Two Space MMOs Enter, One Leaves

I am having one heck of a time trying to navigate my inner hype-meter regarding BioWare’s Star Wars: The Old Republic and Cryptic’s Star Trek Online. Several months ago my excitement was purely along Trek lines as Cryptic showed off the range of character looks you could create and gave tantalizing glimpses of the final frontier as they envisioned it. In contrast, all I knew about TOR was that it was going to be like the KOTOR games, neither of which had snagged my interest (but then again, see my lack of fondness for single player games).

Months later, we have a wealth of further information on each upcoming game, and the more I learn, the more I lean towards TOR and away from STO. I’ve always been more interested in the human side of Star Trek, yet all I’ve seen of the avatars out-of-ship is some combat that looks like it could use some improvement. The space battles Cryptic has shown have been very pretty and impressive, but I don’t want to be a ship, and I don’t want the most interesting things in the game to happen to me while I’m a ship, nor do I want my only options when assuming a bodily presence to be “combat” or “role-playing”. I guess this is where my bias for fantasy games rears its ugly head; I do want to boldly go where no one has gone before, but I’d like to walk around for a while once I get there. I’d probably be the crazy Ensign who “goes native” and decides to stay on an exploration planet, making it my home.

On the other hand, the main thing that kept me from playing both KOTOR and Dragon Age: Origins for longer than an hour was that I couldn’t play it with anyone else, so on the surface of it, a game from BioWare that I can play with someone else sounds like precisely something I’d want to try. The first images of the Jedi Consular have me swooning, and companions sound deliciously like Guild Wars’ heroes, just as the mentions of heavy instancing to enable better storytelling reminds me of that game. Why, it’ll be like getting to play Guild Wars 2 in space! My only concern is that I’ve not quite come around on the artistic style of the game; it’s a bit too Clone Wars-y for me sometimes, as I didn’t care for the look of the series or movie, either.

My current position is that I’d like to wait until Star Trek Online releases and see what others have to say about it before I make my final decision; however, my better half has watched the latest video on Fleet Actions and declared it necessary to buy the game on launch day. As for The Old Republic… well… my last pre-order was Warhammer and that didn’t turn out as well as I’d have liked, but I think I may have to set aside a fiver to reserve this one for myself.

Here’s hoping that a Jedi Consular can party up with an Empire Bounty Hunter, since we’ve each called dibs!

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