The Old Republic

[Kevin]

The voice acting and individual storylines really make the game, IMO! The only question is how the endgame's going to play out.

They did something I've thought MMO's should do for awhile. They slapped a single player game into an MMO. Like I said the engine and story telling mechanisms remind me a lot of the Mass Effect games, and those were good story telling games.

You slap that in your MMO, you add in group stuff and there you go.

They realized that 80-90% of MMO time is still spent playing solo or maybe in a duo with a spouse/roomate/child/sibling. Voice acting the story arc and giving you dialog options keeps you involved in the arc, other MMO's you just hit accept look at the summary/map pointers and drive on, soon you have mostly lost the story unless you want to keep it in mind and things become stale much faster.

It's a better game than WoW, or course so is Rift. The difference here is that Rift is WoW with better game engine tech, but not a lot of other changes. It didn't have a large enough hook to break the inertia that WoW has on a lot of people. SWTOR with putting in a solid single player game that is worth the initial purchase price is adding something new.

The combat, while still chunky cooldown stand around MMO combat still feels different. Playing an Imperial agent and actually rolling under cover launching an explosive drone then lining up a sniper shot to smash up a bigger enemy is not the same as rolling into cover in ME, throwing a grenade then firing a sniper shot by any means because it's still chunky MMO combat, but it is something that WoW and Rift just don't offer. It's a nice feel.

As mentioned the conversation options let you make your character feel more alive and involved in the world, it adds a bit of the R back into the MMO. Or at least changes it from "Raiding" back into Role. Of course I'm still only like L9 and still playing with tweaking the interface and such and only still putzing around on Hutta.

Of course I'm going to have to play my Republic trooper more because she is voiced by female Sheppard and female Sheppard rocks.