MMO

I have played a Jedi Consular for about 4 hours now and have a pretty good idea of how Star Wars The Old Republic will play.  I'm bound by the NDA, so can't discuss specifics, but here are a few general impressions.

1. Polished.  Amazingly so.  I'd heard bad things about the game from other beta testers, so I was pleasantly surprised to play a game that seemed months past release.  The only problems I encountered were the initial queues when the beta went live.  No server lag, no game bugs, nothing to complain about on a technical front.

2. Pretty.  The art is very appealing.  Somehow it captures both the cartoon feel of WoW and a more realistic style I really like. Animations are nothing special, but fun and help create the illusion of force powers and abilities.

3. Easy.  There is nothing challenging about the game at all, in the early going.

4. Standard.  Game structure, development, and style is pure traditional MMO fare.  There is nothing new in the underbelly of the game that I encountered.

5. High quality.  The quest presentation is the best I've ever seen in any MMO.  Period.  No comparison.  You'll see why when you play.

With my Christmas gift from my mother-in-law, I picked up DCUO for the PS3 from Amazon.  It released yesterday and I received the disk right on time.  Still waiting for my pre-order reward code, but overall a happy experience.  It took about an hour and a half to download all the updates, but everything worked the way it was supposed to and I was able to make a character by mid-afternoon.  My overall experience is that this is a more than competent super hero MMO.  Get used to the idea that you're a side character, albeit a super powered one, in a pretty cool time-travel world crisis.  You're not Superman, you're Animal Man, or Frostfire, or some as yet unknown schmuck who just got super powers, doesn't yet know what he or she is capable of, and who does not yet have an iconic idiom they need to cleave to.  This flies in the face of what most RPGers ask for in a superhero RPG, but it seems to work.

I'm looking forward to seeing this game in November (or a bit later.)  I loved CoH, really wanted to love Champions Online (but so didn't), and am now looking forward to this title.  It will release on the PS3 and PC simultaneously, hopefully with users able to play together on the same servers, but I'm not holding my breath on that last front. The original article is here.