GamerHaze

How great is this? The melody of “This is Halloween” from The Nightmare Before Christmas combined with GLaDOS’ sinister voice providing vocals. It gives me warm fuzzies, shall have to watch TNBC again soon!

The beta for Steam Mobile seems to be gathering… steam!

A notification popped up announcing that I had been given access to the mobile app as well as a Steam gift to give the gift of beta access to a friend.

The five or so minutes I’ve spent with the app have not been a disaster; prices and purchasing works as advertised, the chat function is present and all in all appears to offer a near identical experience to the desktop application. It will be interesting to see what further features they can incorporate into this and how they can further integrate it into the Steam experience between the desktop application and the oft-mentioned and long-rumoured large UI for televisions and control pad access.

It is impossible to review an MMORPG. Well, fully review anyway. MMORPGs by their very nature can never be comprehensively reviewed due to changes introduced through patches and content updates, the type of character you play as, even the interactions you have with other players. As an example, although I can see exactly why League of Legends is so popular and can understand the game and recognise its successes, I cannot say I like it due to the community at large. It just seems unfriendly to me, but I digress.

This review of The Old Republic will focus on my experiences as a Sith Warrior, levelling from 1 to 50, completing my story and experiencing everything the “single player” has to offer.

That’s right, I said single player, as for the most part I didn’t interact with a single other player outside of inane babble in general chat. This isn’t a failing of the game, in fact I would call it a success. The fact that I could level the entire way without participating in group quests or flashpoints should be lauded. However this does raise the question as to why I’m paying a monthly fee at all, but more on that later.

Level progression breaks down into two types of missions, planet and class. As you would expect class missions are unique to each class, likewise with planet missions being unique to planets. The missions are set up in such a way that when you arrive you will be directed towards the first mission hub which also has your first class mission giver on this planet in the vicinity. If you are playing “efficiently” you’ll be progressing both your planet and class missions more or less at the same time. This structure persists for the most part throughout the entire experience. It’s not a bad thing, but by the end I was starting to feel the grind.

The exception to the tedium was the class story. This is a Bioware game so as you would expect it was full of well-voiced cut-scenes which told a good, if rather clichéd story, although this is Star Wars so what do you expect. It does take a few unexpected turns, and the choices you make do have a real impact on your story. Notice I said your story. Your story may not play out the same as mine, in fact, I encourage you to try it the same way I did.

As I said in the opening I played as a Sith warrior. Typically they follow the dark side. I played as a light side Sith. Not only was this style of play preferable to me (I don’t like being evil) but it provided interesting colour to the universe; the reactions of NPCs to my Sith’s benevolence, mercy and kindness was handled well and not once did I feel that it broke the story.

This also has an effect on the companions you recruit. By the end of the story I had amassed six of them, each having a different role. Most of the time I stuck with Vette, a Twi’lek who had been enslaved by the Sith but was freed by my character. She is a ranged DPS character, which was my ideal style of play; constant damage per second, constantly dumping on enemies no matter the outcome.

The actual act of playing the game is pretty standard for an MMO. You have your action bars along the bottom and sides of the screen if you opt to have that many, you mash hotkeys or click furiously to attack and if successful, loot corpses if you spot a laser beam burning out of them. There are a couple annoyances with the combat; there’s no basic auto-attack and certain abilities appear to have longer animations than the global cooldown which can severely mess up your flow. The abilities themselves have interesting effects on each other if you’re specced a particular way. It wasn’t until the mid-twenties when I realised that I had specced in such a way that it ran counter to how I actually was playing. The first respec is free, however, with costs ramping up after that each time you do it. By level 50, I was an Annihilation Marauder getting healed every time I made an enemy bleed, which was nearly every single time I attacked.

The graphics right now are decent, but could be better. As it happens the option to set high-resolution isn’t working for world textures right now due to performance issues and was removed by BioWare. It’s understandable that they did this but disappointing that a better solution couldn’t be found. As it stands, the world is aesthetically vibrant, if a little devoid of life. The character models have just enough of exaggeration to them that they don’t look realistic but they also don’t look like complete cartoons.

The sounds and music are typically Star Wars, with all the expected grand sweeping orchestral pieces and lightsaber noises being in place. The voice acting as stated above is top notch, although it did start to grate a bit when I noticed my character saying the same confirmation phrases over and over. It’s a minor annoyance and should possibly have been expected considering the amount of questing I had done over the course of 7 days of /played time.

Now, onto what is possibly the biggest point of my review, the cost. Why, if I’m playing this as a single player game, am I paying a monthly fee? Is it worth it? Would this be better as a single player game? Personally, I see the monthly fee as the cost of playing a story or two to completion. I more or less played the entire free month as my Sith warrior and finished the story a week after the trial expired. If I pushed myself I think I could do a story a month. So, even on a monthly basis, I feel that £9 a month is not a bad deal for 7 days /played of entertainment. Your mileage will very obviously vary but the story lines are the main draw here for me.

My experiences will not be your experiences, but for what it’s worth I really enjoyed myself and I can see myself subscribing if for no other reason to see the rest of the stories. BioWare has done a fantastic job of melding the single player story experience to an MMORPG setting and they should be applauded for that.

The Score for the Impatient
Score
The Old Republic is a solid experience for the single player, despite the monthly fee.

Having rented Dragon Age II and played 24 hours of it, most of that time while in the throws of a severe head-cold that feels like a sack of marbles has taken up residence in my nasal cavity, I have been thinking more and more about the notion of a “good game.”

What, exactly, makes a game good? Surely the sensible answer would be “high-quality visuals backed up by decent gameplay and a story to hang that on.” But I don’t believe that’s entirely accurate. I posit that a good game can be any game whereby the sum of its parts creates an above-average experience for the player. Dragon Age II is a good game. It’s deeply flawed in many, many ways, but the core of it is good. If you feel compelled to read on, please do, although this article may end up quite a bit long. Depends how bored I get in a couple minutes or until the meds kick in and I get distracted by a milk bottle top or something.

Dragon Age II has an excellent combat system, above-average visuals and a great story. The story of a lowly refugee from a foreign land carving his/her way to the top is a classic in literature and this trope has been put to good use here. It is a good game. However, underpinning all this is a serious lack of content.

Yes it’s got a good story but the fact that most of it seems to take place in exactly one house, one cave, one mine, one hideout, one docklands warehouse etc. really detracted from the experience. The landlords on these places must be raking it in, what with all the thieves, mercenaries, blood mages, necromancers, chanters, templars etc. taking up residence for their super secret hideouts. You’d think that all these groups could come to some sort of co-operative consensus considering they all want to kill Hawke for some reason or another, but no. A clean, empty hideout is just a few loading screens away and hey, they deal with all the corpses too.

Speaking of the combat (sort of, I’m awful at segues,) the combat in DAII is, in my very shallow opinion, excellent. It mostly retains the tactical elements from Origins while speeding the whole process up. I’m playing as a rogue, and watching Hawke leap about and making people explode into piles of gibs not seen since Quake 3 puts a wry smile on my face every time. Admittedly I am playing the Xbox 360 version, which isn’t the preferred choice for some others, but I really like playing these sorts of games with a control pad. I would never have gotten through Origins, for example, with only a keyboard and mouse. I know, because I have it on PC and it flummoxed me. Also, I’m lazy, so my tactics go as far as “mash this button to win.” Most of the time, that has suited me fine. The larger encounters require a bit more planning, but I’m muddling my way through.

This is definitely not intended as a review, since I’m not quite finished with the game, but I think that if I had paid full-price for it I would’ve felt a little bit let down. Origins was such a great game in spite of its flaws, and in many ways DAII is too. However, with the lack of content I can’t recommend this at full price. Now, the obvious caveat with this wall of text is that I rented it. However as the game has been out a while you should be able to get it a bit cheaper; I’m able to find copies online for £20. I am always tempted to buy it, but then I think about the almost-inevitable ultimate edition that theoretically could be coming out next year. Overall this game leaves me feeling a bit “meh.”

On the one hand I really like playing it, because it is a good game. But I am very well aware of its flaws, and sometimes they crop up so quick in succession that the spell is broken and I see those flaws as if they were magnified.