So! A couple days in and very enjoyable so far. Things it's doing right:

-KOTOR-style story. This game plays quite differently from most MMOs in that you're much more of a role-player than in Warcraft or most other MMOs. The interactive cut scenes mean that your character is much more well-defined, with an actual personality rather than just "I went to place X and did quest Y, give me my shiny". This means it runs at a significantly slower pace, mind you - all those voiced cutscenes take time to play out - but it means that you're building a character based on more than just a min-max analysis of the rewards at stake. For that matter, the game mechanics can bump into each other there - sometimes there's a conflict between what my character would want to do and what gets me light/dark side points, not that I'm trying to optimize exactly. At the same time, they can compliment each other as well - I started playing as a fairly tight-assed Imperial agent but have loosened up considerably under the influence of my irreverent companion, which is actually a pretty clever bit of role-play if you think about it that way.

Downside of that is that it only holds up as long as the quests do - once I run out of stuff to do, that advantage goes away completely. So I don't know that I'll be playing this game for years and years. On the other hand, that's kind of an advantage too...

-Combat. Doesn't feel like WOW, mostly because fights are a lot more oriented toward gunplay and groups. There's still a certain element of "swing at the other guy until someone falls over", but being able to duck behind cover helps a lot. Playing an agent is weird - I'm a stealthy shooty healer class with some crowd control and a backstab?

-A rail-shooter-type space combat minigame I can do for EXP? With daily quest bonuses? And it's optional if I don't feel like it? Heck yeah.

-Upgradeable equipment. Not all of it, but there are a lot of pieces where you can stick with the same look and just upgrade modules as you get higher in level. This gives you a lot more control over your "look" than you usually have in an MMO, and should prevent the problem that a lot of them develop at the endgame (where most of your good players are swanning around in identical outfits), assuming it's balanced right, which who knows at this point.

The big downside is that I have no idea what I'm doing. I was... pretty good at WOW, if we ignore PVP arenas and the like; I generally knew what I was doing and where to look something up if I got lost or confused. The generally-pretty-good-interface here means I'm not getting lost or confused much, but I have a much poorer idea of what sort of things I ought to be doing, or even what's possible TO be doing at a given point.

Posted by: Avatar_exADV at 06:05 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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