Worst MMO Ever? - Star Wars: The Old Republic

i'm about to do the two most dangerous things you can do on the internet one i'm going to say bad things about star wars and then two i'm going to say good things about star wars so everyone's equally upset here we go star wars the epic space opera about how one family seemingly controlled the entire galaxy how you can defeat the big bad guy and then have them somehow return and how just smashing a ship into another ship at light speed was apparently always an option but nobody thought to do it star wars is without a doubt a cultural institution but it's not too controversial to say it's been going downhill for some years the tv shows haven't been great the great sounding games got cancelled and the games we did get didn't really fill us with feelings of pride and accomplishment but what if we go back before baby yoda before darth jar jar before midichlorians three and a half thousand years before the events of the films to the old republic in this video i'm going to smuggle my way out of the rebellion and then go undercover as an agent of the empire ladies and gentlemen welcome i'm josh drive hayes and this is worst mmo ever a show where i play every mmo i can find in an attempt to find the worst drop a like on the video or sub to the channel for more mmo stuff ring the bell for all the future notifications as usual a massive thank you to all the supporters on patreon and twitch who keep the channel alive more information on how you can support at the end for now let's begin there are certain narrative setups which just lend themselves to adventure pirates sailing the seas archaeologists exploring tombs spaceships seeking out new worlds and new civilizations the vast openness of the possible star wars is a perfect foundation for an mmorpg endless planets races and stories the only pitfall they needed to avoid was artificially shrinking the size of their universe by making everything revolve around a small single powerful family and thankfully they were smart enough to set this game thousands of years before the film so let's look at the strongest element of the old republic first it's a bioware game the absolute titans behind baldur's gate neverwinter knights mass effect dragon age and star wars knights of the old republic these guys know a thing or two about narrative design story driven choice filled companion heavy rpg games but how well does that translate to the mmo space let's find out first off pick a side galactic or sith i'm going to choose both but i'll start nice and simple with galactic now to choose a class or origin each side has four main classes the republic get troopers jedi consulars smugglers and jedi knights and the sith get bounty hunters inquisitors imperial agents and sith warriors and each of these classes has further specializations within it the trooper can specialize into the tanki vanguard or the damage healer commander the sith inquisitor can go for lightning damage healing combo sorcerer or tanky assassin so there's lots of choice within playstyles and class choice matters a lot because the old republic is at its core a story driven game and each class gets a totally different main storyline indeed completing all eight main storylines is needed to unlock legendary status and earn a special in-game portrait so this is an mmo that is encouraging you to play every class it might actually help to not think of the old republic as a traditional mmo with a traditional open world it's very much a story game with multiplayer elements it's an online rpg with other people and as in most bioware rpgs you'll be making dialogue decisions that affect the progress of that story or that specific event we'll see how these matter later for me star wars means cheesy pulp adventure so on the republic side i'm going with the smuggler and giving myself a cracking mustache now on to the text crawl i must say they have nailed the look and sound of star wars the music throughout is absolutely stellar the intro movie plays we land on a planet people start talking and it's fully voiced in fact the voice cast for the old republic is pretty damn respectable a quick glance on imdb shows that you've got nolan north as the jedi consular nolan north as overseer marcan nolan north as commander hun nolan north as lord madal wrist nolan north as sergeant bligh's nolan north as the shuttle navigation computer and nolan north as zentil and then you've got solid snake voicing the jedi knight my main issue with cut scenes is subtitles aren't on by default and as someone who plays on relatively low volume i'd appreciate if they were in most conversations you'll have choices usually three options and while you'll always push the main story forward no matter what you choose your choices can raise or lower your approval rating with the good side the bad side or with your active companion they can approve or disapprove of what you do honestly i just choose whatever seemed funny being a bioware game however the choices don't always relate to the line you'll say you could click the i somewhat disagree option to discover this actually means you'll reply with i'm going to kill your entire family and then make you watch so we're a smuggler there's some valuable stuff in our ship and some guy called skarvik needs us to do something unfortunately we can't leave the planet due to the local separatists taking over some anti-air guns so we need to clear them out before it's safe to take off i like this it's a decent personal motivation to go into a quest and now the game and the issues begin wasd movement space to jump tab target combat skills bound to one to nine left click spins the camera independent of character facing right click locks it to the camera pretty standard stuff so far but text dump tutorials so many text dump tutorials everything every system not explained in game not experienced through a designed encounter not introduced slowly and played through before being enhanced by the next system every single system in the old republic and there are so many systems is explained entirely through giant text dump tutorials i think it's fair to say that star wars the old republic is an absolutely excellent game with a terrible on-boarding process playing it as a new player is like learning to drive a spaceship by being given the spaceship and then handed the owner's manual but you've never driven a spaceship before it truly feels like they've made an excellent mmorpg for people who already know exactly how an mmorpg works and then at the last minute remembered maybe some of our players will be brand new to mmos should we design an intro section or an in-game tutorial which introduces and then tests their understanding of the core gameplay or class systems and the answer was no just give them a massive manual and let them memorize it the tutorials aren't integrated into the flow of gameplay and this is one of the weakest aspects of the opening section you will discover that your character can do 10 20 or 30 things but they'll all be told to you you won't actually need to do 10 20 or 30 things i spoke to a couple of players and one of the most commonly repeated stances was star wars the old republic is probably one of the only mmos you can play without understanding half the systems because the game makes no effort to put you in any position where you actually need to use them as far as navigation goes you have a local area map which can be expanded into a general zone map which is very nicely laid out but we will find issues with this later and the in-game mail system throws me some free gifts which while nice means my inventory is already a third full and i've done nothing the main storyline is a purple triangle symbol side quests are yellow triangle symbols and even shorter side quests do still have fully voiced cutscenes standby tick hq this is forward recon do you copy hq blast thought i had him you look like you know your way around a blaster want to be a hero what's a hero make these days more than me citizen that sounds fair then listen up you'll notice there's a relatively inconspicuous question mark symbol to the bottom center of the screen that is your tutorial warning whenever you are exposed to a new system you are expected to click that tutorial and read about the system before you rush into it or you can just run in and hope for the best now combat isn't terrible target an enemy cycle through your abilities your basic ability is essentially the auto attack but you still need to press it and if you have energy you can use your skills using skills takes some power which refills slowly while in combat and quickly after combat as a smuggler some of my skills need me to crouch down behind cover and then charge up some blaster shots and i do appreciate the green ghosts showing me where cover is you can use medi-packs to recover health while in combat although they aren't great and while out of combat you have a recovery skill which will play a short class specific animation and fully heal you the smuggler flips a coin into the air and then shoots it out of the air think of combat as small self-contained encounters and after you've won you can recover to full before the next encounter the difficulty is in the encounter itself not in constant slog battles and long-term health management pretty much exactly like the earlier dragon age games run around kill some guards destroy some computers and then somebody else does the same thing and oh right okay the interactable objects needed for quests are in a shared over world not instanced for each player meaning if several hundred people were doing this quest at the same time there would be quite the queue of people waiting for objects to respawn push on and enter a smuggler phase so let's talk about story locked areas both the central hub areas and the general area on any given planet are multiplayer you'll see other people walking around but as you progress your main story you'll enter story phases shown by these big green planes that you walk through buildings rooms or even whole sections which need to be presented in a specific way at a specific moment to make sense to your class's story when you enter a story phase only one of each individual class can be in the same phase so if you're a smuggler and you party up with your friend who's a jedi you can both enter and progress but two smugglers can't or more accurately they can but only the main one gets to progress the story in that specific instance and you need to repeat it with your friend as the main player to progress for them basically if you want to adventure through the story in real time with a friend choose different classes the story phase basically means you can't just take a massive party with you and stomp through the combat encounters it keeps it relatively balanced and keeps the focus on the role play of your character not just mechanically beating the encounter the best part about the story phase is i'm only now realizing my character looks like an extra from a porn parody of top gun we have a shootout in a hangar the music continues to be absolutely god damn amazing and then i discover this area loot which makes things a lot quicker kill many enemies loot one it shows you everything and now a problem while clearing out the gun turrets our ship has been stolen and we're told to speak to vidu in ord mantel to go and get it back oh cool there's also first person mode but don't don't use this this is bad now we get told about taxis shown on the map by two arrow icons taxis link together all major settlements and if you are required to take a taxi to either a quest or main story destination it will be highlighted in green or purple you can't control the taxi but you do get to admire the environments which are for the most part gorgeous more problems not only has scavek the guy we trusted nicked our ship turns out there were some valuable blasters on the ship blasters belonging to a guy called the butcher so unless we get them back we're in big trouble the story is delivered through a massive narrative dump while everyone stands around and acts glib but ultimately it boils down to go and shoot some separatists here's an annoying issue with the map on the left hand side you'll see a legend of icons and you can click them to show them but in a really odd touch you don't toggle each one on and off individually you can only have one selected so i can't see both taxis and shops i can see one or the other toggling one on toggles the others off why if i want to tick every box and make my map look like some open world ubisoft monstrosity i should be able to fight through a warehouse with some more shooting honestly it does feel very very much like playing dragon age the tight movement the good positionings enemies having the same charge up attacks and animations as you small damage numbers meaning it's not overwhelming skills actually feel important moment-to-moment gameplay is solid there is a quality foundation here all i've found to complain about so far is the unfriendly flaky onboarding process the excessive tutorial tech stumps and some very minor map mechanics there's nothing wrong with the gameplay the problem exists with the way the player is introduced to the gameplay get some better items and see a handy dandy green arrow on the inventory screen showing if an item is just straight up better than what you're currently wearing there's lots of stats but none have been mentioned so far and i seem to be doing fine so i'm just going to ignore them and hope i keep doing okay ah yes the flirt chat option literally always the correct option slightly jarring to end the convo saying farewell and then she just stands there i'm thinking making this an mmo actually took development time away from making the best star wars story game and you end up with weak aspects of story and weak aspects of mmo blending into each other the journey to recover our ship continues we break into a security facility following the trail of breadcrumbs to find scavek and hang on can other players appear in story cutscenes who is this random guy combat is starting to get a little bit tougher enemies are actually throwing grenades but it is still mostly just a time sink as i walk from a to b disable some security stations and then enjoy the violent camera judder as i walk down some stairs it's always very impressive when each step is modelled in a game but having the camera drop or jerk from step to step isn't the best visual journey for the player also i seem to be able to hear an extra blaster shot every time combat is finished listen shooting is done stuff is dead and then there's always one extra blaster shot sound effect on watching this back during editing i realize it's not just a sound effect it's a muzzle flash as well watch the blaster on my hip [Music] and now a mini boss with a cut scene and everything properly hyping it up surely a complex fight but then um no not really master my sensors indicate this individual's armaments were recently used in combat initiating defense mode you killed those men didn't you forsen do your thing combat protocols activated ugh honestly i expected more from a firefight with a cutscene introduction escape the compound and discover my aoe blast to attack is actually really really good okay this is my go-to plan for basically everything from now on hide behind my little wall and just blast everything get back to the smuggler base find a girl being bullied so do what any upstanding citizen would do and flirt with her then kill everyone else and then go and find her to accept her thanks and she's gone the mini-map shows shiz here has she despawned okay this is something we need to address the old republic is a good foundation with a lot of smaller bugs npcs sometimes don't spawn or despawn sometimes you'll fall through the floor or get stuck graphical issues like sometimes you don't draw your blasters and they shoot at the floor as they remain on your hips walking animations where after you leave the taxi your arms stay down by your side they're not game breaking but they are frequent apart from this non-spawning quest npc which actually is game breaking and i do need to restart the game to get her to come back this young attractive lady gladly flirts back with me and this means she is definitely going to stab me in the back later probably soon don't be shocked when her traitor twist is revealed corso our trusty sidekick gives us a cool blaster and our hunt for sarak continues honestly i just want my ship back i want to be a smuggler why are you making me play amateur detective this is not what i signed up for everyone tells me the smuggler storyline is not anywhere near as good as the imperial agent so don't worry i will get around to the imperial agent later and believe me when i say it is not only one of the best mmo storylines i've ever played it's one of the best rpg story lines in any star wars game now a new system item modification right click on an item like this blaster to see what modifications you can add new barrels new power crystals again this is another deep system not explained through gameplay but just through text dumps and everyone tells me that modification used to be a system that required you to go to a specific console and access it from there but now you can just do it from anywhere so it's kind of taken away the mystique of it and replaced it with just confusing overwhelming whenever you want so let's just nail down my main issue with the old republic there is no question that this is a good game with a lot of deep complex systems and a great variety of player choice my issue is only how those systems are introduced to the player or more correctly how they are not really introduced to the player the opening section of a game should introduce a mechanic such as movement shooting interacting with an npc or a shop or an object and then give the player a chance to use that or even require them to use that to progress thus integrating that mechanic into early game progression if you have jumping make me jump up something if you have cover during combat make me use it to avoid a powerful attack early on if you have a modification system have an enemy be immune to damage until i have put a certain mod into my gun that i have to find by jumping up something and then taking cover see how you combine these things together don't just explain systems to me by having massive blocks of text use in-game set pieces to teach me what to do the old republic has so much within it that a new player will either miss because they don't need to do it or feel overwhelmed by because when they do try to learn it the only effective way to really learn it is read a massive block of text i mean look the tutorial window now pops up explaining how to fly my starship and how all the starship stuff works i'm not on my ship yet i'm not in space i haven't even got my ship this isn't the right place for the tutorials because i'm not going to remember this later and even if i was on my ship this is the most boring way to do this just giving people books and saying here read learn what to do that doesn't work often you're a video game your strength is in having sections where you teach me to fly by having me fly i'm gonna be harsh because you're a bioware star wars game and if there's one company with the early game design knowledge and one franchise with the money to pull this off it should be a bioware star wars game meet some mad scientist on the beach grab some explosive chemicals and then lament at my inventory being filled with so much junk already and so far i'm feeling a sense of so much potential which won't be seen because the journey to that potential is bad i mean look the customization of the ui elements is incredible and extensive you can lock elements to a grid but you can also change the grid itself flip elements around horizontal vertical change opacity you can make the game look however you want this is an exceptional final product with a terrible first impression scarvex still has our ship which means more endless running from a to b i've given up even fighting enemies at this point because they can't kill me and every quest is a fetch quest and now another odd issue when you cursor over a status currently affecting your character the tooltip relating to the status pops up in the corner not next to the icon you're hovering over why this is actually quite jarring to have the cursor here therefore i'm looking at this and then the text there so i have to look at that just have the tooltip of a thing appear next to the thing when i cursor over it in combat corso is now spraying me with some magical links africa and healing me making combat even more trivial i don't feel in any danger in quite a cool twist you can actually right click on your companion's portrait and set them to either damage dealer tank or healer so you can have pretty much any companion filling any slot in your party in general though i'm loving this the lack of loading is great the area is vast and open vertical negative space is used nicely to give a ground and open feel although it is a shame the vertical design space does seem to be mostly ramps and stairs so far i've not had any firefights going up a tower or multiple sight lines going up or diagonal to an enemy like a shootout up some scaffolding here's a great touch you can sell the trash items in your inventory to your companion and then they'll just take off for 60 seconds to get rid of them so you've always got a way to get rid of junk and now another boss fight which is just really disappointing watch you tell me if you think this is a good fight you are guilty of crimes against the oppressed people of ord mantel the sentence is death memorize our faces well you criminal filth for we are your righteous executioners do you have any last words degenerate swine i love killing morons like you let justice be served [Music] [Music] i surrender i surrender please i don't want to die he left in your ship i don't know where he went but i can guess who does scovic has a girl at fort garnick named cyrena oh no cyrene's the girl who flirted with me is actually a spy for scarvac who could have seen that coming so we kill some more people and get back to finding our ship here's why the smuggler opening sucks you don't have any emotional connection as a player to your ship you're just told you need to get it and then you have a rare blaster on it and then you're told who can help none of the events of this opening have happened because of my choices this is entirely reactive i'm not smuggling anything i'm going from place to place because other people have told me to go there it's not even a hidden tutorial it's basically walk around for six hours from npc to npc occasionally killing things and eventually you might be able to play the class you signed up to play confront sirens and ask why she's helping scarves get fed up for being so nice so i shoot her in the head which corso disagrees with but i've given up caring what corso thinks i do appreciate how the game does give you the ability to kill npcs in cutscenes because you just want to do that in fact you can kill npcs as an imperial agent and your companion actively encourages you to do it we then get even more text systems dumped onto us will these text dumps be immediately useful no of course they won't but it has been a while since the game threw some text at us and it wanted to check we still knew how to read i do however get told about flash points and here begins the process of completely messing up the narrative flow of my own playthrough up until now it's been a story game plot point to plot point and while these plot points may be tedious in some aspects they've made sense and had a defined structure even the side quests have been related to the place i'm in but now that's about to change flashpoints are the game's early dungeons they are short self-contained adventures for teams of players and if you don't have players with you they will fill those spaces with ai companions the tutorial has told me i can queue up for flashpoints so i do that and the queue pops almost instantly and i get whisked away to some random ship to talk to someone random and then the empire attack and now we're fighting through a ship and yet the experience is cool but the narrative structure the opening existed within is now just completely gone the whole find my own ship storyline was so i could get off the planet and if you've just teleported me directly onto another ship it kind of undermines the whole you're stuck on the planet plot point so i fight through the ship and i enjoy this control panel explosion followed by a very delayed ragdoll physic flinging of this npc and then i meet this npc who looks like the human form of shrek i also like how when running down the imperial boarding ships crash into the side of our ship and soldiers pour out and then how you're given a choice to save people but you're told doing so will make the mission harder moral choices affecting gameplay difficulty is a decent level of role playing but then i have to pop off for dinner in real life so i quit the game and when i load it back up i spawn in at garrick space station a place i've never been to before now it put me here because the flashpoint is a temporary dungeon and garrick station is a permanent place but my main story mission is leave ord mantel and get to garrick's space station but i'm here because leaving the flash point put me here so now i need to find a way to get back toward mantel the planet i was on so i can get a ship to garrick space station where i currently am so i can continue the quest to find my ship which i need because without it i can't explore the galaxy despite the fact i can apparently just teleport onto other ships at will are you seeing how a brand new player especially a player new to the mmo genre as a whole might find this a tad confusing and all of this happened because the tutorial pop-ups decided to explain what flashpoints were at a random time when i hadn't discovered them naturally through the gameplay this is a perfect example of why you should make a player play through a system when it fits into the narrative structure of your game and not just throw it at them via text i spend ages running around the republic fleet central hub bodhi asks me if i'm the real josh and i have a difficult time replying because chat for free players is heavily limited you can talk in the opening planet but in this area the main central hub you cannot use general or yell or say or even private message most players you can talk in groups during content and that's about it so we communicate via emotes and then say our goodbyes eventually i managed to find the departures lounge and make my way back where i get attacked by two bounty hunters but just to test i stand in the crossfire proving that early game combat encounters are meaningless because you literally cannot die i'm not saying early game combat should be brutally hard but it should require a little more tactical thought than this take a ship to the main republic fleet and another tutorial pops up you can get a speeder level 10 if you're a paying member and level 20 as a free player paying players also have the emergency fleet recall ability which lets you return to your team's central hub at any point free players can buy single-use passes to do this from the shop we'll look at the shop and monthly membership later on the hunt continues hop into a taxi and corso just straight up disappears maybe he's a ghost maybe animating a companion getting into a taxi was just too much maybe the real corso was the friends we made along the way have a quick dance in the cantina and then see oh corso has a quest symbol above his head you can chat to your companions to advance a plot line with them that's a very bioware touch meet some criminal dude called dharmas who's playing a card game with the cards from battlestar galactica and then we stand around and talk to each other for five minutes the world is amazing and yet the gameplay is mostly running my god so so much running break into more prisons and meet this super computer whiz lady she has the ability to change data records and asks what we want to make scarvec look like so i say make him look like a sith spy on all worlds he's not a sit spy he just has our [ __ ] but i'm vindictive and want to ruin the rest of his life i then get told that at level 10 i unlock my family legacy and at 50 things really get going let's just focus on the low levels for now game i think this highlights how the mmo design has hurt your story design you're telling the player who's enjoying a slower paced involved story hey when you finally reach 50 the game begins and they're gonna think oh great hours of dull slog and simple combat left to go we get sent to find some black sun hollow recordings because someone needs them for some reason sort of related to skavak and my inventory is full but i can buy more inventory spaces with cartel coins so let's look at the shop the old republic is free to download and play right now but the free part should really be considered a demo because there's a lot you can't do as a free player you can't talk in most chats you can't even equip the epic items that you can find in the low level flash points you can't return to your central hub at will and while all those things are included with the monthly subscription there's also a cash shop you can buy cartel coins and then spend them because otherwise how can they sell you awkwardly sized packs of coins and make sure you're always slightly over or slightly under what you need now the shop isn't pay to win you can't buy anything that makes you incredibly powerful you can buy everything individually or you can take a risk on the loot boxes of those things meaning you could buy individual bits of armor or mounts or weapons or companions or pets or you could buy the loot boxes of those things potentially getting something very rare for a good price but most likely getting something very cheap for a higher price essentially you're paying for the mystery oh and that line about not being able to equip rare loot even if you get it as a drop i wasn't joking i did some flash points got some level 17 armor as a boss drop and i can't equip it until i either buy membership for a month or spend six quid on the one-time purchase of artifact equipment wearing skill the sub itself is 15 a month with better value for buying longer time periods it includes some cartel coins and access to the game's eight expansions the latest of which released in 2022 so it's definitely not a dead game in fact steam charts shows a daily average of 9 000 players and that's just steam not including the game's own launcher so to answer the inevitable is it worth playing the old republic in whatever year you're watching this is question yes it is it's a great rpg it's just not the best mmo here's a lovely touch and in fact a perfect example of how to do a hidden tutorial you get sent an in-game mail from an npc it's relating to the npc dying and triggering a dead man's switch and sending us some items but look what you've done you've introduced the player to the mail system and you've linked it to the plot and you've shown it can send items it doesn't feel forced it feels completely naturally integrated and it's taught the player how a system works but then from good design to bad design see the galaxy map flashing at the top of the screen i go to click it to stop it flashing because i assume the flashing means new information please click here but i can't click it because i don't have a ship so i literally cannot stop this from flashing i just want my ship every story element is beyond my control so i'm just speed running this now and finally thankfully i die good combat now needs attention let's do this find some hollow recordings scavek has sent some assassins to kill a policeman so we go and find him to keep the trail to scavic hot and when we do find him we get deputized and ordered to help him okay i'm a smuggler and the opening section of the smuggler's story is be a detective congrats you're now a policeman this is the opposite of what i wanted none of my choices really matter and now we get told that scavek has stolen a ruby and we need to hunt him down and okay hang on i've just realized something scavec is having the adventure i should be having he's stolen someone's ship stolen a ruby foiled an assassination attempt and is now considered a wanted sith on the run from a psychotic unstoppable ex-captain the whole opening has cast us as the wrong person i literally want to play scavek right now so we run back to the club and get attacked by three bounty hunters there's even a cutscene this fight plays out the same as all the rest do just stand still and shoot them and then we meet up with the crime boss dude again now this cutscene really annoys me because he asks hey want to play the card game sabacc so i say yeah cause i love rpgs with card games in them and then the screen goes black and then we're told while we wait for skobik to make his next move perhaps we could play a little sabach i saw that one coming for so don't be such a spoiled sport what do you say captain first games on me what's the harm in a friendly game of cards don't say i didn't warn you captain get us a round of drinks weren't you corso there's a good man let's deal some cards you win again that was very impressive impressive the captain just cleaned your chrono darmus hmm i'd say you've played this game before i don't even get to play the game i'm just told i'm great at it come on bioware that is weak news comes in that starbuck is cited in the justicar sector so we head off here's a nice touch a sign of decent player friendly polish pressing m brings up the map while standing still the map is opaque when moving it goes transparent so you can see through it and see where you're going that's a small touch but it shows the design team not only understood the function of the map but also the way players were most likely to use it our underworld informant is called jic her brother has been kidnapped and we need to go and get him back before she'll help us find scarves so to do that we need to destroy some cameras and then another twist the justice cars are working with the empire and i don't care i literally just want my ship back i have no emotional connection to any of these people or their allegiances right now all i want to be is scarvec we get told that skarvik was seen in the works so we head over i was expecting a discount bookstore and instead got some sewers and finally after six hours we catch up to skavak and what does he do he goddamn runs away and we don't even try to shoot him we are left with some imperial guys the policeman we helped earlier shows up then there's a shootout and the policeman dies but tells us to check hangar bay 87. so we go there fight some guy called fabazan he begs for his life and promises to upgrade our ship if we spare him so i spare him and finally god damn finally i get my ship and with the ship back we get access to the galaxy map and told about ship to ship combat the galaxy map lists all possible destinations along with fuel costs required to reach them and a recommended level range for that planet so we can finally start being a smuggler slight annoyance the recommended level range doesn't show up when you cursor over the planet it only shows up when you click onto the planet specifically so we take a walk into the cargo bay of our own ship and it seems the ship now comes with some new crew this girl was previously working with skarvik but decides she's with us now the tutorial box asked if i want to try some ship to ship pvp combat so i think yeah how hard can it be an iq up and i should have known by now i should have realized it's the same design principle as the rest of the game excellent system terrible introduction no on boarding no training no slow creep of complexity or rising difficulty just throw the player in to a pvp dogfight mini game teams of players battle for control of three points in space three space stations and you fly around taking the other team out and trading control of the points until one team reaches a thousand points and i think this minigame specifically really encapsulates the design philosophy of the old republic it's an excellent 3d dogfight minigame with lots of systems aiming dodging boosting barrel rolls this is actually where the fun begins but it's also explained the player entirely through three pages of text i win the pvp battle because the rest of my team were good enough to cover for me and vow to never to play it again so i take my main ship back to the republic and queue up for some more team-based flashpoints i want to see how group dungeons feel with other players and honestly group dungeons feel amazing everyone gets level scale to the same high level so every member of a party feels useful and the numbers are still relatively low so it's not a mess of damage labels on the screen the mechanics are pretty well explained and i was lucky enough to get some really kind and patient players in my group who talked me through all the encounters and i had a great time either the community is actually quite inviting or i got very lucky and happened to find a lot of people who were willing to be patient with me i took out some mobs died to a turret waited to be respawned and got taught to just suicide after killing the final boss to make the journey back to the start a bit faster and look flashpoints now actually make sense they are dungeons but you access them from the main hangar deck which i've just arrived at within the narrative and each ship leads to a different flash point because you are basically a volunteer strike team being dropped off to do stuff this makes so much sense holding back the telly to flashpoint ability until the player has journeyed to it once on their account would prevent so much confusion so now i just queue up for a load more flash points and i can only access the first one because i'm still a low level but this is a fun experience it's just a shame it took me six hours of running and one major narrative break of queuing to get here star wars the old republic is a great rpg that is poorly ported into an mmo it is terrible at helping you see how great it actually is but there's still one thing i need to do the old republic is a story driven game and while i think the smuggler story is rather dull because you're not even the main character or the one doing the smuggling everyone has told me the imperial agent storyline is substantially better so i started a new character and played through the imperial agent main quest reading all the dialogue watching all the cutscenes and properly immersing myself here's a breakdown of my eight hours as an imperial agent first and foremost the voice is perfect if your transmission established this is keeper we may speak freely agent prepare to receive your orders i take it you're my handler correct i'm speaking to you from service headquarters on drum and cars i'll be directing you personally on this mission i like to think you'll be travel blade you'll be bloodthirsty treacherous because i could enjoy keeping an eye on a bloodthirsty treacherous pirate do what you want just stay out of my way what should i think about now don't worry you don't have to think anymore i don't have to think thank you all you have built here all you hope to control it falls apart as easily as a human life an hour ago the minister of intelligence dropped to his knees and wept before me he would do so too if not for fear of being humiliated your dissatisfaction is clear my lord it will be remedied now i'm asking you humbly to leave these people are suffering in your presence i will leave my domain at the moment of my choosing keeper you agent you were the one sent to hutter is that correct that's correct my lord i am darth jadas you served me well in your dealings with nemro you will serve me well again i serve imperial intelligence not the sith all the empire serves the sith even your handler has learned this we're basically an imperial james bond with a license to kill we're sent to infiltrate the nemro hut crime family because the empire want to leverage their planetary exports we take on the persona of the legendary pirate the red blade because apparently they're on the other side of the galaxy and after breaking in you need to disable three hidden listening devices but they're hidden so you just break stuff until you find them which makes complete narrative sense then we go and kill some guards at a mine and steal some uniforms then there's a stealth section and then we befriend a doorman who asks us what working for the empire is like because his two sons have started trading careers with the empire so we butter him up and tell him it's great and you actually get quite connected to this guy and then we get a message from hq telling us the doorman's sons angered a sith lord one of them is dead and the other is paralyzed so we then use this knowledge to threaten the doorman into telling us more stuff about the gangs by saying hey be nice or your paralyzed son gets killed as well which is brutal and then i get stuck in the floor like in the world i open the map at the exact time i go up a step and my character somehow glitches into the step and then my character stops moving and then the screen goes black and the ui still works and i can see on the map that i'm spinning around so i log out but this phenomenon persists throughout log out it even persists throughout closing the game and restarting it so many bugs i have to queue up for a flash point and then return to this point from the main area just to carry on with it eventually the real red blade shows up because the intelligence was bad so we kill him and then get called to see darth jaidus we murder a slave rebellion leader then get called to the sith temple and the sith city is so much cooler than the galactic federation seriously play the sith just for the environments in a fantastic bit of role playing i tell darth jaden i work for the imperial intelligence not for you and he straight up kills me to prove a point more missions and oh man you can be such a dick if you play as the bad guys your military right you've got that in charge kind of lack and the weapons i'm not military i'm from imperial intelligence i see you're going to make me mysteriously disappear be careful you need to take this seriously shut up i said i'm done with you so tell me how can i serve the empire there are anti-government radicals operating on drum and cars tell me about them i don't know what you're talking about my dad's the one who always complained about the government anyway if you want to talk to covor not sure what i can do he hasn't seen a lot of visitors i tried to ask nicely but i'm running out of patience what did you what i was wondering when you were gonna get around to that that's enough please tell me what i want to know no please look dad's workshop is in lord graton's estate i've got codes to get in you can get a key card from the guards that's everything i know just stop was that so difficult i take on a solo flash point get instructed to commandeer an imperial vessel to intercept another vessel the captain of this vessel disagrees so i get to should we say relieve him of command stay calm manson everyone stay calm no threats found the bridge is now secure tell me who's in charge i'm captain reverend allzek i'm pretty sure i know what this is about for the record i take complete responsibility for my actions i understand captain if nothing else that should make it easier on the crew i'm glad it's worth something you're here because of the moth aren't you you must want a bental star's passenger pretty badly or maybe he just hates me the black talon would be destroyed chasing a battleship i've fought in the war before and i'll fight again but i don't do suicide missions suicide was deciding you could ignore your superiors [Music] the captain's dead the captain's dead shut up you have our attention sir what would you have us do let this be a lesson your only hope for survival is complete and utter loyalty yes sir yes sir in accordance with article 27a of the imperial code of military conduct command of this vessel has been lawfully transferred new orders are being downloaded to your consoles priority one intercept the brent all-star bakara do as the droid says and prepare to jump to light speed [Music] emerging from hyperspace now one throne to class warship on the scanners powering up [Music] enemy is firing clever lasers missiles in what looks like transport pods i'm not sure the pods are a distraction return fire aim for their power generators so long as they're damaged we're not we have the advantage lieutenant captain silas sir engineering is reporting blaster fire they just cut out remind me to report your incompetence when we get to drama cass dammit there must be some sort of boarding action if they're in engineering they could destroy this ship we do respect i recommend you lend a hand down there it's trivial enough i'll handle it i'll notify security and don't worry we won't let those republic scum get away fight through a ship find an imperial defector and then this awesome moment where a transport ship flies into the hangar i'm in almost killing me so i report all this to high command and okay i have to admit i've left out a lot of that story because it's really good and i want you to play it because the imperial agent's storyline isn't just one of the better mmo story lines it's one of the better rpg story lines in general gaming the old republic is worth downloading and playing for this story alone ultimately the old republic is an rpg it's a single player rpg with a chat function and some multiplayer bits the mmo part has had years of tweaks patches and updates and now it's deep and it's complex with no route to really understanding the depth or the complexity built into the game beyond reading and just asking around honestly the players seem to care more about onboarding new players than the developers do and now i need a score i need something which says it's a great product worn down by years of updates it's something the community care about more than the creators and while there's a great story buried in there somewhere it's bogged down with so much filler and so many unexplained bits you'll sometimes struggle to enjoy it i need a score which says it's great because the foundation is great but it's been neglected over the years and a new fan won't really know what's going on because the creators don't seem to have put any effort into making sure new fans are up to speed and it sometimes feels like they're relying on nostalgia more than good modern design and i think i've got that score so to end the review i will award the old republic star wars out of 10. thank you very much for watching another massive thank you to all the supporters on patreon and twitch who keep the channel alive you can support from only one pound a month check the video description for links to the patreon twitch twitter and discord and as always may the force be with you

Channel: Josh Strife Hayes

Views: 1,682,283

Keywords: mmo podcast, mmo discussion, mmo design, mmorpg youtuber, mmo news

Id: h97_3WLW-pw

Length: 45min 24sec (2724 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 02 2022