Story: Does anyone remember that ‘other’ Star Wars MMO? Yeah…So, why is SWTOR not going to fall into the same hole every other MMO has sinked into? Bioware says it’s story. And after seeing the preview, I’ve to agree. In fact, I’m already convinced. Throughout the demo, SWTOR’s gameplay bears all the trappings of an MMO: 1-9 ability shortcuts for spells and attacks, same movement, same everything, except, it didn’t feel like an MMO template. Full voice acting aside, it actually felt like I was watching a gameplay of KOTOR.
Dialog is delivered through multiple choice answers, and affects your course of the game. Every choice provides light/dark side points which can affect your abilities and future responses by NPCs. Everything as it should be in KOTOR, except, there’s not save button, there’s no reload for a bad decision, there’s no turning back. At this point however, we weren’t told if having too much light side points for a Sith Warrior actually turns you into a Jedi.
There were a couple of other design choices that may have an effect not only for you but for your party as well. Back to the demo. After the Sith Warrior introduction, we’re taken back to the Imperial ship where both the Sith Warrior and Bounty Hunter has infiltrated. We saw not only interactive dialog driving the story, but also a mechanism that allows simultaneous party response.
In traditional MMOs, when you’re in a party and interact with a Quest NPC, everyone gets their own dialog to either accept, reject or hand in your quests right? In SWTOR, the NPCs provide multi-choice dialog, and when you’re in a party, everyone gets to see the same dialog and respond to the same dialog. In the demo, we were shown both the Sith Warrior and Bounty Hunter answering in a quest dialog segment. The demo is of course the perfect scenario, but when asked, Bioware Senior Producer Dallas Dickinson said that they’re still tinkering with the weighting system. Who gets priority to answer, what happens when two people choose different answers, or no one answers at all, waiting for another party member to answer.
There’s also the sticky problem when your party moves the story into a direction that you’re not comfortable with. For example, if your party opts to kill a ship captain in a mission, where you wanted to spare him, are you stuck with the party’s choice, which will impact the rest of your character’s story or is there away to opt out? Again, Bioware says they’re still working on it.
What Dallas promised though is that you will not see a single repeated quest line between the story progressions of an Imperial and Republic character. Also, in the course of your game, your choices are permanent. In the demo example above, if you choose to kill the ship captain, he should remain dead in your current character’s timeline, and that will impact the whole flow of your continuation, leading to the closure of certain quest lines and opening of others. Quest rewards and NPCs available will also be changed permanently. This seems like Bioware has a shit ton of instancing to do, and if they can pull it off, it will be the greatest thing to happen to MMOs, now we wait with crossed fingers.
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