Star Wars: The Old Republic takes place thousands of years before the events of Star Wars Episode 1...though it's never clear what their idea of a year is, or if that measurement of a "year" applies to all planets and systems, so really "over three thousand years before Darth Vader" could mean a couple of our decades before Anakin is born, I dunno. The website, however, does have a pretty cool illustrative narrative to the Star Wars universe's ancient history...if you're bored out of your mind and you're waiting for the giant patches to load while you're installing the game, it's worth a watch.

But to paraphrase, the good guys and Jedi Council (The Republic) were battling it out with the evil Sith Empire. Shit got real when the Empire hit a little close to home...and by "a little close" I mean in, and around. They stormed the fuck out of the Republic homeworld Coruscant, bringing down the Jedi Temple in the process...

(I know right? This animation team should have made the actual movies.)

But the Republic is getting overwhelmed, and now with Sith and Imperial Fleets blowing shit up all over the place, they called for a cease fire. The Sith, being evil incarnate, listened and backed off, of course. (...wait, what?)

So the Empire is set about to claim more systems rapidly expanding, and the sneak attack on Coruscant was a big success...now the underdogs within the ancient Sith Empire hold promise, and the currently dominant Republic is a little nervous. Things seem on equal ground...with that said, both sides are trying to convince neutral planets that they'll be victorious in the long run and the other side is bad. Which, oddly enough, coming from the Sith Empire's perspective isn't too crazy, because along the way you find out the Republic is just as capable of doing fucked up, villainous things too...and I learned this from playing a Republic character.

Getting right to it is my favorite part, Character Customization. The Republic has four classes; the Jedi Knight, Jedi Consular, Trooper, and Smuggler. Each class gets splintered off into a more specific skill set at about level 10. With the Knight and Trooper it's just a matter of what kind of tank you want to be, but with the Jedi Consular it's about choosing between Healing and Defense (Sage) or Stealthy and sneaky (Shadow). For Smugglers, you choose between being a ranged combat medic as a Scoundrel or a ranged incapacitating Gunslinger.

With the Sith, in their efforts to keep it balanced, the Jedi are mirrored. Instead of a Knight, it's called a Warrior. Instead of a Consular, it's called an Inquisitor...the interesting perk about the Inquisitor's version of the healing Sage is they actively drain health from their enemies to replenish their own, or teammates. Instead of throwing a bunch of rocks at an enemy, they zap the fuck out of them with lightning. If Vader was a Sith Warrior, Palpatine was a Sith Sorcerer. The other two options is you can be a Bounty Hunter, all decked out in your "Not-Boba Fett" armor, but with goofy little blades on your feet, or the Imperial Agent. Which can either be a high tech, field medic/damage Operative, or a damage cannon Sniper.

In my experience, I was on Kaiburr Crystal server.

My primary account was a human Jedi Sage, Phobotekk.
My secondary was a Chiss Imperial Sniper, Deikos.
Then I had a Sith Sorceress, Fogahn
and a giant Trooper Vanguard, Beefcaek.

What is refreshing about the game is each story is different for each class...and takes you on an arc from planet to planet unique to the path you've chosen. Unlike World of Warcraft or City of Villains, there's a rich narrative to it all, and with the occasional swell of John Williams scoring, it successfully makes you feel like you're in Star Wars.....but that illusion is swept away when you begin to think too much...more on that later.

This game claims to be very story-driven...and yet, something's lost on it in that. The Jedi all start on a planet Tython, which is a planet overrun with these Flesh Eating Hammerhead looking things. Say, the mission is to save Padawan's trapped in cages...you gotta rescue five of them. Well, there's ten cages littered across the area, and if you rescue one from one cage and wander off and come back, there's another Padawan in that same cage guarded by identical baddies you just killed. "Go out and get/destroy/sabotage X and while you're at it, kill a bunch of Y for bonus points" are all applied in this way...and yeah, I get that it's supposed to accommodate for the never-ending stream of new users or new accounts, so when they're not far behind you, they can gain a similar experience...but what it does is dampen yours. You don't feel like you're making a difference.

A pivotal decision: some asshole is sent to make a bunch of villagers happy because they're losing faith in the Republic, so this guy's plan was to pump them full of drugs, and it's your decision to either let him do it and get a bunch of cash in return, or destroy the drugs and run him out of town. These are decision that account for your Darkside/Lightside rating, and I really don't see it effecting anyone but Jedi and Sith and what kind of lightsaber they hold, but whatever. The point is these are morally heavy decisions...one you can only choose one or the other in, and either would have a definitive impact on what happens to that town....but you'll never see it. No matter which you pick, you don't see any apparent change. And even if you disappoint your employer (in this case, the drug pusher) you still get paid anyway. You still get the XP. Did you make a difference? Another example: Some Republic Troops bet on the poverty stricken residents to run a race through a minefield. You could turn them in, sure, but somebody else right behind you will humor it, and maybe even participate. Nothing is allowed to happen, because the newbie behind you a couple of days late has to have this conversation too, and decide for himself. Those minefield Republic Troops will always be there, they'll always have those races, and they'll always dish out the same amount of credits and xp to whomever talks to them. No difference is made.

With that realized, there's no consequence. Go ahead and piss these guys off and start a fight with them....they might take a while to take down, but they'll focus on your companion AI, and both of you will kill them inevitably. Loot them for what's in their pockets, heal up real quick to no consequence, and move onto the next side quest. Your companion is pretty much going to be your bait most of the time anyway...they match whatever level you are, and seem to be typically stronger than you. I guess that's why the enemy tries to take them out first. Your companion can die again and again and again, at no consequence. Good thing they don't have a tendency to remember this and hold grudges...

There's logical inconsistencies. Because you're a Jedi Knight, that means when some farmer on Tattooine asks you to fix his moisture farm, that you know exactly how to repair it at it's base, never been to a dessert planet before, never seen this equipment. You studied your whole life on the Jedi way, and coincidentally, you can waltz over to his adjacent broken turrets, in a mangled, twisted metal heap, tinker with a few things behind this panel, and it's good as new. Because you're an Imperial Agent sniper assassin, you all of a sudden know how to reprogram droids on a computer interface you've never seen before. Though this is 3,000 years before Vader, Tattooine never looked as good even when Anakin was just a child....there seems to be something lost in translation with technology in general here. Especially since the Republic and Empire alike have COMPLETELY EQUAL technology, both recreationally and for combat.

That point brings me to the space battles. Let's get real here, probably the most interesting thing about the Star Wars universe, and fuck you if you disagree, you are wrong. At level 15, your character is assigned your own ship...a REALLY NICE, bigass, technologically sophisticated ship...for free. You don't pay one credit for this fast traveling, space battling cruiser, that has a room, an armory, medical hall which is never used, meeting room, bridge, escape pod...it even comes with it's own Protocol Droid, which does little more than greet you and say something funny or awkward. Naturally you can purchase ship upgrades. Why would you need that? Well, you wouldn't if all you used it for was to get you from planet to planet. But you can do rail-shooter missions! Sort of like Starfox or more closely Rebel Assault.

However, even with no upgrades at all...just stock, you can dive into a couple of space missions the Republic/Empire Fleets needs help with...and keep in mind, it's all interchangeable between Republic and Empire this entire time. Same levels, only role reversal, doesn't make a difference. Your FREE ship fucks up entire flights of their fighters, completely cripples frigates, and damages capital class destroyers. The Republic clearly has free access to this technology, and Empire clearly has access to the same shit too..but, instead of giving this kind of tactical firepower and advantageous space combat technology to someone with flight experience...someone who's JOB is to do this kind of stuff, they give it to you. It's a wonder the entire space war isn't fought with these things instead of the fragile everything else..

Your ship, regardless of class or side, rips apart these Not-TIE Fighter and Not-X-Wings with disturbing ease. At greater distances than these Frigates can reach, you can pick off their turrets and engines. With a measly Class 2 or 3 upgrade on half of your parts, you're not even challenged anymore. Just highlighting your shooting icon on the incoming distant fighters, the game leads the shot for you, ensuring their destruction with an effort that reaches to the extent of a lazy point, click, and hold. "Oh those distant pink/yellow engine flares? There they are." .....which doesn't even make sense, because the engine flare would be more visible if they're moving away...and NOT visible when they're moving toward!

But it doesn't make a difference. You would have to be asleep at the controls for you to die or your fellow wingmen to get shot down, or your friendly frigates to be obliterated. You would HAVE TO BE ASLEEP. Or STUPID. The technological gap is almost astoundingly distant from the source material as common sense is absent . Even in missions where you're told, simply, "kill 60 fighters" even though there's 120, you can't fucking lose. The fighters will ALWAYS pass you. Again and again, in two's and three's, they won't even shoot. They'll just PASS YOU. "Here is a fucker that's invading our territorial space, attacking the ship we just launched from or are told to protect, he's been chewing through our numbers, making loops and circles around our ships. DON'T EVEN BOTHER TO SHOOT HIM, LET'S JUST MAKE A QUICK PASS TO SEE WHAT THIS GUYS INTENTIONS ARE, AUUUGH I'M GOING DOWN!!!" *boom*

That's stupid and mindless. So are the enemies on the ground, really. If you're in a little over your head, you can slip right past the enemies as long as you don't walk too close to them. At one point, there was an Imperial Sniper lying prone on the ground searching for incoming enemies to snipe...I didn't want to alert them, so of course I ran right past, right in front of them, outside of the general triggering radius that gets them to attack you. This is somehow worse than Metal Gear Solid's arbitrary "vision cone" because this implies the enemies we're fighting are REALLY dumb as bricks. Of course, maybe it's not their fault they're completely incompetent; too frequently on Class Specific missions, I'll run into a door and I'll stop to survey what's ahead...it's a wise practice; you get to pick out a priority target, leisurely tell your companions who to kill, and you can charge up certain attacks...Ahhh, unless you run into an area where the game forgot to load them, loads them in too late after your five or six steps in, and all of a sudden, WHOOP! Materializing henchmen! They're not even supposed to have teleportation technology! Egad!

But going back to the space combat, you can't customize your ship at all. Interior or exterior. At certain levels you're allowed to equip it with stronger things. That's about it, and I'm sure somewhere down the line the space missions at least TRY to be challenging. But it's the biggest missed opportunity for the game. Why, I'll pretend you ask?

Because the primary is to be the most badass special forces Trooper...or your very own Han Solo or Boba Fett, or your own awesome Jedi or evil Jedi or good Sith or...normal...Sith. To be an Imperial elite modeled after Grand Admiral Thrawn only a hot Chiss babe with a sniper rifle, or to be your very own Asaaji Ventress, only an Inquisitor. Those kind of things...and it falls short out of repetition, and the overwhelming feeling that you're not really making a difference or impact on these worlds. You can't expect them to call you by name, but you can expect visible change. But everything that COULD make physical change is washed out, because they have to account for the players that don't choose that change. Because you're sharing this space with very different people, and in many instances you're FORCED to share that space by teaming up for Heroic missions (see: unfairly strong opponents) or Flashpoint missions (see: unfailry strong opponents in a giant linear playing field that tells a story), your individual epic saga is lost among the noise.

The all powerful Jedi/Sith and the lightsaber you fought so fervently to gain is little more than a painful glowstick, instead of this mystical awesome thing. You're a common psychic space samurai with an ordinary weapon in this universe that sometimes deflects lasers and sometimes doesn't at all, and instead of slicing through metal and flesh alike, you have to slap around normal man wearing a jacket at least ten to fifteen times if he's your equal level just to bring him down (while your partner is helping!)...and when he's felled, he's intact. A locked door...and no option is "fucking cut it down with your goddamned lightsaber, you idiot." It's dramatically nerfed, and the "choreographed lightsaber duels" equates to like, two to three animations with both duelists feet planted firmly on the ground...moving during battle serves little more purpose than to get you in range for your next target, once you've outlived your initial, weaker foe.

Say, you have to go over those mountains to reach your destination. Well, I'm in luck...I just got a space ship. What do you mean I can't have my protocol droid pick me up, and let me fly and land over there? You're expected to walk the entire way. Oh but don't worry! In your "teenaged" levels, you'll get the ability to sprint constantly! Lord knows why you'll ever need to turn it off, but it's there in case you ever wanted to be slow again! Good thing nobody is out of shape in this universe, because you can sprint non-stop. Oh, it STILL takes you twenty minutes to traverse the entire map? Why not spend every credit you've earned in a month to buy a land-speeder! Now you'll cover that same distance in fifteen minutes! You have to be a certain level to buy the nicer, faster speeders, so you better start grinding! There is something to be said that some of the planets are designed beautifully, but it outstays it's welcome when it takes forever for you to venture out, back and forth, again and again over the same landscape. It takes even more time when you inevitably have to slaughter some territorial, but innocent indigenous life forms that were minding their own business patrolling a bottlenecked bridge.

In combat, I can lift small, torso sized debris and throw them at my enemies with the force...but I just saw my very same character lift MUCH HEAVIER, MUCH LARGER things in the story with ease. Why can't I do that to my opponents? Why can't I just collapse the ceiling on their head? Push a much stronger opponent under a door and guillotine him with said door? Pick them up and dunk them into that vat of poisonous toxins...hold them under, and drown them in it? These Jedi and Sith really lack imagination and capability with their force powers. It feels very RIGID. "This is what you're allowed to do. That's it. Get used to it, because you're going to be doing A LOT of it."

But ultimately the game is just capitalizing on this new franchise Star Wars has been kicking up for the past decade. But our antagonist for the grand Republic can't be the droid federation, that doesn't happen for another 3,000 years apparently...when time has allowed for technology to downgrade a couple of notches. (Seriously, how often did you see the characters in the movie have handheld Holocommunicators like handy, very easy to eavesdrop on, cell phones?)

From what I understand, the Republic, led by Senator Palpatine, eventually becomes the Galactic Empire. So those black uniforms, and the white plastiplate armor? Spoiler alert guys, but those Republic, white armored troopers are pretty much the fore-fathers of Stormtroopers. The Republic becomes the Empire. In this game, they retconned it so the famous Star Destroyer designs and TIE-Fighter looking things were basically around 3,000 years in the past as a formidable opponent, WARRING with the Republic for centuries. It doesn't make sense that this theme of things had survived for THAT LONG through time...ESPECIALLY if they were eventually defeated if the movies are canon. Why not come up with something fucking different? Those uniforms, that iconic architecture? The clones of Gran Moff Tarkin and everything else that was THE EMPIRE in the original trilogy shouldn't have existed then. You don't think a few historians wouldn't raise a few eyebrows that their glorious Republic is being reformatted into the very EXACT enemy they fought so hard against? That would be like if World War 2 happened for thousands of years, Allied planets are Coruscant, Alderaan and such, and the Fourth Reich is occupying planets like Korriban and Dromund Kaas...thousands of years, and eventually America came out on top. We get into a huge robot war thousands of years later with a trade federation, and all of a sudden America looks supiciously less America-like and our military is dressed in Nazi uniforms, flying Nazi planes, mechs, parades, architecture... "NOPE! It's all good now everybody! That stuff you learned about in ancient history...heh, ignore it all. Those Rebels, oooh those rebels...they're bad! They're very very bad. Just like the Jedi order, yeah...we really did you all a favor with that one. Return to your homes and jobs. Glory to the Emperor!"

None of it adds up to me. While looking at it from a child's standpoint, it's valuable that its teaching kids there's two sides to an argument, two different stories to tell, even if after a while it goes about it pretty predictably. I just can't enjoy this monotony anymore. I love Star Wars, and I just can't turn my brain off to the fact that this game just isn't engaging. The combat is underwhelming (hell, even when you're expected to aim your gun, the lasers hone in on the target. Missing and hitting is judged like a roll of the dice. Evasive maneuvers equates to jumping off a cliff.) progression is laborious and unsatisfying, and the challenge is based on repetition like its treating us like idiots. Rats on a wheel. That we're foolish enough to ignore everything of what was the Star Wars universe so it can reinvent it into something that's less and simplified. Packaged in something that's overcompensatingly huge, but with little actual filling.

For a brief moment I thought I had found the MMO for me. Something more engaging than City of Villains, more interesting than World of Warcraft.....and for a moment, it was a little exciting, together with my buddy Mitch and his dual blue lightsaber wielding Sentinel, accompanied by a high leveled Jedi Shadow (it's like a Jedi Ninja with a blue Darth Maul lightsaber) and back to back with another Sage, ripping apart droids and generic troopers in a HUGE complex. Having Jedi fueled dreams again... only my imagination got it right in my lightsaber being more lethal to it's impotent Old Republic counterpart. My imagination got it right when I was in CONTROL of my spaceship. My imagination got it right that I could say what I want, and not one of three dialogue choices: (1. Okay! 2. "What happens now?" 3. Fuck you.) or (Good Side points / Bad Side points). My imagination got it right...and honestly, I don't have to pay monthly for my imagination.

For a game where you have to spend money for time to play it, it does an awful lot of wasting our time. Flashpoints that go on and on, quests that demand you back and forth traversing COLOSSAL maps and stages and planets. It eats up so much time. It needs so much time. An ideal game for someone with no life.

I'm going to ride out the time I already payed for with this game, but there are too many faults for me to ignore. If you like MMO's, this might be for you. But I'm convinced that MMO's are for fools who have nothing better to do and nothing better to buy or invest into....or rather, not for me. It's primary, critical fault is being an MMORPG. In a world where stiff, soulless facial expressions with dead unblinking eyes is permissible. Awkward, constantly clipping animations is so common place you eventually stop noticing, and skill equates to endurance and nothing more. Where fights starting from one area to get to another can last up to twenty minutes at no consequence to the victor. If you lose, your consequence is time.

MMORPGS. Where wheezing sloth-children could outlast the most formidable opponents by simply adjusting stats with time, patience, and superhuman resistance to boredom.

This isn't what I need to be doing with my time. It is a time sink...and these guys profit the fuck out of it.

-G-