In the past weeks I and others of TRP have been keeping tabs on the new  Star Wars MMO coming from Lucas Arts and BIOWARE.  There is enough information at last to do a decent write up of this thing of beauty and awesomness.  
    Lets start with the setting of this particular Star Wars game, it is set 300 years after The Knights of The Old Republic…an awesome game in it’s own right, and around 3,500 years before the rise of Darth Vader.  A “most impressive” choice of timeline,  It has been totally unexplored until this point.  Personally I like this idea because it leaves the writers and artists  a huge area to explore, to write about new conflicts, worlds, and characters as well as flesh in some things that have only been alluded to in the movies and books that have followed.  
    Next is this new thing to the MMO, the so called “fourth pillar”. The traditional MMO has three pillars to stand upon,  exploration, combat, and progression.  But thanks to bringing BIOWARE on board they are adding a new fourth pillar of “story” to the MMO.  A fascinating and exhilarating idea that will draw in many more people like myself that enjoy an awesome story to pull them into the game.  Lets face it BIOWARE are masters of doing this, just look at The Knights of The Old Republic, and Mass Effect.  They coupled with Lucas Arts dedication to making everything fit right in their universe makes me salivate at the possibilities.

 

 
    It has been said that there will not be endless hours of leveling up, and you will feel the “hero” from the start by always taking on multiple enemies, and  the story is finite…yes there is an end to the story like all good games.  How they will differentiate between the story ending and continuing to use your character in the PVP or playing with friends they haven’t said yet.  This also leaves wide open lots of expansions…that guy you really screwed over and got away with at the time can always come back to bite you in the hiney in an expansion.
    Also new is their announcement of this MMO being fully voiced over.  You got it every character including NPC’s and your main character will have a voice.  Needless to say this will make several thousand speaking roles and hundreds of thousands of  recorded lines of dialogue.  Mind boggling to say the least, impossible I would say but  again we have BIOWARE on board….I don’t know about anyone else but I would marry BIOWARE if they were female and a single person…sighs….
    

 

 

     I know everyone wants to know the classes you’ll be playing as but they’ve been a little stingy in that regard.  They have only released a few classes so far.  There will be Jedi and Sith of course, what would star wars be without those two opposing forces causing trouble for each other.  They have also released the classes of the republic trooper(probably the tank type) since they like big guns.  Along with the trooper they have also released the smuggler and bounty hunter.  It seems so far everyone with a desire to play as a Luke, Han, or Bobba Fett type will be able to do so...these after all are the classic characters in the universe.  Everyone at some point in time wanted to be a Jedi, a smooth talking smuggler, or the mean techy bounty hunter.  
    Sadly they have yet to release any information on the playable species in the game…sniff…sniff. One can only hope that you can play as a wookie smuggler.  I am definitely rolling jedi as my first character, thanks to the choice in timeline it actually makes sense to have thousands of jedi and sith going at it light sabre to light sabre.   
    The volume of weapons and accessories  will be mind boggling to say the least.  You can also play through the entire game by yourself if you wish to do so, and thanks to BIOWARE each play through will be different from the last, all based on your character class and choices during the game.  They have also said that once you make a choice there’s no going back to change it to see what might change, the ramifications of a choice at the beginning of the game might not show until the end…this makes my head hurt at the thought but also makes me all warm inside.  They haven’t released much on the multiplayer aspect yet, it will be there for sure, it is an MMO after all.  The details released so far say that it will be instance based.  But if you wish to play with a friend almost like co-op you will have a job to do to progress their story in some manner, no running around willy nilly acting stupid…you will have a definite impact on your friends game, they’ll love you or hate you for what you did to “help” their story along.
    We can only hope that it will be released soon, as of E3 this year it was fully playable, right now they’re balancing classes and polishing the dialogue.  Come soon my friend, come soon….we need a new hope for the MMO and I can quit checking the website every day looking for something new!!! Phantom and I have almost locked up the websitechecking so often.

 

Is this game just hype? let my friends answer that