Preview: Star Wars - The Old Republic

If you were at E3 a couple of weeks ago, or if you were watching a lot of footage from the show floor, you might've seen a number of people wearing buttons that said "I KILLED THE CAPTAIN" or "I SAVED THE CAPTAIN."

Those people managed to get in to see the private demonstration of LucasArts and BioWare's Star Wars: The Old Republic, which took place behind closed doors in LucasArts's booth, located in the most isolated corner of the Staples Center and under guard by a small detachment of armed cosplayers. You could be forgiven for not realizing it was at the show at all.

I managed to get in on the first day of the show, by luck more than anything else, and sat in on a half-hour demonstration of the game, given by Dallas Dickinson, one of BioWare's senior content producers.  Old Republic has been getting steady buzz since its announcement, so I was curious about seeing the actual game in action.

The game appears to play like a multiplayer Knights of the Old Republic. That game was a heavily abstracted version of the Star Wars d20 tabletop system, with most of the "dice rolls" handled automatically by the computer. You directly controlled one character at a time in a three-man crew, with the other two being either AI-directed or given specific marching orders during a pause screen.

In Old Republic, those other characters are actually other players, sharing quests with you. Like BioWare's other games, such as Mass Effect or Jade Empire, Old Republic is a game that's largely about choices.

You start off by picking to be an agent of either the Sith Empire or the Old Republic, with appropriately limited class selection; Sith can opt to be a Bounty Hunter, for example, while Republic players can instead opt for a Han Solo-esque Smuggler.

Both sides can also play Jedi, obviously, and BioWare's learned from the failure of Star Wars: Galaxies. In the Old Republic setting, Jedi don't win automatically just by existing. Lightsabers and Jedi are common in this setting, and normal people have a host of potential ways to defend against them.

Interacting with NPCs comes with the typical BioWare conversation tree, influencing NPCs to help, hinder, befriend, or antagonize your character. Those choices, which are one-time and one-way, can change the course of an event. The aforementioned buttons came from the specific ethical choice that BioWare displayed at the show; the player, in the role of a Sith, was confronted with the captain of an Imperial ship. When given the order to attack a heavily-armed Republic frigate, the captain refused, on the basis that he wasn't up for a suicide mission. You could opt to either punish him for his insubordination, which of course means cutting him into seared bits, or let him live but reprimand him.

The crowd I was with chose to kill the captain, which resulted in a nearby lieutenant receiving a sudden field promotion. She carried out the previously-unobeyed order, which meant the player had to go defend the ship against a Republic boarding party. The opposite choice, letting the captain live, still led to a confrontation with the Republic, but in a different setting, against different enemies.

It's difficult to say anything conclusive about The Old Republic this early in its development, but what it looks like now bears a bit of a resemblance to Tabula Rasa; it allows you to share adventures with other players, and the retail version will feature a player-driven economy, but it bears very little resemblance to the current standard MMO model. Right now, there are still more questions than answers... which is probably just how BioWare wants it.