SW:ToR: Classes

When Bioware first started talking about the upcoming Starwars MMO, I made very happy in my pants, multiple times over. I love the crap out of RPG’s, especially once with stupid amounts of dialogue, deep characters and good vs evil choices. So I’ve always been a massive Bioware fangirl. But is this what we want from our MMO’s?

 Bioware have shown a videos as PAX this year of their Bounty Hunter (omgsquee), Smuggler and Sith Warrior classes. Now I’ve seen them I’m less blown away than I expected to be.

The first is the Bounty Hunter video, which shows an example of the “fully voiced” conversation dialogue. If you’ve ever played Mass Effect or Knights of the Old Republic.. well.. it’s that. Doesn’t even look like they’ve changed the dialogue wheel much. Admittedly, I had a happygasm on seeing this, but a lot of people won’t. Guild Wars did the story cutscene well, in that they were skippable and short. SW:TOR conversations seem to be long and unskippable. Does this mean we’ll spend 10 minutes getting quests from 10 different people in every new area

Next up was the Smuggler video, which is essentially the class for those of you who loved Han Solo. In this one it shows the cover system, which is essentially Gears of War, only with.. well.. Han. Useable skills change in cover too, I imagine this is very like the different warrior stances in WoW. I do like the way they’ve done the shooting, it’s quick and sounds authentic. Really not sold on the firing or running animations though. Knowing that this game will probably go for about a billion hours, I’m not sure I could take it for that long.

Also shown was the Sith Warrior class, which showed off some of the lightsaber melee combat. The melee did look quite hot, the attack animations were smooth and you got a definite sense of “man that guy’s a tank”. However I’ll only be sold on the Sith once I see the quality of the Force Lightning, and the robe options for caster classes. So help me God, if I can’t get around looking like The Emperor with tits, I’m out.