Republic Closed Beta Media Event



BioWare recently held a closed beta event for the press involving Republic Classes. With the embargo now over, the press sites that took part can discuss details involving general gameplay, storyline, Companions, Crew Skills, worlds, quests, NPCs, Flashpoints and PVP Warzones. In an effort to make all of the information easy to find, this post will serve as a roundup of all of the coverage from the press sites that attended.

A full listing as well as highlights from the individual articles is available after the jump.
Coverage





Highlights


More than Alderaan, Huttball makes every single class feel valuable. It also never feels like a stalemate, which is something other capture-the-flag modes almost always boil down to. Huttball is a mode that, come launch, I will be playing a lot.

The game opened up a lot more once I left Ord Mantell (where I only saw other Troopers and Smugglers) and made my way to Coruscant. Before arriving on Coruscant, I traveled to the Carrick space station in the midst of the Republic fleet. This is the Republic social hub shown off during the TOR main panel at New York Comic-Con last week. The station is indeed filled with vendors, a cantina, class and crafting trainers, and a jump off point to launch Flashpoints. It was a pretty neat spot, but felt sort of inorganic. It almost felt like a bit of a shopping mall in space. Everything is neatly placed and organized in an intelligent and convenient fashion, which is great for gameplay purposes but really not much else.

As if that wasn't enough, the Trooper can swap between different firing modes. Called 'Cells', only one of these modes can be active at a time to give the Trooper added bonuses to all blaster shots. I favored the Plasma Cell over the Armor Piercing Cell, because it added a percent chance to ignite targets for a short while, inflicting damage over time. It also lets me use High Impact Bolt, a single high damage shot only usable against targets taking damage over time or who were incapacitated.

You'll be traveling on foot until you ding 25, and I spent a good four hours or so just getting to level 7 (all without straying far from the very obvious beaten path between one quest hub and the next

In conversation they (companions) are less active and more reactive. Depending on which dialogue choices you make during a conversation sequence, your companion may gain or lose "Affection."

The story (as much as I saw) is every bit as good as I'd hoped. Whether I was smack talking across the bleak wastes of Ord Mantell on my prissy smuggler or pontificating as a holier-than-thou Jedi Consular over the wooded paths of Tython, SWTOR pulled me into its world like no other MMO has pulled me before.

Once you have a crafting skill, items that you can theoretically craft -- say, lightsabers and bracers for Force users as an Artificer -- can be "Reverse Engineered."...This is significant because you can break down items you create, and each self-created item you Reverse Engineer has a chance to teach you a recipe to create a better version of that item...It makes item-crafting somewhat of a slot machine, and gives you a reason to craft the same item a dozen times that isn't strictly for skill-ups, sell back to vendors or put on the Auction House

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