SWTOR review.
I didn't get to play the game as much as I would have liked this weekend but I did play some. I am going to be brief but I will answer questions if anyone has them, assuming I know the answer of course.
I am going to skip straight to gameplay and ignore stuff like character customization, graphics, animations, and that sort of thing, only because I am not sure you all are interested in that. I will answer questions related to it if asked though.
Gameplay:
The game is like wow. If you hate wow, or are tired of its combat system, then you won't like SWTOR, simple as that. It has a hotbar with abilities, and a GCD when you use them. That said, calling it wow with lightsabers is a bit too simplistic. The classes I played, bounty hunter mostly with a bit of imperial agent, feel entirely different than anything in wow. Plus, the removal of auto attack makes a bigger impact on how the game feels to play than I expected it would. The best I can think to describe it is that it is kind of like playing WoW, but with entirely new and different classes with different class mechanics.
Based on the abilities I saw at low levels there doesn't seem to be much spammable CC like polymorph/fear. All the CC abilities I saw had cooldowns. One of the cooler ones is a flash grenade type thing for the imperial agent. It is an aoe incapacitate effect that breaks on damage and lasts for 8 seconds with a 1 minute cooldown. Bounty hunter had a similar ability, it was a single target dart that you shoot and it was an 8 sec incapacitate with a 20 second cooldown.
Players seem to do very little damage in comparison to player character's max health. at around level 5 or so the biggest burst I could line up with my imperial agent was about 250-300 damage and I think my max health at the time was 1500 or so. Where as in wow my abilities tend to be able to one shot myself at low levels.
Mobs on the other hand have a lot less health than players. Mobs tend to come in packs as well. Often there will be 2-3 extra trashy mobs with 200 or so hp and one slightly tougher mob in the pack with 500-600 hp. Most of the time the mobs you kill have much less than half your total health. I wonder if this is bioware trying to get around the need for a resilience type stat.
Story and shit:
Edit: I should probably mention that I suspect that my opinion on the story and stuff is artificially elevated simply because its not something that I expect from an mmo, and if this were a single player game that my opinion on it wouldn't be nearly as high.
The main hook of this game though, is the story based experience. IMO, bioware hit the nail on the head with this part of their game. It is easy to forget that you are even playing an mmo while playing this game. The storyline for the quests are interesting, and the voice acting and dialogue options make it effortless to follow.
Not only that, but you get to be more involved in the story by making decisions on how to carry out the quest. The option for choice comes along a lot more often than I thought it would, with pretty much every quest having 2 ways to complete it. Sure, the options can be pretty black and white at times, but I found the black, which is what I tended to do, to be very satisfying.
Towards the end of the origin world, you pick up a companion. I only got this far with the bounty hunter, and at least for that class, you can start to involve your companion in dialogue with other npcs. She even jumped into a few conversations of her own accord. I believe there are multiple companions available for each class, and it could make things interesting if you have different dialogue available depending on which companion you take with you. One thing I was slightly disapointed with the companion system was that, I tried to talk with her, and apparently there was no conversation available. However, she does say, "We'll talk later." which does give me hope that at least occasionally there will be optional conversations you can have with your companions.
You can customize your companion's gear too. They seem to be able to equip anything you can equip, assuming that they have the required armor proficiency. What this means is that it doesn't seem like there is seperate companion armor. However, the gear your companion starts with says "Mako only," Mako being the name of companion character in question, so it could be there are items that can only be worn by your companion, or it could just be that its only the starter gear they don't want you to equip. In addition there is a special slot on your companion where you can put items to change the look of the companion character themself. I got one as a quest reward and the change was pretty dramatic. It looked like a completely different person, it wasn't just a change in hairstyle or something like that.
Classes:
Imperial Agent
Before I played the game, the imperial agent was the class that I was most interested in trying out. I figured it would be squishy, high damage, and have good CC, but I was also concerned that the cover mechanic wouldn't be very good in pvp. It isn't as squishy as I thought it would be, though it isn't as tough on its own as the bounty hunter is. It wears medium armor, and has a decent amount of health so it can take hits pretty well even outside of cover. In cover the agent takes much less damage than even the bounty hunter did, and gets access to abilities that are only usable in cover. I only had one ability that was usable from cover for the level I played at, and it was called snipe. It was a 2 second cast shot that did pretty good damage, but it only did slightly more damage than an instant cast shot that I had that was usable both in cover and outside of cover. It was great for bursting down one enemy before the fight started but the difference in offensive power inside of cover compared to outside of cover didn't even compare to the difference in defense. Cover is relatively common while questing, though occassionally there are times where you will have to take a few seconds to get in position if you want to start on a group of mobs from cover which can be annoying.
The damage an agent did was really good, it felt a lot more bursty than the bounty hunter though the overall damage seemed pretty similar, with the agent probably doing a bit more overall. There was good variety in the way damage was dealt, using a pretty even mix of sniper shots from cover, a high damage power shot, and the basic attack which provided an enjoyable mix of animations as well, with the basic attack being a small flurry of fire opposed to the other two being one big shot. You also had a DoT in the form of a poisoned dart, and an aoe attack in the form of a frag grenade.
The CC available was pretty decent for a low level, and incapacitating a group of 4-5 enemies with the flashbang grenade and taking half of them down with snipe+power shot bursts before they could even shoot back was lots of fun. If any of the enemies got close you could do a melee range 4 second stun and either blast them with your rifle or shiv them with your vibroblade.
Still cover is a bit of a concern for me. I was glad to see that the damage you deal from cover wasn't really much more than dealt from outside of cover(at least before level 10), but the amount of damage mitigated by cover seems to be a pretty big deal, and I just don't see how a class that has to limit its mobility to 0 to be at maximum effectiveness can be viable in pvp, especially against the lightsaber classes. I am hoping that one of the agent advanced classes, probably operative, doesn't have much use for cover, so at least one agent advanced class can be useful in pvp.
Bounty Hunter
Coming into the game the bounty hunter was my second choice, but since playing the game it has become my first choice. The bounty hunter is heavily armored and heavily armed with more gadgets than batman, well maybe not more than batman, but it has a lot of gadgets. The bounty hunter plays a lot different than the agent, there is no cover mechanic to discourage you from running and gunning and you have the heavy armor needed to take the extra hits from not being in cover.
You start out with your basic attack which shoots a flurry of lasers from your pistol, a wrist rocket attack, and I think rocket punch as well(if not at level one then at level two.) The wrist rocket doesn't do much more damage than your basic attack, but it knocks enemies back(which you can use to knock people out of cover as well), and if they are weak enemies it knocks them down as well. It makes fighting weak enemies really cheese because you can just spam knock them down until you overheat, which is the bounty hunter resource. You build up heat with your attacks and once it caps out you have to wait to cool down a bit before you can use abilities again, or you can use a 2 minute cooldown called, vent heat, which lowers your heat by a certain amount. Rocket punch is pretty fun ability to use as well, it has a 6 second or so cooldown, and you do a Ryu(streetfighter) style uppercut while setting off your jet pack for a little bit of extra force.
Later on you get other abilities like flamethrower which is a channeled cone area of effect attack that does quite a bit of damage. A 3 second channeled ability that fires off a bunch of shots from your pistol that does a stupid amount of damage and stuns your target for the duration. A dart attack that incapacitates your enemy for 8 seconds much like the agent's flashbang ability but single target with a much lower cooldown. Death from above which is a 1 minute cooldown ability that makes you float in the air and rain down heavy fire on an area, seems like it could be used as a pretty good defensive cooldown against force users as well.
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Originally Posted by Ziel
