Star Wars The Old Republic: My Story, Your Story, Everyone’s Story
“You are not eligible for this conversation.” But… but… I’m a psychotic Bounty Hunter who guns down her clients almost as often as she does her contracts. I’ve executed prisoners in cold blood, then laughed about it. I’ve presented horrified wives with their husbands’ severed heads in a burlap sack. I’ve poisoned water supplies, killing hundreds of innocents just because there’s a fee in it. I am a stone-cold murderous bastard who’ll do anything for a handful of credits. And you’re telling me I’m not able to talk to a passer-by because… well, because you need to partition the world into neat little slices for different types of player? Star Wars: The Old Republic is a game at war with itself. The deep-down, unabashed fantasy-fulfilment of role-playing a galactic hero or villain is in perpetual conflict with an MMO’s need to marginalise its every individual player so they’re each just a tiny dot on an ever-spinning wheel. It is an incredibly ambitious, even audacious attempt to fuse two disparate elements of RPGs into one all-things-to-all-men whole, and for that reason the “it’s just Warcraft in space” dismissals are desperately myopic. Trouble is, while both elements – the epic single-player destiny-chasing that BioWare is most known for, and the deeply traditional XP and loot-hunting of the EverQuest-model MMOs – are indeed in there, they don’t always mesh, and the sudden switches between the two can be jarring. The game changes in an instant from your game to everyone’s game; its chatty cut-scenes, moral dilemmas and dramatic score disappear, other players flood your screen with emotes and chatter and shooting roaming mercenaries before you can get to them. You start to feel very, very small, like when dreamy Professor Brian Cox goes off on one about how none of us humans are worth anything more than dust in the grand galactic scheme of things. Read more…
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