Let’s not beat around the bush here. You can hardly call yourself a geek if you haven’t ever fantasized about jumping to light speed in the Millenium Falcon, or about staying on target while strafing the Death Star. So it’s not hard to understand the appeal of a game set in the Star Wars universe. Especially if it’s a persistent world where we can all live out our most geeky fantasies. The Old Republic, as you probably know, promises just that.

Thumbs up!
Bioware have a thing about choice. As they demonstrated in their single player RPGs, they consider the story that unfolds based on your actions to be very important. The demonstration at Gamescom began with the now famous trailer, where Sith and Jedi battle it out. Following that, we where shown a live played sequence where a Sith warrior decides whether to save or kill an Imperial captain. It must be noted that all of the events where displayed in real-time, looked awesome and where fully voiced.

By showing a thumbs up or thumbs down, the press in the audience was asked to decide the captain’s fate. To my surprise, most of us wanted to see him live. Unfortunately, it seems the Dark Side had overtaken the demo systems and the sequence crashed. This was doubly unfortunate for that poor captain, as the only playable ending was now his demise.

Yada yada yada
After this, it was time to move on to the behind closed doors portion of the demonstration, where I was finally allowed to take control of the same Sith warrior, and to play through the same sequence. This time, I chose to save the captain, and saw an entirely different set of events unfold. Everything was again perfectly voiced, and playing though the dialogue was a joy. The same system is in place as in Mass Effect, and it works great.

Fortunately, it wasn’t all about menus and dialogue. There was action as well. After the cut scenes, it was up to me to first cut through dozens of troopers. Using several attacks, I could string together combo’s. For example, there is a charge attack, which launches your character through the air towards a targeted enemy. You can follow this up with saber strikes, use an AOE to stun nearby enemies, or force choke your target.

More is better
Controls are very responsive, and even though there are the typical MMO cooldown timers on your actions, combat is extremely fluid and fast. After battling through the minions, I was finally confronted with the boss character: another Jedi. Killing him awarded me with his light saber, which allowed me to dual wield. This is just as cool as it sounds.

A Bioware guy asked me what I thought. My first reaction was: “This isn’t an MMO. This is a next gen Knights of the Old Republic”. The whole experience felt very much like a single player game. It is very hard to imagine how this all will feel when playing with others. Combat and story are so streamlined and so scripted, that I cannot yet see how the experience will be with a random PUG or even with some good friends.

No comment
Bioware wasn’t talking much about this yet, but confirmed parties of “approximately four or five people” where planned. Exact numbers where not given. Same goes for raiding, which was confirmed, but again no team sizes where specified.

I can say I walked away from this demo impressed. I have played dozens of MMOs and TOR seems to be unlike every one of them. If the quality of the rest of the game is like the demo, I might not even care if there are other players around to group with. This truly feels like a true KOTOR sequel.