Like many of you, the tail end of November saw me, along with thousands of other gamers reaching out with our feelings and travelling to a galaxy far far away.
Over the past 3 weekends Bioware have been allowing increasing numbers of testers onto their new baby, just prior to release in around 3 weeks time, to help iron out the bugs and get a feel for how SW:TOR is going to feel.

The verdict? It feels ok.  Unlike its sandbox predecessor, SWG, SW:TOR is very much a themepark world instead, which for many has already presented a wall between this latest offering in the Star Wars franchise that wasn’t present in Star Wars Galaxies and enabled hundreds of thousands of gamers, before the combat upgrade, to call the place home, it’s almost like the colon in the title is there to symbolise all the little ways the game presents a wall between what people were hoping for, and what Bioware have presented them.

It plays “ok”.  Its an MMO, doing MMO things in an MMO way.  Groundbreaking, SW:TOR certainly isn’t.  The graphics already feel dated, the controls are pretty much bog standard and the UI could be swapped out with one from one of a dozen other MMO’s and would make little difference.

Companions seem to have been lifted straight out of Guild Wars and I’m told the landscapes are like a technological world of warcraft.  Combat mechanics from any MMO out there – were it not for the light sabers you could be running around Moria instead of Mustafar or Celondim instead of Coruscant.

Sadly in developing the game, Bioware seem to have chased after descriptive catchphrases about what people liked, rather than seeking to understand what they actually meant.

Landscapes certainly are epic.  They’re vast. Huge tracts of land which are sharded into blocks of around 200 people that take an age to run through.  In one “hub” area it takes a good 5 minutes to actually run through town.  The number of people around simply don’t make up for that, there’s too much room and even on a busy day in town you’ll rarely see another player.
But they dont make you stop and think “bugger me, that looks incredible”.. they’re more likely to make you stop and think “actually, is there anything else I can do over [here] before I have to run all the way over [there] to turn this thing in?”

Stuff is customisable, provided you can decipher the cryptic explanations about crafting and stick with it long enough to create a template item from template parts in a template way.
Sure there are a wide variety of crafting options.  Dozens. And I’m sure there are even some players who have managed to figure out which professions do what and how to actually use them, but there’s none of the really personal feel to the items that SWG had and Eve online manages to maintain.

Unfortunately the lack of clarity in crafting comes quite late in a game that is essentially as clear as condensced neutronium.  Lots of general MMO things are intuitive (as in, have been copied from every where else) but those points where you actually need to have something explained are usually explained poorly, in lovely spammy walls of text, that tend to pop up just as you are getting your ass handed to you by the forces of Sauro…. I mean Vader.  The ingame knowledge base does nothing to address this problem as most of the information it contains does not relate to the information the “tips” were designed to feed you, and once a “tip” is dismissed from your screen, its gone for good… which is a pain in the arse if you missed a vital instruction because it popped up at the wrong time.

Overall, it’s Kotor online… only not quite, it doesn’t quite have the feel that Kotor did, and you certainly don’t feel like you’re the new Revan or Bastilla, out to make your mark.  At first glance, it has a wide variety of profession choices, but their actually pretty limited.  Regardless of your feelings in the matter, it largely boils down to “Ranged, Melee, Healer” with different special effects.

Do I rate it?  Not really.   Would I recommend it? Probably not, there is better out there if you just want to try something different..   Will I be playing it? Yes, but only because I’m looking forward to rejoining my friends from SWG on there.

What else have I been up to?

Well as you may have guessed from the title pic, I’ve been loving every moment of my time in Skyrim.

I skipped out on Oblivion as it seemed to be a walk away from the world I loved in Morrowind, so it took a bit of work to convince myself to try this latest epic from the lands of Tamriel but I’m very glad I did.

Following the format from Morrowind, my first few minutes were a visual treat and introduction to the world around me, as I found myself in a carriage whilst a random NPC filled me in on the world around me.  In the background, I heard trees, wind, birds, as an oboe or clarinet began a quiet refrain – the music from Morrowind….

Sure, the interface sucks, I think most Skyrim players would agree, and the fact that it can’t handle more than 2GB of ram and requires a player made mod to be able to make the most of your gaming rigs available memory is a bit stupid in this day and age, but it is still a beautiful and engrossing game.

Forget the 30 mins turns into 60 on an MMO, or the way that 5 mins checking your email turns into 20-30 mins of emails, texts and work.  Like a sultry and lustful mistress, Skyrim smiles at you flirtaciously and calls you over, just for 5 to 10 minutes… just to drop some of the junk from your inventory off in your house, or to turn in that quest, and then like a succubus drains hours and hours of your life away in a blink.  All of a sudden, you realise your character has left the house or the company of that quest giver npc, it’s at the top of a mountain, corpses all around whilst outside in the real world, its dark, you desperately need a drink and you realise you’ve been hungry for the last couple of hours.

If you haven’t tried it yet, you really should.  If you’re torn between Skyrim or another game, believe me, you won’t regret choosing the former, and if you are setting out to voyage across the lands of Skyrim for the first time, for gods sake, do not forget that most vital peice of survival gear – an alarm clock, judiciously set to go off after an hour or two, because without it, you are probably going to become lost very very soon.