I'm addicted to Star Wars: The Old Republic. Rather, I find that it's the first MMO I've yet played that avoids feeling like work, in which I'm compelled to complete and turn in my quests not because of arbitrary rewards in experience and items (which will doubtless be outclassed soon enough by those found from later missions), but because the stories they tell on their own are just that compelling. Like Knights of the Old Republic before it, and as is the general way with BioWare RPGs, TOR has a main plot, which sometimes splits into multiple threads, and there are many quests that don't directly benefit or influence your primary objective but are engaging enough in their own right that it seems a shame to leave them behind.

I'm a completion fanatic to begin with, and stringing me along with savory story morsels is just unfair. Why is it, then, that when I got to Balmorra, I found myself abandoning quests and pursuing the main thread of my class' story? If anything, I blame it on the fact that The Old Republic feels like a co-op game, not an MMO.

Let that sink in for a second. So I'm saying it's a well-designed multiplayer affair, but not multiplayer enough?

From the very get-go, TOR limits who you can group with. Each starting planet plays host to two of the game's eight classes and space travel is limited. Further, even if you could join your Sith buddy, all of your Agent-specific quests are on another planet. If you're pairing up at all in these beginning stages (which isn't strictly necessary, but makes the game much more enjoyable and the few Heroics you come across more doable), it's probably with either someone from your same class or the only other class on the planet.

This is fine and dandy, as long as you don't intend to have a dedicated leveling partner. After bullying my friend Dan into picking the game up, I wanted to play it with him, but we felt lame both running around with lightsabers, and ended up maining a Sith Sorcerer and a Powertech. As such, we just sort of blew through the starting planet content so we could meet up on Dromund Kaas and get our game on.

And Dromund Kaas was awesome. It's the first planet on which all four Imperial classes conjoin, so we were able to freely adventure across its surface with our partners in tow, sneaking off every so often to further our class stories in the main city and meeting up to go out into the wild once more. Content on Dromund Kaas is designed to be mostly soloable, with primarily two-player heroics. Those two-player heroics were just the right balance for us. It should have been a sign of things to come, though, when, near the end of our time on the planet, the game threw a four-man heroic mission at us. We pushed through it, us and our characters' companions.

Enter Balmorra, which is bland to start and, on top of it, loaded with four-man heroics. Suddenly, we would have had to be in a consistent four-person party to see all that the planet had to offer, without pausing to find another couple of people every time we wanted to tackle a heroic area.

Understand, I don't have an aversion to the concept of needing more people to do particularly challenging patches of content in an MMO. That's what makes it massive, y'know? TOR's "Flashpoints" and "Operations" are a testament to that. Thing is, the vast majority of its content seems designed to be soloable, which means that, even in a group of two, the overworld and most missions can just be steamrolled over, save the four-man heroics. And, no, your companions probably won't be enough.

Companions in TOR are a strange addition. They help you in combat, yes, and they're fairly useful early on, but they aren't full-on replacements for party members. That being the case, it's a bit strange that they do take up a party slot. And there's incentive to keep them in the party, too. TOR is an extremely story-heavy MMO, and your companions both contribute to the story directly and react to your decisions, which can unlock companion-specific quests for you to undertake. Since they're not effective enough to replace real players, though, it's difficult to step into a four-man heroic area with them and come out triumphant. Maintain that four-man group all the time, though, and you can lose out on the companions' specific interactions. It's two parts of the whole working at odds with one another in a way that just makes it confusing and, though not bad, certainly less enjoyable than it could be.

Further, considering how easily a group of two players and their companions tear through the standard cannon fodder the game throws your way, it would be truly terrifying to see a group of four players rending the enemy armies asunder. Combat, outside of the heroics, would simply be a roadblock between story points and experience. At least with two players, you have to pay attention to what you're hitting and pace yourself a bit.

Maybe it's simply a disadvantage of persistent content? Since everyone is running through the same persistent version of the world, most of a planet can't be geared, specifically, to an individual group as they run through. The Old Republic, however, also features instanced content, both for class missions and for some "group phases." While these ensure that a player will not find his quest object yanked from beneath his nose, it seems a bit of a waste that BioWare didn't also take this opportunity to shift the balance of such areas for the number of characters coming through. City of Heroes, which was almost all instanced missions, did exactly that, increasing the number and level of enemies in each mission instance to match the size of the group coming in.

That said, The Old Republic has been a fun co-op experience, and I don't see myself quitting anytime soon (having just made my first actual monthly payment and all). Still, it irks me knowing that there are quests in my log that will remain unfinished simply because the game's careful guidance of me around the planet (accomplished through geographically related quests) makes it inconvenient to stop at a heroic's entrance and start entreating like-minded players to join my group for the ten minutes it will take us to charge through the mission.

By Shelby Reiches Contributing Writer @Shelby_Arr Date: February 1, 2012

*The views expressed within this article are solely the opinion of the author and do not express the views held by Cheat Code Central.*