Questing in a Large Open World
The first thing we did was pick up a mission from a NPC in the open world. There wasn't a typical pop up quest dialog box to accept or decline it after interacting with an NPC; as soon as you clicked on them, the voiceover dialog started in the fashion of a cinematic cut scene. Once the conversation moved to our character, the familiar decision wheel was there with very distinct Light, Gray, and Dark options. You could hit the space bar and skip through the dialog until you hit the decision wheel.
We could see other players running around in the zone after picking up the quest, causing us to wonder what exactly happened to our Trooper's body while in the cinematic. However we were unable to answer that question during our time with the demo. It is possible we started in a phased area, but there wasn't any instance portals or something else to indicate that we were in a phased area. It was completely seamless.
[n]Now that we had our quest, we hit the map icon on the minimap to get an idea of how big of an area we were going to explore on Ord Mantell. We were pleasantly surprised to see that there were indications of more than one zone on the map. Additionally, there were multiple drop down menus, that were unfortunately not active, giving us the sense that there are definitely more map iterations.
When we later spoke to Jake Neri of LucasArts about this, he told us "Yeah, but that (Ord Mantell) is one of the origin planets and it won't be as big as where you will go. I think it is safe to say that there will be different sizes of territories. Not everything is like, 'Here is your grid, fill it out, and go.' It is different."
To give an idea of the vast amounts of explorable area, I saw what I thought was a sea or large body of water in the distance. Wondering if it was possible to swim or hit an invisible wall, I started out walking towards it. It took about a minute of walking at normal pace to get close to the edge only to realize it was a landscape resembling a dry sea bed with very detailed ground design littered with pits, craters, and small pebbles. This stretched out to the horizon, didn't resemble a typical matte placeholder, as I definitely got the feeling I could walk a few more minutes further. After spending another entire minute running back to the Mannett Point base, Jake Neri's statement about Ord Mantell as one of the smaller maps gave the impression that The Old Republic will be simply massive in scope.[/b]
As we started exploring the immediate zone we were in, we noticed there were a lot of NPCs who were not exactly thrilled we were there. The feeling of being in a conflicted and hostile area was immediate.
"Ord Mantell is not a happy place," Jake Neri explained. "There is conflict there, but it is also an early world. One of the goals there is 'Hey, people that haven't played an MMO need to be successful there.' So we are constantly balancing those planets. I don"t know if you guys were aware, but those planets are getting a lot of iteration. We did open up and start to do some testing. We are doing small groups, we are looking to expand that in the near future, and those origin planets are really a focus. We really want to make sure that they are good so we can extend into the larger game as we go."
Our mission took us to a large structure on Ord Mantell. We did go through a green instance portal at a point inside the multi-level building (there was an elevator we had to use to navigate between floors) but it felt extremely seamless and natural to do so. It was incorporated into the building, and there wasn't a loading screen. It wasn't blatantly obvious or gave us that "whoa, you are going into an instance" type feeling.
One of the biggest takeaways from this was that the whole quest/mission wasn't some "go kill x of y" or "collect things" quest. We weren't actively grinding mobs for this particular one, and we were definitely making decisions to affect the mission story. As we were fighting our way to around the building, a Separatist Base, a bonus quest popped up on our on-screen quest tracker. This new mission noted we killed 1 of 8 of a specific mob type, and a new quest showed up in our mission log. This "instant quest" felt very similar to Warhammer's Tome of Knowledge feature.
