and could have been so much more. Like a huge pvp battle between factions.
Even in the early Star Wars games, like Star Wars Rogue Squadron you could fly a lot more freely.
I was actually hoping to see this kind of space combat in Star Wars The Old Republic.
The companion/crew part is really cool as well no more boring looking around for materials just send out the crew that you have to micromanage. They gather for you, they craft for you, some of them sell your gray items, which helps a lot on full bags.
More importantly they are a nice asset to go into combat with. They do their role in a descent way, I had a ranged dps companion, but I saw a tank and healer companion as well and they seem to do it properly.
I did had some bug with my companions once I had 2, If I used my droid (second crew member) for an assignment I was unable to do let my other companion do an assignment, It simply said it was already busy.
I did some dungeons as well. The first was rather easy probably because of most of the group out leveling it.
I soloed most of it at first, with my companion of course, but the end boss was to hard to solo.
The second dungeon was a lot harder. The first boss in there was pretty easy but the second one took us a couple of wipes and the fights are considerably longer than in WoW, not a bad thing in my opinion, the fight was a lot more tense and this for only a second dungeon. The bigger satisfaction afterwards ofc.
We were unable to kill the third boss because our healer had to go (we spend almost 2 hours there), but we got close it also another learning fight that has to executed almost perfectly. We were a bit low on level though. It was recommended 1 level higher than our average level.
Having those wipes made me noticed how big those places are on running back. I sure hope they add some sort of teleporters.
The pvp part of the game seemed really balanced and with some form of normalization in battlegrounds helps a lot as well I suppose.
The battleground I joined had several levels of ground and I could easily jump between them with my Force Leap, no path issues like with the WoW Warrior's heroic leap.
