A day spent with the team at BioWare Austin has made one thing clear: working on Star Wars: The Old Republic has left them in a bizarre place. Talk to a member of the production or design staff and you’ll hear them talk about how proud they are of what they’ve accomplished, but also how they’re constantly humbled by how much they need to improve. They know better than anyone that Star Wars didn’t have all the features the audience wanted at launch. They know that many people, including myself, stopped playing after having a passionate – but ultimately brief – affair with it.
Part of their answer was dropping the monthly subscription fee and going to free-to-play. Another part of it was a series of content updates that hit the game in roughly eight-week intervals. But BioWare Austin’s biggest initiative comes in the form of the upcoming Rise of the Hutt Cartel expansion. New quests on an new planet called Makeb, a new level cap, and a host of other features are on the horizon for the story-driven MMO. Now only one big question remains:
Is it enough to lure new and old players alike back to a galaxy far, far away?
Whether you’re a subscriber, playing for free, or someone who put their level 50 characters on carbonite freeze shortly after The Old Republic released in 2011, Rise of the Hutt Cartel primarily aims to give you more of the universe to explore. On top of a level cap raise to 55, you also have new storylines for every class that pick up where the core game ended.
And that new content could be exactly what The Old Republic needs to bring people like me back. The primary reason I jumped into the game in the first place was to experience an original Star Wars tale. Creating Chuf, my Chiss bounty hunter, and guiding him through a narrative where I made moral choices and visited places I’d only read about or watched on TV was a blast. With Hutt Cartel I get to visit a new planet, meet new characters, and continue developing my avatar’s persona.
My companions won’t be evolving with me, however. They might occasionally make an observation about what you’re doing, and they’ll still react to the choices you make in your story, but your compadres have no new quests in the expansion. That’s really disappointing to me, because my Old Republic story was as much about me as it was the people I chose to surround myself with. I understand the logistics associated with adding new voiceover and the huge additional investment this would have required, but it’s a bit of a downer nonetheless.
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The conversations are still fun despite the time that's passed, but I'm a bit more skeptical about Rise of the Hutt Cartel's opening quest design. When you first land on the planet Makeb, for instance, you immediately have a quick fetch quest. From there it’s on to new parts of the planet where you’ll kill X number of soldiers while blowing up a set number of ships by planting explosives. It’s familiar and, well, a bit boring at its core. But combined with the narrative choices you’re making in between, the bits of witty banter from your companions, and the new pieces of lore it introduces, I found myself enjoying it during my all-too-brief session.
You’ll be doing a ton of fighting in the new story quests, and the reworked talent trees and new character abilities should help mix things up a little. My bounty hunter got a shock net, allowing me to do a bit more crowd control in skirmishes. His redone talent trees also give me a lot to think about as a returning player, and could reduce the frustration that comes from hours and hours of cyclic, button-mashing combat.
Exploring Makeb’s new story might be enough for some, but BioWare really wants to give you cause to return to older content too. As soon as you’re level 52 you gain access to two new quest lines, one of which involves a new macrobinocular tool, and another that gives you a seeker droid to hunt out new loot in the world.
There is a narrative attachment here that makes the Star Wars nerd in me geek out at the new lore.
Based on that brief description you might think the new content just puts you on a series of fetch quests, but they’re actually much more epic and appropriately Star Wars-y. For instance the core macrobinocular quest starts off with you hunting down a few radio towers and droids, but eventually leads you into a deeper story involving a mysterious figure known only as The Shroud. Likewise, the main seeker droid quest isn’t just about digging up junk around the world, but is instead tied to a narrative about an evil lord who has sown deadly seeds throughout the galaxy. The backbone for these tasks might involve a repetitious action, and there will be daily quests you can do to get experience and reputation, but there is a narrative attachment here that makes the Star Wars nerd in me geek out at the new lore. It seems they’re also kind of essential, as the team at BioWare explained that they generate a lot of experience, and will be an important part of anyone’s adventure to level 55.
The expansion and post-50 content also gets a boost from the Scum and Villainy update. Releasing right alongside the expansion, the update is free to anyone who plays, but mostly serves high level players. Four classic Flashpoints are getting level-50-or-higher Hard modes, for example. There’s also a new post-50 Operation, as well as new achievements tied to the macrobinocular and seeker droid missions.
A number of quality of life updates coming alongside Rise of the Hutt Cartel, and that have come out since many of us stopped playing, also make The Old Republic a lot better to return to. Scum and Villainy introduces an on-ship auction house for all players. It also redoes some annoying things like re-routing taxis on Korriban to make them more efficient. You can also redo your entire interface, moving things around however you like. If you haven’t played since launch, the team has been very busy trying to implement many of the features you probably wished were there at the start.
Part of me wants to see Chuf’s story through to the end. Another, more skeptical part of me still fears the tedium of The Old Republic’s overly familiar World-of-Warcraft-style combat. Will I return? I can’t say just yet. The idea of embracing an old gaming flame and having another passionate affair is alluring, but I’m wondering how long the fling can last.
Anthony Gallegos is an Editor at IGN with an emphasis on PC games. Many Bothans died to bring him the information to write this preview. Follow Anthony on Twitter.
Source : feeds[dot]ign[dot]com
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