In the first installment of "The First 10," I review my experience as a newbie in the world of the controversial MMORPG Star Wars: The Old Republic.
At this point, my character’s strengths and weaknesses definitely began to show. With an arsenal of instant and DOT abilities, the Sith Inquisitor is 100 percent nuker. At the same time, Prectorr can’t take a lot of hits, and it became clear that soloing would soon not be an option. Lucky for me, Korriban offers two team-oriented instances, exclusively for low-level players.
Heroic missions are SWTOR’s versions of raids—instanced team-based missions that can be replayed to receive rare item drops. After throwing up an “LFG” message on the general chat board, I was quickly paired with another Inquisitor to take down some renegade droids. I was surprised by how quickly two wizard characters were able to clean out the dungeon with little effort, but I’ll chalk that up to part of the game’s shallow learning curve.
Once I turned in my quest, I had reached level 10, and the world of The Old Republic had opened up to me. Following the level-up fanfare were several popup tutorials informing me of the many things that were now available to me: space travel, PVP arenas, and larger-scale group instances. I could finally leave Korriban and explore the galaxy, which signaled the end of my introductory period.
Star Wars: The Old Republic isn’t revolutionary, by any means. You aren’t going to find anything here that hasn’t been done anywhere else. While the game has certainly received some flak regarding the limitations of its free-to-play model, I have to say that I was pretty surprised at the amount of content to which I had access. Of course, there are a few things that nonsubscribers don’t have access to—players can’t send private messages until level 10, or sprint until level 15—but for the most part my experience did not feel fragmented at all. The game is polished, easy-to-learn and represents the source material well, and I would definitely consider subscribing and seeing what the universe outside Korriban has to offer.
