We played D&D on Sunday.  Had a good time with my level 15 dwarf fighter.  Killed a bunch of things.  But the storyline is progressing very slowly…  When you get up to this level there’s so many dice to be rolled for everything you do, that a single fight can take a good hour or two.  Makes it hard to move the story along.  Especially when the party is full of folks who are easily distracted by shiny objects.  We actually completely forgot about the main story and wandered off the rails for several sessions – made absolutely no progress towards our ultimate goal.  This week we made an effort to get back on-track.

But that’s not really what I wanted to mention right now…

Before the game, while we’re waiting for everyone to show up, there’s usually talk about what we’ve been doing and what’s going on in our lives.  Who’s frustrated with who and their job…  Who’s got a new job…  What folks are reading, or watching…  Things like that.

And, since we’re all a bunch of gamer geeks, there’s usually talk about video games.

On Sunday, everyone was talking about The Old Republic.

A couple of them have been playing it since the beta…  A couple more started playing when it went live…  And a couple more have been convinced to start playing by all the raving about how awesome it is…  Which means, at this point, that pretty much everyone in my D&D group with a working computer is playing The Old Republic.

I hadn’t really even looked at it.  Terri got into the beta, and I had the option of using her account (or I probably could have even gotten in on a beta myself)…  But I just wasn’t interested in another MMOG.  I was tied-in to WoW for a year, and we can’t really afford another MMOG subscription.  And it really looked like it’d just basically be WoW with lightsabres.  So I just sort of ignored all the press and hype and whatnot.

But listening to the guys talk about their exploits…  It really did sound like fun…  And there’s also the prospect of getting together with some decent people and killing something big – which is something I miss out on, by not having a real guild in WoW.

I mentioned to Terri how everyone was raving about The Old Republic.  And also mentioned how they gave me some crap about still playing WoW.  We kind of laughed about it.  I didn’t expect anything to come of it – it was just a random conversation with my wife.

But last night, when I got home from work, Terri surprised me with a copy of The Old Republic.  And I was genuinely surprised.  I really wanted to check it out…  But I never thought for a moment that I’d actually have a chance to play.  At least not for a few years – maybe after we cancelled WoW again, or after it went free-to-play.

But, there it was!

I had some trouble getting it installed.  The first time around it simply failed while loading Disc 1.  Never even prompted for Disc 2.  I re-ran the installer…  Didn’t change anything at all…  And it worked fine the second time around.

I installed about 20 GB of data off of three DVD’s…  And then it wanted to download another 300 MB or so of patches when I ran it the first time…

I almost gave up on the whole thing and un-installed it out of disgust when I saw a mention of Origin in the install process…  But it was an optional install, so I just didn’t use it.

So I installed The Old Republic…  Watched some truly epic intro movies…  Then rolled up a Sith Inquisitor.  Started out on Korriban.  Had to go talk to an old guy in a tomb to pass some trial.  Was a little weird walking around Korriban…  I’ve been there before in the Knights of the Old Republic games.  I think I even wandered through the Tomb of Ajunta Pall in a previous game.  So it was vaguely familiar…  But also very different…  Which was just kind of strange.

It’s still an MMOG at heart…  So I had the typical newb quests – kill 10 of these, recover 4 of those, pass some trial.  But they managed to make it feel considerably more epic than killing rats outside of Freeport.

Combat is also still basically the same as every MMOG out there.  Youv’e got a hotbar with buttons on it.  You target an enemy, hit the buttons, and your character does its thing.  You don’t actually have to aim or anything like that.  But, again, it feels considerably more epic than the combat in other MMOG’s I’ve played.  Your character dodges and weaves a bit…  Sparks fly…  There’s grunts and cries of pain…  It really feels like I’m playing a Star Wars game, rather than some generic MMOG wearing a Star Wars costume.

The storyline is interesting…  When you talk to somebody important you get a dialogue scene, with different conversation options.  And you can actually lean towards the light or dark side of things.  It’s a little weird to see a BioWare-style conversation crammed into a MMOG framework…  But it seems to work so far.

And it’s insanely fun to run around and hit folks with Force Lightning and things like that.  I can’t wait to get a ligthsabre.

Posted on February 7 at 8:51 AM