Last week, BioWare extended an invitation to us for another round of
Star Wars: The Old Republic hands-on game play at the beautiful Presidio campus in San Francisco. Eager to take another look, we left GDC and made our way to the place, where we were treated to playing Level 6 Troopers on Ord Mantell, and also spoke in depth with Jake Neri of LucasArts and Daniel Erickson of BioWare.
Questing in a Large Open World
The first thing we did was pick up a mission from a NPC in the open world. There wasn't a typical pop-up quest box with "Accept" and "Decline" - as soon as we clicked on them, the voice-over dialog started in the fashion of a cinematic cut-scene. Once the conversation moved to our character, the familiar decision wheel was there with very distinct Light, Gray, and Dark options. You could hit the space bar and skip through the dialog until you hit the decision wheel.
We could see other players running around in the zone after picking up the quest, causing us to wonder what exactly happened to our Trooper's body while in the cinematic. However we were unable to answer that question during our time with the demo. It is possible we started in a phased area, but there wasn't any instance portals or something else to indicate that we were in a phased area. It was completely seamless.
Now that we had our quest, we hit the map icon on the mini-map to get an idea of how big of an area we were going to explore on Ord Mantell. We were pleasantly surprised to see that there were indications of more than one zone on the map. Additionally, there were multiple drop down menus, that were unfortunately not active, giving us the sense that there are definitely more map iterations.
To give an idea of the vast amounts of explorable area, I saw what I thought was a sea or large body of water in the distance. Wondering if it was possible to swim or hit an invisible wall, I started out walking towards it. It took about a minute of walking at normal pace to get close to the edge only to realize it was a landscape resembling a dry sea bed with very detailed ground design littered with pits, craters, and small pebbles. This stretched out to the horizon, didn't resemble a typical matte placeholder, as I definitely got the feeling I could walk a few more minutes further. After spending another entire minute running back to the Mannett Point base, Jake Neri's statement about Ord Mantell as one of the SMALLEST planets gave the impression that
The Old Republic will be simply massive in scope.
As we started exploring the immediate zone we were in, we noticed there were a lot of NPCs who weren't exactly thrilled we were there. The feeling of being in a conflicted and hostile area was immediate.
Our mission took us to a large structure on Ord Mantell. We did go through a green instance portal at a point inside the multi-level building (there was an elevator we had to use to navigate between floors) but it felt extremely seamless and natural to do so. It was incorporated into the building, and there wasn't a loading screen. It wasn't blatantly obvious or gave us that "whoa, you are going into an instance" type feeling.
One of the biggest takeaways from this was that the whole quest/mission wasn't some "go kill X number of Y things" quest. We weren't actively grinding mobs for this particular one and we were definitely making decisions to affect the mission story. As we were fighting our way to around the building, a Separatist Base, a bonus quest popped up on our on-screen quest tracker. This new mission noted we killed 1 of 8 of a specific mob type, and a new quest showed up in our mission log. This "instant quest" felt very similar to
Warhammer's Tome of Knowledge feature.
The attention to facial and environmental detail seemed improved over recent official footage. The vocal intonation of our characters was extremely believable and polished and they felt customized to the male and female human characters we played at the various demo stations.
The Artificial Intelligence
We saw mobs taking cover behind boxes and walls, and they appeared to be working together. There also seemed to be three levels of aggro radius according to the UI indicator (see the picture below).
Some mobs we thought we killed would pop back up again and start shooting at us. Apparently they were able to feign death in order to surprise us. The path-finding is significantly improved, as the AI walked around objects, and we didn't see any mobs running through walls or boxes. They also intelligently used cover: a mob would run away when engaging a group, and then a bit later, when you least expected it, he would sneak up behind you and attack. Very interesting.
Conclusion
We wanted to sit there for hours playing and exploring, but we were told we had to go in order to make room for the next group. We reluctantly said goodbye to our Troopers and Ord Mantell.
Star Wars: The Old Republic is definitely an amazing game and we eagerly wait its official release.
