GAME BYTES: ‘Star Wars’ MMO delivers

But I felt like I had to give “Star Wars: The Old Republic” a shot, both because it’s one of the biggest new releases of 2011 and because it comes from one of my favorite studios, Bioware. And so it was with great trepidation that I sat down last Saturday to try it.

I’m writing this on Tuesday night, and in the intervening time I have logged over 25 hours in the game. I’m not quite consumed by the game, but I do feel compelled to play it quite a lot, and here’s why.

At its heart, “SWTOR” is a single-player RPG. It’s a game that you can play entirely on your own and never feel like you’re missing anything. And that’s because this game features all the hallmarks of a typical Bioware title: high production values, excellent voice acting and a deep, interesting world to explore.

And it’s a massive game, possibly the biggest ever created. I’ve played for 25 hours, and I’m still in the bounty hunter’s prologue. And there are eight different classes you can choose from, each of which has its own unique story quests.

I can’t overstate just how important the voice acting is to my enjoyment of the game. In a typical MMO, quests are given in text only, and with very little in the way of interesting context. Each quest in “SWTOR,” on the other hand, is delivered by an actor, and each quest has enough context and is interesting enough to keep you feeling invested. Bioware’s typical high-quality writing is definitely on display all over this game.

It’s not perfect, though. My main complaint is that each story quest has a level recommendation, and it’s set up so that you more or less need to do every side quest if you want to be able to progress through the story. This is a bad thing when you consider that other class stories will also take place in the same environments, so when you play through as a bounty hunter you will be forced to play all the same side quests you did when you played as an Imperial agent. The side quests make up a significant portion of the game, and so that’s a lot of repetition.

I guess I have a while before I have to worry about that, though. From what I’ve heard, it will take me 200 hours to complete the bounty hunter story, and by the time I finish I will probably have forgotten all about most of the side quests.

But for now I’m really enjoying the game, so much so that I actually think it’s one of the best games of 2011. Unfortunately, it came out too late in the year for me to include it on my best-of list, but that’s OK. Perhaps I can just pretend it came out in 2012.

It makes me happy to say that I feel like I can definitely recommend “SWTOR” to people who don’t normally like MMOs. And, from what I can tell, you’ll probably like it if you do like MMOs, as well. It’s an epic crowd-pleaser, and it’s so big that I don’t doubt many of us are going to be devoting a whole hell of a lot of time to it in the coming year.

It will all come down to, for me, my patience with it. I’ve never played any game for as long as I would have to spend with this one just to complete one of the eight stories. We’ll just have to see. And I’m looking forward to finding out.