Obviously I haven’t been around for a while. Due to the Chinese New Year holidays, a trip overseas and most significantly a family crisis, I’ve been busy. Hopefully I’ll slowly be able to settle back into my usual routines from now on. Before all this, I’d been spending a lot of time with Star Wars: The Old Republic so as I’ve just finished one of the class-based story arcs, I’m writing about it now.

This one is an MMO that should be considered quite old by now. Still, it was one of the very few MMOs that I paid attention to back in the day, both because of the Star Wars theme and because it was made by BioWare. I’d promised myself that I would play it one day but kept putting it off until now. It’s now free-to-play but I ponied up for a month’s subscription for the convenience factor. I also made the boring choice of playing the Jedi Knight class for maximum Star Wars effect.

In case you don’t know, what makes this MMO different from all others is that each of the eight classes in the game has its own story arc. It also has all of the usual trappings of BioWare’s RPGs: voice-acted dialogue, cutscenes, companions etc. This is why it plays so well as a single-player game, at least while you’re still levelling, despite being an MMO. Once you get an NPC companion, you can solo your way through the game, even for Heroic quests, without needing to interact with a single human player. I’d never have played this if it weren’t so.

To tell the truth, this game maybe makes it a bit too easy to solo your way through the story. Early on, I made the mistake of turning exploration quests on and therefore spent a ton of time on running pointless errands. Combined with the accelerated XP gain due to being a subscriber, made me level at a crazy rate. The game does have a neat system to reduce you to a level appropriate for each zone but the effect isn’t significant enough to prevent it from being a total cake-walk. So long as you have a NPC companion at your side, the only real source of danger is enemies who use Force Push to knock you off high places. There’s essentially zero challenge in here as a single-player game.

The gameplay itself is the usual MMO stuff, except that there’s no auto-attack. Due to the easiness and the lack of any need to group up, I found myself using only a tiny subset of the abilities available. Needless to say, there’s never any need for the consumables either. If you feel like grinding the crafting skills, resources for gathering seem plentiful. The other mini-games like space combat or building up your stronghold are interesting novelties but ultimately not worth spending much time on.

The story arc for the Jedi Knight class is at least suitably epic even if it isn’t terribly creative. The planet-based story arcs are only decent and in my opinion missable. It’s particularly unfortunate that these stories aren’t correctly synchronized with that of the class stories, creating implausible situations. The other miscellaneous quests are pure crap and should be avoided at all costs. There’s a mind-numbingly large number of them and they are all uniformly boring. You’ll never face a shortage of quests to do in this game but whether or not doing them feels fun or like work is another question entirely.

I enjoyed visiting the various planets, especially the ones with expansive outdoor environments like Tatooine and Hoth, and being immersed in the Star Wars flavor of the game. I also confess to being slightly addicted to the MMO grind, at least for a while. But I found myself mostly wishing that this were a fully developed single-player game instead of being a MMO with all of the weaknesses of the genre. Stay away unless you really like MMOs.