[keg in kc]

Part the second:

Sith Warrior and Sith Inquisitor

If the bounty hunter and agent's starting missions seem cold and mercenary, the atmosphere for new Sith characters could be described as downright hostile. Both of these professions begin their lives on Korriban, the Sith homeworld, which has appeared in both Knights of the Old Republic games as the location of the cutthroat Sith academy, where new recruits routinely resort to extortion, manipulation, and murder to outshine their classmates. It also appeared as the place where teams of archeologists routinely brave the arid desert to dig through the trap-laden tombs in the Valley of the Sith Lords in search of rare artifacts and ceremonial weapons. Korriban is every bit as unfriendly a place as it was in the previous games--more so, in fact, because you start your career at the very lowest rung of the ladder here. Both of the game's Sith professions--the warrior and the inquisitor--will find themselves interrogating prisoners detained in the academy and exploring the tombs.

The Sith warrior starts his career as an acolyte serving a bitter, angry overseer who leads the training of you and your fellow acolytes, including Vemrin, the apprentice to a powerful Sith lord. At the outset of your training, the overseer very bluntly explains that this other apprentice clearly outclasses you and is your enemy and shockingly points out that you must kill Vemrin as soon as possible, lest you be killed by him first. The Sith inquisitor reports to a different Sith overseer as part of the slave caste--a group of low-born wannabes who are not of proper Sith bloodlines but have been admitted simply because they are Force sensitive. It's actually implied that the Sith ranks are dwindling, which is why the academy's entrance requirements have been relaxed. As it turns out, the inquisitor has an opportunity to become apprentice to a powerful Sith lord but finds herself in competition with another ambitious recruit who is further along in his training. Both of our Sith characters were human.

The Sith warrior is the melee powerhouse of the evil, lightsaber-wielding faction and possesses powerful melee combat abilities that crush opponents at close range. The character's powers are based on rage points, which he accrues by performing basic attacks and can then expend with more-powerful abilities. The warrior's starting combat skills include assault, a standard lightsaber attack that earns a few rage points; vicious slash, a slower melee attack that deals significant damage to a single target; and Force charge, which is essentially the Knights of the Old Republic's Force jump power. This ability lets your character perform a superhuman leap across a long distance to immediately engage a faraway opponent with a powerful lightsaber attack.

The Sith inquisitor also wields a lightsaber, but the profession's true strengths come from its devastating Force powers, which are tied to a Force power meter not unlike that of the Knights of the Old Republic games. The inquisitor has a basic saber strike attack that deals lightsaber melee damage; shock, a Force power that zaps a single target with a lightning bolt; and lightning drain, a highly damaging Force power that bathes a single target with damaging lightning, a la Emperor Palpatine from Return of the Jedi. It also drains Force power and potentially stuns and slows the movement of its target.

As the warrior, our experience started with a mission to raid the tomb of a long-dead Sith lord to extract an ancient, ceremonial war blade (not unlike the early mission we undertook in our first hands-on session with the game many moons ago).On the way to the tomb, we quickly picked up a few extra side quests within the tomb itself; one came from an Imperial officer who asked us to clear out some of the K'lor slugs (huge, pale, centipede-like critters) that inhabited the tomb, where a stray data pad revealed that a security malfunction had allowed pesky tomb robbers to enter the various tombs to scrounge for artifacts to sell.

As the Sith warrior, we had no trouble dispatching anything foolish enough to cross our paths. In fact, the biggest challenge we faced in combat was that we couldn't Force charge every single enemy we encountered because our enemies were clustered in groups (the powerful leaping attack requires you to stand at a distance from your target). There's no mystery about how the warrior's basic lightsaber attacks work--they're simple, work only at close range, and do decent damage. Of the character's starting skills, the Force charge ability will make Sith warriors deadly in player-versus-player battles because as soon as they get within moderate range, they can use this skill to automatically engage in hand-to-hand combat; this is a very difficult scenario for more-fragile characters that rely on ranged damage, such as the smuggler.

After retrieving the war blade from the bottom level of the tomb, we returned to the academy, and en route to our superior, we encountered Vemrin, who confronted us and dared to offer us the choice to be his vassal. The ambitious apprentice bluntly stated his intent to overthrow and replace the overseer, insinuating that joining forces was in our best interest, but we declined the offer with a few threats of our own and reported back to the overseer. It seemed that our superior was already aware of the apprentice's designs and suggested a plan of his own--one about which he hadn't informed his own daughter, Eskella, who openly voiced her resentment at her father's harboring another Sith warrior and sending him out to retrieve a war blade, no less. The overseer callously dismissed his daughter and instead sent us out on our next mission--to interrogate three subjects held in the facility's detention center.

Upon entering, we watched a brief cutscene that showed the academy's jailor interrogating Vette, the wisecracking Twi'lek who, as we revealed in our exclusive preview, can join the Sith warrior as a NPC companion. We then introduced ourselves to the portly officer, who had already been briefed on our mission and introduced us to the three prisoners. The first was a defiant young human woman and freelance assassin who had killed a key Imperial officer under Sith watch and awaited her sentence. She insisted she was ignorant of the target's true identity and was merely following orders, and rather than torture her, we decided to take the unorthodox dialogue choice of insisting that the woman not only be freed, but also brought into the service of the Empire as an assassin herself. This was a choice we hoped would add light side points to our character, though this feature apparently hasn't been implemented yet. The jailor expressed mild surprise at our choices but let us continue to the second subject, a disgraced Sith warrior with many years of service under his belt, who had made a crucial mistake on a recent mission that cost many men their lives. Realizing that light side and dark side points weren't in the game yet, we went right to the Force choke option, eventually killing him. We decided to cut to the chase again with the third and final prisoner, a member of the Rodian race (to which Greedo belonged) who strenuously argued that he had no idea the supplies he kept shipping were ending up in Republic hands. We immediately chose the Force lightning option and repeatedly zapped him until he confessed, and for some reason, we felt a lot better about ourselves afterward.

As the Sith inquisitor, our experience was even more mean spirited and nasty. We began as one of a group of students of a different overseer who, as mentioned, addressed us as slaves and demanded that we head to the valley and seek out the council of a Sith hermit who had taken up residence in one of the tombs. We wasted no time heading out to the area to find the old man in meditation with four other disciples. We also found a nasty surprise when the hermit revealed that the disciples were fallen Sith pupils who had come before us and failed--and given a second chance to prove themselves by attacking us.

In battle, the Sith inquisitor definitely has powerful skills--and a lightsaber to boot--but seems to have trouble standing up to a melee onslaught from multiple foes. The character's starting Force powers can target only a single enemy, and though it's possible that later abilities can zap multiple foes, the profession seems like it might be at its best with a bounty hunter or Sith warrior covering the front lines while the inquisitor hurls blazing electric death from a distance.

Having played through six of the game's classes, it seems clear that The Old Republic will offer a great deal of variety in terms of branching paths, differing dialogue choices, and interesting gameplay nuances. We're intrigued by the prospect of playing through a massively multiplayer version of BioWare's best story-driven experiences while also playing through diverse PVP battles where smart use of your character's skills will seemingly make all the difference. We'll continue to bring you more updates on this highly anticipated game.