Beta testing for Star Wars: The Old Republic has been going on for some time now, and in the last couple of weeks the media has finally been let in to poke around and tear up the galaxy. While we were restricted to playing only the lower levels of the Republic side, we were able to see and do quite a bit on the various planets and experience lots of areas of gameplay we haven't yet seen in our other preivews.

Ever since my playtime at PAX East, I have been enamored of the Jedi Knight's force leap (your character lunges several yards to close distance between you and your enemy), and, to be honest, I'd bet this will be one of the most, if not the most, popular class. Hence, in the name of science and that arresting distance-closing ability, I chose to spend most of my time as a knight, swinging my light-stick at various beasts and robots.

One of the cooler touches I noticed was that as your character levels, your combat ability evolves visually. As a Jedi knight, you begin by cautiously waving your practice (plastic?) light saber at the bodies of enemies, executing the occasional sequence of choreographed moves. There is no auto-attack here; you must always choose to attack.

As you rank up your skills through a trainer and you eventually get a real light saber, your movements become swifter and surer, and the attacks' choreographies are longer. When I chose to become a Jedi sentinel (a damage-dealer track versus the tank-focused guardian), I gained a second light saber to dual-wield, and at lower levels my character retained the skill in her main hand while holding the second light saber lamely in the other, save for when she awkwardly used her sole dual-wield attack. It's a small but welcome detail, showing that Jedi Knights aren't born knowing perfect technique.

All this happens as the Jedi completes quests given by the various NPCs scattered around her starting planet, Tython, and later the planet Coruscant. Without giving too much away, I found the Jedi knight track to be less action-oriented than many of the other classes, which is appropriate since the other Jedi you encounter say things like, "there is no emotion; there is peace." The Trooper class story, for instance, starts off faster, but the Jedi knight's story has a great payoff toward the end of your time on Tython.

The quest-giving conversations you will have in the game, across classes, are beautifully scripted and voice-acted. The model works well for conveying the story, especially since almost all of the quests you do are chains. If you get too many storylines going at once, your quest log text updates even as the story evolves between talks with the quest-giver. I often found the nicer responses in the Jedi knight's dialogue to be a little naive and goody-two-shoes, making me wonder if so much trust in her fellow Jedi could come back to bite her, especially given how much corruption she witnessed in the first few levels.

The only thing that sometimes takes away from the high quality of the dialogue is the animation of the NPCs. Some are better than others—usually, expressive eyebrows make a big difference. The NPC gestures are sometimes awkward or forced, and there is a pacing animation that a few characters do—step, step, strike a pose, step, step, original position—that is begging to be set to music. Your own character is always well-animated, though, which makes helmeted characters whose faces you don't see (like some bounty hunter heads) seem like a waste.

But then, it wasn't hard to become attached to my first faceless companion, a droid named T7. If you're eager to romance your companions, as characters in BioWare created games are wont to do, your romantic life will be slow-going at first as a Jedi knight (and potentially nonexistent if you want to stay light side, since love is verboten in the Order). But I liked the Jedi's T7, who delivers his dialogue as equations, better than Kaliyo, who was my companion as an imperial agent. And the fact that I can send T7 to run errands to gain crafting skills and materials is the greatest solution ever to the tedium of skilling up in fields like Diplomacy, Slicing, or Armormech.

As I've found before, the game has fantastic graphics, and is very detailed, though there are weirdnesses; for instance, the grass moves as if it's supposed to be blown by the wind, but the motion is sort of a perpetual undulation, like it's underwater. You'll notice it during the slower moments of NPC conversations.

SWTOR is very light on instancing, a concept that WoW flooded its world with in recent years which allows two players to see the same space with different features. It may be difficult to implement so widely, but there are some minor parts of SWTOR that could use it.

During NPC conversations, the world will continue moving around you and the NPC, which can introduce some frustrations, such as another player stepping in front of one of the camera angles so all I could see was his back instead of the quest-giver for parts of conversations. At another point, a quest-giver was talking about how he could not move a rock with the Force, but as he spoke to me, the rock was lifted and dropped. Really? That rock right there, it can't be moved? Turns out the next step in the quest is for the rock to be moved by other means, and another character at that step in the quest was moving it.

Still, the questing experience is great, and questing inside flashpoints (the SWTOR equivalent of dungeons, instanced areas you explore with friends) is amazing. I played through the Esseles flashpoint, where you help a Republic ship getting harassed by the Empire, and combined with the moral choices you make during your quests that bend you to the light side or the dark side, the flashpoints feel like a movie. When an interesting moral choice is raised (leaving someone for Empire bait or saving them, for example), instead of shouting at or willing the main character to do one thing or another, you are the main character. This feeling will be familiar to players of the Mass Effect series, but it's a great evolution for an MMO.

There's still a boatload to discuss about this game, and I didn't get to play nearly as much as I would have liked (half the time I reserved an evening, the servers were down). But the beta is going away for a while in the next couple of days, and BioWare will be seeding a new build in a few weeks when we'll be able to get a look at the Empire classes and possibly later stages of the game. No dates have yet been set for an open beta, but the full SWTOR game is set for release on December 20.

Note: This article was originally accompanied by several screenshots that did not respect BioWare's embargo. Those pictures have been removed.