by Chris Ware on Sep 20, 2010
While recent development of the second
style="font-style: italic;">Star Wars MMOG
style="font-style: italic;">Star Wars: The Old Republic,
developed by BioWare in conjunction with LucasArts--has garnered the
lions share of media attention, LucasArts and SOE quietly went about
creating their own second installment, a browser-based free-to-play
that takes place in the highly popular Clone Wars era.
Using the Saturday morning cartoon franchise as a stylistic blueprint, the team
at SOE has taken their considerable expertise with browser-based gaming
and fashioned a highly entertaining MMOG aimed at younger and older
players alike,
developed by BioWare in conjunction with LucasArts--has garnered the
lions share of media attention, LucasArts and SOE quietly went about
creating their own second installment, a browser-based free-to-play
that takes place in the highly popular Clone Wars era. Using the
Saturday morning cartoon franchise as a stylistic blueprint, the team
at SOE has taken their considerable expertise with browser-based gaming
and fashioned a highly entertaining MMOG aimed at younger and older
players alike.
Clone Wars Adventures is rated E.
Gameplay is guided via an easy to find green arrow in the lower right
hand portion of the UI that brings up a browser window, allowing
players to navigate the various game modes without ever having to move
inside the world. If you do wish to explore and interact, you can also
uncover these games by speaking to their representative NPC and
entering that way some of the most famous names in the
style="font-style: italic;">Star Wars universe
act as your guides, so true fans will definitely want to explore a bit.
Some of my favorite games included Stafighter, Lightsaber Duel, Star
Typer and Republic Defender. There are games available here for all age
ranges and skill levels, so everyone should be able to find something
that speaks to them with relative ease.
While I am certainly no programmer, one can imagine that the majority
of load time issues on a browser based 3D game are graphic related
and the balance here is almost perfect. Clone Wars Adventures looks to
have improved upon the first generation graphics of FreeRealms in
subtle ways. Even if the technology supported infinitely more realistic
looking graphics, they would feel out of place here and would probably
triple the load times.
The most compelling content is the content with the most multiplayer
interaction. My two favorite activities so far are speeder racing and
lightsaber duels. Both have a single player option, but the multiplayer
is easily the most fun. When FreeRealms
launched one of the first knocks against it was that there wasnt a
plethora of group content either, so with less than two weeks under its
post-launch belt, it doesnt make sense to crucify
style="font-style: italic;">Clone Wars Adventures
for that particular shortcoming. So with that in mind, the jury will
remain out on this particular facet of the game for now.