14 DAY TRIAL // With Dragon Age: Origins now out and capturing the fantasy of players, it's rather easy to forget that BioWare is also working on Mass Effect 2, which is set to arrive in January, and on The Old Republic, the Star Wars based MMO, which is set to arrive later in 2010. Related to the last project, the company has just offered the first details on a new character class, that of the Imperial Agent. The reveal came at a press event in Europe and the developers have not offered too many details on how the new class will play.
On The Old Republic official forums, Sean Dahlberg, who is official community manager for the project, has written that “The Imperial Agent is heavily inspired by several classic Star Wars characters such as Zam Wessel and Grand Moff Tarkin. Imperial Agents work behind the scenes to get the work of the Empire done. Specializing in high-tech gear, the Imperial Agent always has the right tools at the right time. They use abilities of subversion and subterfuge to infiltrate and assassinate enemies of the Sith Empire with deadly efficiency”.
It sounds like the Imperial Agent will be a sort of infiltration class, possibly a counterpart to the Smuggler which the Rebels get. The emphasis on high tech gear and on subterfuge also means that the Agent is not going to get any Force powers to play around with, meaning that he will need some pretty formidable skills in order to be able to take on the Jedi of the Rebel faction.
TOR is basically a sort of Knights of the Old Republic 3 which accommodates more than one player. The MMO is set to offer branching story paths for all characters and will have full voice acting, a first for the genre. BioWare is also promising that, on release, each of the classes will get the same amount of story a single player experience would have.