In my last post, I talked about the good and the bad about Star Wars The Old Republic. This time, I’ll be going in to give you a view on the “Crewskills”, and the various talents that the classes have and my concerns with some of those choices.
So let me give it a start with the different Crewskills. We have three different categories: Gathering, Crafting and Mission skills. Each have their own sub-skills. Here’s a list of all the different sub-skills in their different categories:
Gathering:
- Archaeology
- Bioanalysis
- Scavenging
- Slicing
- Armormech
- Armstech
- Artifice
- Biochem
- Cybertech
- Synthweaving
- Diplomacy
- Investigation
- Treasure Hunting
- Underwold Trading
For a quick rundown on the skills, check it here.
Stay with me to see what I think of the skills.
To start, I want to talk about how they have implemented these skills. The player doesn’t have to do any of the crafting themselves, hence the name Crewskills, and as such, the skills are all done by the player’s companions that they gain over their journey through the universe.
For me, this entertained me with a great experience; mainly because I didn’t lose a lot of downtime by spending it either crafting or gathering. The player presses some buttons, and sends their companions on their merry way to gather some force crystals, or make the found force crystal into a crystal that the player can use in their lightsaber.
The one thing I found to be annoying was the fact the player can have only three skills (one from each area). Now, it’s not that you can have only three, but the fact that if the player chooses, say Cybertech, Archaeology, and Treasure Hunting, he misses out on 1/3 of his total potential productivity since Treasure Hunting, Archaeology, and Artiface all work together. This makes the player only choose the combinations that only work together, because otherwise, it would be less min-maxing capable.
As a small aside, are the talents. The talents are done as polished as the rest of the game, and continue with the theme Beararms and I are feeling of the “familiarity” of the entire game in comparison to others, such as World of Warcraft and Global Agenda.
I do have a smidgen of worry from the different talents and specs you have available. As an example, a Bounty Hunter that can heal, or the Smuggler, for that matter. I’m not going into full detail of all the talent trees and specs, and I’m not saying they shouldn’t be in the game; a healer Bounty Hunter just seems awesome, but lore-wise, would a Bounty Hunter really be able to heal? I can see them maybe doing some self-healing, but not a full party healing in the sense of that’s the main role. This is simply raising a red flag with me of just how much does Bioware care for the lore? Are they willing to sacrifice it for the MMO aspect’s balance?
I just wouldn’t want to see it happening, but that might be my inner Star Wars geek talking.
Remember: Star Wars: The Old Republic comes out December 20, 2011. You can pre-order here, and start playing up to 5 days early!
And once again, don’t forget! Mordil and Beararms will be at their local midnight release, and will surely have content to share from their experience on LiveCast!