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Sunday, February 23, 2014

The never-ending world - STAR WARS: The Old Republic REVIEW

Many MMOs come out in free2play form, and they barely last for a few months while the developers invest thousands (and sometimes even millions) of dollars into its developement. Most of those games are unfinished, unpolished and crude. SWToR is a great exception. After being in developement for almost 8 years, this massive game has been released, firstly in pay2play form, after shifted to free2play.
PRESENTATION/MULTIPLAYER
The game has two big factions' the Republic and the Sith, and i'm guessing a lot of people know which is which. There are no level restrictions, you just play untilmyou reach a certain level, but a lot of the available items can only be bought with real world cash, and they can be pretty damn expensive. The world is consisted out of 10-12 sub-worlds. Sub-world that you spawn in vary depending on your character and faction. I you choose to be a member of the Sith, you can perhaps choose a class and spawn on a ship in Space. I chose to be a Republican, a trooper to be more accurate and i spawned in a world where there are only troopers. The campaign is pretty long, might take you 20-30 hours to complete if you are free2play, but technically it doesn't stop there. After that you have PVP arena fights to participate in, all sorts of monsters to kill, you might even not explore the world completely after you end the campaign... Basically it's like WoW with guns, lightsabers and starships. Starships can be obtained somewhere after you reach level 16. Till then you will spend most of your time looting enemy bodies in search for credits, armor and other items that can be sold to a street vendor. Mission structures are sometimes a pain in the ass. You go to a dungeon, you kill some scavengers and you get to your checkpoint... After you finish what you had to, you now have to go all the way back to the mission source (the person that gave you that mission to complete) but you have to fight the goons again, not to mention if there get to be more than 5 of them each time. Skills and powers are learnt by talking to a trainer. Learning each skill costs credits, so do the upgrades. If you get to a part that you cannot go through, you should get a companion to come with you, they have way more firepower than you, the same health amount as you and whenever you start to heal, they heal along with you. If you die, you get two choices, the first is to get revived and get back into battle, while the second one is to get revived and be sent to the nearest medical camp. Getting revived after dying doesn't lose you any items, which is awesome, considering that it's a F2P game we're talking about.
GRAPHICS
SWToR looks great for a huge MMO game. The graphics can look like the ones from SW: The clone wars sometimes, or at least remind of it. A big flaw is that the game is poorly optimized. I have a two times stronger GPU than the one the official system reqs website for the game, a two times stronger CPU, two times more RAM, but the game still lags and stutters, even on lower settings than medium. Also, remember that you need a really fast internet connection (500kb/s) is recommended.
THE VERDICT
SWToR is one of the best MMO's i've ever played. It absolutely beats WoW. I give this game a 8.2 for it being really fun, but also for being poorly optimized and sometimes a bit too nerve wrecking. For more reviews, check out my blog. Laters.

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