Starhawk Straight Talk, Part 2

I'm totally in love with Starhawk, people. No huge update for today, as last night brought more of the same action and excitement of my first night. I got a lot better at building around the base, and sneaking behind enemy lines and dropping down spawn points.

Just like Warhawk before it, I see Starhawk becoming my shooter of choice.

Star Wars: The Old Republic code named SWTOR

A long long time ago in a Xbox or PC not so far away an epic role-playing game was played. This game was titled Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic (KOTOR). Winning multiple awards and being dubbed Game of the Year for 2003 by numerous critics. KOTOR was set in the Star Wars universe 4,000 years before Han shot first. Given the difference in time between KOTOR and the main stream Star Wars films developer BioWare was given free reign to create a wonderful adventure story and set up Star Wars lore for years to follow.
Now I'm not going to go too deep into the story of KOTOR. For that you should really go play it and its sequel, but in order to establish some basics I'll need to talk about the time frame that this takes place in . As most know from watching all 6 Star Wars movies the Sith are the Chaotic or Evil Jedi. As opposed to in the movies where there are only two(Vader and Palpatine), in the KOTOR time frame there are a ton. This is a time when Jedi and Sith have been and are fighting each other in open war for control of the galaxy. Basically in the KOTOR games they fight and the Jedi end up chasing the Sith out of their part of the galaxy and then just kinda forget about them while the Sith go back to Korriban the home of the original Sith(For those star wars buffs out there you can appreciate the irony because that is how the original Sith empire started, a group of dark Jedi are exiled from the Jedi order and forgotten about. They settle on Korriban and enslave it and start building their empire in secret for thousands of years only to come back and fight the Jedi).

Now comes in the main topic of this Blog, I know it was a long trail to get here, but here you are and I thank you for indulging me in the past so we can talk about the future.


Star Wars: The Old Republic fast forwards us 300 years forward from the events in KOTOR and KOTOR2. Who would have guessed, after 300 years the Sith come back for revenge which is "so out of character for them right?" ... Not!. The Sith come back and start galactic conflict all over again. And so we finally come into the game. We are given the choose between creating a character on the Jedi/Republic side or on the Sith/Empire side of this conflict. Once a side is chosen you choose what Class and then what Race you wish your character to be. If this seems familiar that's because it is. There aren't any real strives of innovation on this front I can assure you, in fact with only 4 classes per side and as far as I could tell at least the Jedi and Sith classes are just mirrors of each other. The differences between the agent to smuggler and trooper to bounty hunter does not seem to far apart either as far as game play mechanics go. So at best the game has 6 core classes if not just 4. Each side seems to have approximately 6 or 7 races to it. Unlike games like Rift, WoW, or Dark Age of Camelot where each side or faction had unique races, SWTOR's sides share many races. For an example each side has humans and twi'leks just to name a few.

Gotta have style, gotta have Class:

Now each of the classes have 2 subclasses that you choose between at level 10 like in Dark Age of Camelot. Each of these subclasses has its own 3 talent trees. The talent trees seem to have some pretty obvious and vanilla choices. To get to the top of one you have to spent points in almost everything of that tree to get there, thanks to their point requirements. So as far as customizing your talents there isn't going to be much. You pretty much go up one tree to get the top skill and then have 10 points or so to play with in either the rest of that tree or spread them on the lowest tiers of other two trees. This is where most of the nerf and buff changes after release will happen. And I am 100% certain at least at this stage there will be one solid choice for the min/maxers and you will see plenty of cookie cutters because as it stands there is just not enough room for uniqueness. Now I understand more room to make different specs and such is a balancing nightmare that Rift is still fighting to this day 10 months after launch. But being able to have that choose is not something to frown upon.

Combat is nothing new either, each of the 4 core classes has a different resource management style but they are pretty much stuff you have seen in any other game. The combat is fast and fluid, and they definitely start you off making you feel powerful, you walk through the normal solo mobs, Elite mobs will give you a problem but usually if you don't mess up in the fight you can take even level Elites, if not maybe a level above you. When you group up and do flash points that's where the real action and fun is fighting boss npcs.


Companions: your imaginary friend come to life.

The "companions","crew member", or "followers".. what ever you want to call them, are really where SWTOR starts to innovate. If you have played Skyrim lately this system is going to sound pretty familiar because the basics are the same. Through out the game you will run across multiple people that will join your "Crew". Of your crew much like in KOTOR you can not take all of them with you in your travels, you will have to pick one and leave the rest to their own devices. You can outfit your crew with gear you find to make them stronger and they level as you do exactly like KOTOR. Much like in KOTOR your actions in dialog events effect your influence on the crew members and its implied that should you loss to much they will go away. Now don't fret because in normal game play, positive influence choices give on average 15 point, where negative choices when they disagree with what you have said only take away 1 point. So as you can see its pretty hard to not keep a steady gain on the influence. The follower you have with you can be set to an AI base much like a pet in most mmorpgs or you can toggle a mode where you activate all the attacks as you would for your own character as if you are dual boxing. For the most part the AI is smart and uses their abilities wisely so its pretty easy to just keep the AI mode on.

Now you can't talk about the Crew system with out talking about the Crafting system as they go hand in hand. You see your character does not have crafting skills like a traditional mmorpg. Instead your crew members have these skills. You can choose what skills each crew member has but they are more proficient at certain skills. The interface is very straight forward and easy to use, you simply click on the item you want your crew member to craft and they do so, each item has its own crafting time which at the low level was between one to two minutes. You can also queue up to five items so that you aren't there having to pick an item every minute. Along with the crafting skills the crew also has the gathering skills for the crafting components. How this works is there is a list of missions and what that mission will reward. The mission costs you money(not much) and about 3 minutes for the crew member to complete. This also means the follower will leave your side while on a mission. But when you are grouped up and doing flashpoints the followers aren't out anyway so its a perfect time to have them out getting crafting resources. This is a very different way to go about crafting and I like it. I typically never do crafting in an mmorpg because I always want to be out adventuring but in this system you never have to stop adventuring. Love it love it love it.

"The Fourth Pillar"

One of STWOR's biggest hype engines and marketing is their "fourth pillar" to mmorpg's. And that pillar is Story. Much like KOTOR, SWTOR is rich with story and dialog. Every quest is 100% voice acted and cut scened along with dialog choices which effects the outcome of that quest and your light to dark side alignment. Now if you have ever played a recent BioWare game this is not going to come as to be much of a change from the formula for them. But for the mmorpg market this is quite unique. I've never played an mmorpg and "read" every line of text of every quest. I've never ran up to a quest giver thinking"Ohh I wonder what kinda interaction I'll have with this character". No, I've only ever gone up to a quest giver and gone, I wonder what reward I'm going to get or how long it will take to get the experience from it. But in SWTOR the entire reason I quested was for the cut scenes. In my case I was a bad ass Sith Warrior and I always wanted to make those interactions where my character either threatened the well being of the quest giver or was given the go head to slaughter the weak. Your play through for those same quests might be quite different from mine, You may attempt to look for another option to help or try to steer the quest giver away from an action. Instead of slaughtering those villages because they are camping out on the quest givers sacred ancient ruins. "How about I go get them to move peacefully" may be the choice you choose. That is the true beauty of it, that its up to you. given its usually between choice A or choice B , but at least there is a choice.

While grouping the dialog becomes even more fun as everyone chooses what they want to say then there is a random roll of the dice to see who gets to say their choice. Its a pretty fun and interactive way to go about events. I found myself yelling at the screen in glee when my character was chosen.

All in all STWOR has taken some great steps to be a unique experience in the mmorpg market. I'll forever want more class and skill customization choose out of any mmo I play but STWOR has a lot going for it in other areas that set it apart from the crowd. I hope to have the time to do some editorials on end game once I get there.