Star Wars: The Old Republic : E3 Imperial Agent Hands On

The Imperial Agent's story starts off on the seedy underworld of Nal Hutta, where your contact, an Imperial known only as "Keeper" sets you off on a mission to infiltrate the organization of Nem'ro the Hutt. The dialogue is convincing, and provides players with numerous options that should be familiar to any players of Bioware's previous RPGs. You'll be able to select from a number of different of responses that fit a particular tone or position you want to take with your subject and sometimes you'll have actions you can choose to perform as well. For example, I ran into a character within Nem'ro's stronghold that got the idea he knew me from somewhere; thinking that I could use this to my advantage I played along, only to find out I apparently owed the guy money, not so advantageous after all. However, being a girl, and a particularly fine one to boot, I attempted to flirt my way out of the situation, which failed miserably and resulted in me having to shank the poor bastard. I guess he just didn't dig blue chicks.

Aside from the main story quest, which is pretty compelling and feels very thematic for an Imperial Agent, you'll find numerous peripheral side quests throughout the world, and while the voicework is compelling, it's all pretty standard fare. Some guy needs help with this or that and you go take care of it for him, though some of it can be resolved entirely through the game's dialogue system, which is a definite plus. I ran into side quests that basically amounted to killing X number of things to get some items to bring back to my contact, but I also took on a task for someone looking for their missing brother. This could have resulted in a fight if I decided to go that way, but instead I agreed to pretend the brother had died in exchange for some quick cash. I earned a number of Dark Side points for this as well, but I am unsure how they will affect a non-Force character.

Unfortunately, I didn't get to do any stealth gameplay. Daniel Erickson, the lead writer on Star Wars: The Old Republic was on hand and explained to me that the stealth ability was learned later. I was determined to acquire it during my playthrough but never did. Instead, I had to settle for not-so-subtle face stabs when I felt that melee itch, which turned out to be a lot. Daniel took notice to this and agreed this was one of his favorite ways to play as well.

Overall, the combat, at least for the Agent, is fairly standard. It's flashy enough and fun, but it wasn't blowing my mind or anything, though I did only reach level 3-ish so take that for what it is. I can think of many MMOs that didn't really start off too exciting at the early levels, and this was definitely a good bit more exciting than those games, but not mindblowing. The cover mechanic is a lot of fun, and perhaps if I had stealth right out the gate it may have been a bit more interesting. The world seemed fairly open, though I didn't really get deep enough in it to be sure, and there are a number of "taxi points" throughout the game that you can use to travel quickly to a previously discovered location.

I've run into a lot of people during the show who ask what I thought of my hands-on with the game, and the short and sweet of it is this: If you liked Age of Conan's Tortage experience, it felt like the whole game was basically like that, only with way higher production values given the fact this is Bioware after all. For me, this wasn't a bad thing. I had figured Bioware prepared a demo build for E3, and I was attempting to "beat it" only to discover that it was actually the full version of the game they were letting us run around in. I didn't realize this until almost two hours later, which I think speaks for itself as far as how much I enjoyed the experience. If you like the idea of playing an Imperial spy, you'll probably be pretty happy with Bioware's implementation.