As if we haven’t known it was coming for months now, since the mid-July slip be EA’s head honcho that Bioware was building a KOTOR era MMORPG. Well, Bioware finally let loose with the news yesterday and started releasing information about their new title, Star Wars: The Old Republic (SWTOR). The game is set about 300 years following the KOTOR series and 3,500 years before the movies, so Bioware pretty well has free-reign on the time line to create a story all their own.
And that’s pretty well what they are going to do, in this time-frame the armies of the Sith Empire have come back from deep space to do battle with the Jedi Guardians of the Republic. We pick up a few decades after the initial war, where there is an uneasy peace between the warring factions (remind you of Horde vs Alliance anyone?). However, this story driven MMO is leaning towards the story moving back to all-out-war between the Sith and the Jedi.
Other than the time-line, very little real information has been released. We know at the start, you’ll be able to align yourself with either the dark side or light side of the force. No news on what species or character classes are going to be playable, but I think it’s going to be pretty safe to assume jedi are going to be one player class – just judging by the screenshots with the inordinately large lightsabers in them.
What isn’t clear is if there are going to be any other classes besides jedi playable. Bioware could go many different directions with this. They could potentially make the masses happy and the balance team pull out their hair in the hand fulls by allowing players to role non-force sensitive classes like bounty hunter and smuggler yet still find a way to keep them competitive in PvP and PvE against Jedi.
On the flip side, they could make all classes some form of Jedi or another. For example, there are the obvious warrior elite Jedi class known as the Jedi Guardians. Then you have a class that is a well balanced class between force abilities and the lightsaber weilding warrior training known as Jedi Sentinels. And finally you have the more intellectual Jedi who all but fore-go’s any type of lightsaber combat training and focuses completely on the force – seers, librarians, politicians, scholars and the like. These are known as Jedi Consulars.
Or they could take some sort of middle ground, giving everyone some sort of force sensitivity to help enhance their chosen profession. Like a non-lighsaber weilding bounty hunter who can compete with a Jedi because he has Jedi-like reflexes or some minute force abilities like a basic push or force jump.
Only time will tell, keep an eye out for more information as it becomes available. But given that the game is still in pre-beta phase, don’t expect the information to come flooding in just yet.
Editor’s Note: Dug the following line out of the official press release, must have missed it the first run through:
“Players can choose to play as Jedi, Sith, or a variety of other classic Star Wars roles, defining their personal story and determining their path down the light or dark side of the Force.”
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