Super Nerd Sunday Presents: The First Eleven Levels of Star Wars: The Old Republic!

As I put the finishing touches on my final paper of the semester, the day after I’d finished with my students, the day my work, more or less, ended, I received an email.

The subject line proudly declared: “Your Saga Begins!” It was my notification that I could begin playing Star Wars: The Old Republic. I knew I wouldn’t be able to right away, even though I’d updated the client fully earlier that day. I still had commitments: handmade books needed binding, a class needed attending. But when I got home, after fourteen hours of work or work adjacent activities, I was ready to play.

My friends hadn’t picked a permanent server yet, so there was no call for me to jump into making my final character. I’d briefly played through the game as a Jedi during the beta, but I hadn’t done anything in depth. I’d spent most of my time as a Sith, and I’d been less than inspired by the visuals that surrounded me on Korriban. The time I spent in the starting areas of the Jedi had been equally uninspiring, but hey. These things happen. I stepped in expecting nothing to have changed, and I was more or less unsurprised. Spare a slight polish, most of the graphics seemed the same.

But the play, the stability, and that slight, almost imperceptible increase in visual fidelity has been shaping my experience with SWTOR, inspiring me to play more and more. It’s made me take my wee Jedi from level 1 to 11, make my Knight into a Sentinel. There are still plenty of bugs to be found. My personal favorite came during a mission critical cutscene, where Satille Shan, head of the Jedi order and normally a fully grown adult woman, shrank down to one-tenth size during council meetings. I ran into this bug during my previous playthrough as a Jedi, so I wasn’t overly surprised or frustrated. In fact, I thought it was kind of funny. The bug gave the entire thing a certain surreal-ness that made me chuckle. I’ve come to accept, indeed expect, this sort of thing from SWTOR at this point, but it’s been considerably less prominent in the release build.

Since then I’ve leapt into leveling a Sith Warrior up for the third time in as many months, however, and there I’ve noticed fewer differences. There’s some nice polish throughout – a texture upgrade was put in place for many of the more prominent NPCs I encounter, lag issues have been much more manageable and combat has been a great deal more fluid. Sure, the character classes are exact parallels of one another (visual effects aside) across light-side dark-side divides, but I already knew that was coming. While it’s lamentable and unnecessary, I understand the mentality behind it and the way that the visual effects of their abilities shape the mechanics of different classes while retaining parallel effects is kind of cute. For the most part, though, what I’ve noticed is that this game hasn’t changed much since beta.

The only thing that’s changed since then, aside from the NDA and my reticence to share half-formed thoughts, is my impression of the first ten levels of the game.

See, previously I’d only taken time to play through the game from a single class’ perspective – I had elected, once my friend Alex decided to be our Powertech, to be our group’s Marauder: a class that does massive amounts of damage and can take a little too, sometimes. Each time the beta reset my characters I’d dutifully level my Marauder up as far as I could so that we could all enjoy the wonders of Dromund Kaas together.

This time I took a very different tack: by leveling up a Jedi Sentinel first, I saw more of the world and came to understand both the game and the way that alignment choices function in it a little better. It also made me realize what Bioware has done here that no MMO has ever done before: they’ve made you feel powerful and important from level one.

I’m not just saying they do a great job scaffolding their game and guiding you through specific areas at specific times appropriate to your level. They certainly do that, largely through the use of very well designed maps that make you do what they want without ever making you aware that you’re doing it. They also use the solo story areas to such tremendous effect, it’s kind of insane. By inserting a single player story into a multiplayer game, they make your every choice in the world a crucial one, one that not only establishes your character but also the fundamental nature of the world around you. Adding in hirelings who grow near or distant to your character based on these decisions was an smart move, and making them not only useful gameplay aids but also integral parts of a crafting system? Inspired.

In fact, these hirelings and their impact on story missions sort of showcase my point: namely, that Bioware spilled a singleplayer game all over SWTOR, and that SWTOR ended up far far stronger for it. In an era where other games try to out World of Warcraft World of Warcraft Bioware looked at their arsenal and realized that their greatest strength was their ability to weave a story, something Blizzard has failed at miserably in recent times.

I’d like to take more time to get to know the various ins and outs of Bioware’s latest baby before I write about it in-depth. Space combat, for example, is something I haven’t touched at all. I’m not entirely sure what the Legacy system is, though I’m excited to find out. But my first impressions, my first for-realsies impressions, are terrific. They’ve made something special, something new that violates all the rules of MMORPGs using the tools that were already available more adeptly than anyone else has before.

Sure, Blizzard perfected the conventional MMO in World of Warcraft by creating a feedback loop system that rewarded specific kinds of exploration and art assets that meshed perfectly along with a gameplay system that was hyper accessible and simultaneously difficult to master. And it’s going to be hard to crack that nut, even as subscriptions dwindle from MMO fatigue. But Bioware has done something completely different: they’ve made an MMO where your individual choices have meaning, where you can play through the game nine different times and experience nine different stories. They’ve made a game where expansions could not only expose new worlds but tell new stories and let us continue to grow not only numerically but emotionally with the characters we’ve built.

Regardless, after my first twenty hours with SWTOR as a released product, I’m convinced that this game is something special, and I can’t see the next twenty hours changing that.