Star Wars: The Old Republic will take the pre-A New Hope universe of Star Wars that appeared in Knights of the Old Republic and combine story-rich gameplay with massively multiplayer online adventuring. The result will be highly differentiated experiences for the game's different professions, which will start off in different parts of the universe along different story paths until those paths converge in and around the war waged by the evil Empire with its Sith allies against the peace-loving Republic with their Jedi allies.

In advance of this year's Electronic Entertainment Expo, we took the opportunity to play through the early story content for six of the game's eight character classes: the Republic trooper, the smuggler, the bounty hunter, the agent, the Sith inquisitor, and the Sith Warrior. As we found, several classes are linked by their initial starting area and quest sets, though their differing powers and combat styles make playing each one a unique experience. Here is our report on these six professions. Please keep in mind that our impressions are based on an early version of the game and everything covered here is subject to change. Also, please also note that this story contains minor spoilers.

Republic Trooper and Smuggler

The Republic trooper and the smuggler professions begin their lives in the same area under different circumstances. As a trooper, we started our career as the newest member of the elite Republic commando unit known as Havoc squad--a handsome human soldier riding on the inside of a giant walker into a war zone on the planet of Ord Mantell. The planet is a Republic world torn apart by a civil war waged by separatist rebels. As a smuggler, we played as a Twi'lek, which is the humanoid Star Wars race that has long tentacles down either side of their heads, similar to the Bib Fortuna character in Return of the Jedi.

Yes, the Twi'lek are playable, and this one was a Han Solo-like ship captain who lands her Millennium Falcon-esque ship on Ord Mantell to drop off a weapon shipment to the Republic fort. Unfortunately for both characters, the Republic's on-the-ground contacts double-cross the standing armies, siding with the separatists instead. As a result, the separatists steal the smuggler's ship and hack into the local artillery banks, which means that the beginner smuggler must go out on foot (or risk being shot down), while the trooper's walker gets blasted by the commandeered guns and needs to go it alone on foot as well.

The trooper class begins with four different primary combat skills, which are keyed to the number keys on your keyboard, and all pertain to using your heavy blaster rifle. Most of the trooper's combat abilities operate based on ammo (this has been changed from the previous time we played the class, when it relied on action points). The abilities include hammer shot, a basic ranged attack that consumes a single round of ammo; rifle grenade, which consumes several rounds and activates your character's rifle-mounted grenade launcher to knock all enemies in the blast radius flat on their backs; fast reload, which reloads your weapon to full; and stock strike, a melee attack that lets you pistol-whip your foes with the butt of your rifle once you get up close.

The smuggler class, on the other hand, is one of the game's "cover classes" and focuses on acquiring cover behind various environmental objects. These objects then grant various offensive and defensive bonuses while accruing energy points with basic attacks and expending them with advanced ones. The smuggler tends to favor a single, handheld blaster (again, not unlike Han Solo), and the profession's starting abilities currently include flurry of bolts, a basic ranged attack that builds energy points; take cover, which lets the profession acquire any nearby cover indicated by a transparent green paper-doll model; burst, which fires off three times as many rounds as flurry of bolts but costs energy points; and flash grenade, a hand-thrown projectile that has a chance of stunning all targets within its short radius but also costs energy points.

From cover, the smuggler's action bar changes to include flurry of bolts (which causes the smuggler to quickly pop out of cover to fire), detaching from cover, and charged burst, which is a new skill that slowly charges up a blast before causing the character to peek out behind cover and deliver a highly damaging burst of three charged-up rounds at a great cost of energy points. (And aside from these character-specific abilities, all characters in the game will universally have some kind of fast-healing, meditative skill to use when out of combat to decrease the amount of downtime required for characters to recover from the wounds they've suffered.)

The Republic trooper speaks softly and carries one heck of a big gun.

Each character has different entries into Ord Mantell. The trooper meets up with the rest of Havoc squad in short order, including Wraith, the stealth specialist; Fuse, the demolitions expert; Needles, the medic; and the squad commander, Tavus, who briefed us on our mission to track down a stolen orbital strike bomb with enough power to wipe the Republic fort and the nearby civilian refugee encampment off the face of the planet. Our mission required us to infiltrate a besieged village to meet with a refugee informant with intel on the bomb, fighting through a few waves of separatist guerillas and guard droids. We'll say that they didn't put up much of a fight; we took on groups of three or four rather easily and pounded them into the ground by unloading hammer shots and grenade blasts. We also periodically reloaded and used the stock strike melee attack to smack down the few rebels that dared to get in close.

We reached our checkpoint rather easily but found that the separatists had gotten to our informant first and left him for dead in an alley. After checking in with our commanding officer by remote communicator, we accepted our updated mission to find the deceased spy's data pad in his house, where his nerve-wracked wife waited for her husband's return. Unfortunately, it was clearly our duty to inform her of her husband's demise, which she took poorly to say the least, but rather than simply strong-arm the data pad away from the hysterical widow, we instead chose to hear her out--to listen to her vent her frustrations and assure her that her husband died a hero. While either approach would likely have gotten us what we wanted, our choice to delve deeper into the conversation netted us a "conversation bonus"--an as-yet nonfunctioning gameplay mechanic that LucasArts producers tell us may affect your character's light side or dark side alignment or result in some kind of other reward.