Star Wars: The Old Republic Retrospective

Now that BioWare’s MMORPG Star Wars: The Old Republic is available on Steam, we get this Eurogamer article that makes a case for it being a decent single-player experience. If you’re someone who for whatever reason enjoys this particular title, you might be interested in the article since at the very least it conveys how easy it is to pick up The Old Republic after a prolonged break.

Here are a few sample paragraphs:

I was dreading it a little bit, to be honest, because when I logged back into World of Warcraft after a long time away, I had an uphill battle trying to relearn what felt like a very different game. The same wasn’t true of SWTOR. To my delight, I was off on a new single-player story within moments of firing up the game. I just pressed ‘launch’ in the journal and I picked up seamlessly where I left off, as the person in charge of the Eternal Throne and its armada, a faction leader brokering alliances with the Imperial Empire and the Republic, not some rookie trying to rise within the ranks of them.

Everything I needed to remember about how to play came back to me on the job. I didn’t need to refamiliarise before heading out because the companions the SWTOR story gives you heal so powerfully it’s almost impossible to die. It was like this in the previous expansions. In story mode, SWTOR is a breeze. You can saunter through a grandiose story for hours without ever bumping into another player, only ever setting foot in a public area to run through it, to the green-hued barrier signalling the entrance to your own instanced personal world, your own Star Wars. In reality you might be a newcomer in a wider community but the most you’ll ever see of it is when stopping to inspect people as you trot through, like dogs in a park.