E3: Star Wars The Old Republic Behind Closed Doors

Yes, we know, there's already been a Star Wars MMO, but while Galaxies was certainly worshipped by the few, like so many in this WOW-dominated genre, it has slowly crumbled away into mirky oblivion like an over-dunked rich tea biscuit.

And if you haven't been chained to a Hutt for the last year or so, you'll already know that BioWare are on hand to pick up the shattered dreams of Star Wars MMO players with the quite extraordinary Star Wars: The Old Republic. Much has already been said about this game, so taking as read the fact that this is a fully-featured MMO with all of the instances, questing, raids, guilds, talents, weapons, armour, crafts, professions, reagents, drops and all the rest of the malarky that we've probably missed in that unseemly list, let's focus instead on what we, here at NG, were exclusively shown.

It's often the first thing people wonder about when you use the words Star Wars and MMO in the same sentence; character classes. Will I be able to be a Darth Vader, a Bothan, or a Banther? The answer to all three is a most definite y... no. Because more realistically, the character classes thus revealed have all been rather obvious; Jedi, Sith, Bounty Hunter and so on. Today we were introduced for the first time to the new smuggler class, white shirt, black waistcoat and all. He's Han Solo essentially.

What came as something of a shock however is BioWare's inventive power balancing. Being dressed in little more than the attire of a common or garden space-stud and with none of the advantages to defend incoming blaster fire such as the swift ricochet of a saber or solid plate armour, the smuggler is the first ever character type in an MMO to use cover. Spots where you may hunker down and fire barrages, blindfire or precision shots at the enemy are common, so there is much advantage to be had. The smuggler is kind of the Star Wars version of WOW's rogue; cunning, multi-abilitied and with very high DPS, but weak-armoured to ground all that clout.

We also got to see the recent announcement - that all of the dialogue in the game would be voiced - played out to its glorious potential. We expected to see therefore quest-giving NPCs speaking rather than bringing up a variety of text-heavy dialogue boxes. What we didn't expect however, was for each instance of conversation to take place in a fully cinematic cut-scene, albeit one that is entirely in-engine.

The Old Republic definitely has enough original appeal going for it to potentially partition some WOW players away from their beloved life-waster.

Impressive, young Padawan... impressive. Although the highlight wasn't the game. It was asking the stormtrooper standing by the exit to Lucasarts' private room if perhaps he wasn't a little short for said role.