Star Wars: The Old Republic Exclusive Preview - The Sith Warrior In-Depth

The Old Republic will be BioWare and LucasArts' massively multiplayer game that takes place in the pre-A New Hope universe of Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. We've already revealed all the game's character classes and covered many of the basics of gameplay, which developer BioWare ambitiously intends to infuse with all the in-depth story, intriguing characters, and moral choices of a traditional single-player role-playing game.

And as we've also revealed, you can play as characters on either side of the conflict between the evil Sith lords and the noble Jedi and their allies in the peace-loving Old Republic. One career path you can choose is that of the Sith Warrior, a powerful combat class that is unafraid to don a suit of heavy armor and is otherwise dedicated to following the dark side of the Force...and utterly trashing all enemies with brutal lightsaber-based attacks. We now have some new details on the profession's advanced capabilities, as well as one of its non-player character companions.

While the Sith Warrior class seems like a pretty straightforward profession with only two steps to success (step one: ignite lightsaber, step two: commence the hurting), it turns out that this class will branch into two separate, advanced classes: the juggernaut and the marauder. Juggernauts will be heavy-duty frontline fighters equipped with Force powers that increase their resistance to damage and demoralize their foes, making them even easier targets. (In online game parlance, this makes the juggernaut a Sith "tank" class.) The marauder class, on the other hand, focuses on dual-wielding two lightsabers at once and excels in combat with multiple opponents. (In online game terms, this would make the marauder a "DPS," or "damage per second," class that focuses primarily on dealing as much damage as possible.)

In addition to having two promising career choices of either "laugh off your enemies' pitiful attacks" or "slice them to ribbons, then laugh," the Sith Warrior, like other professions in the game, can also recruit the services of "associate" characters--NPCs who can help fill out your adventuring party during those times when your other friends aren't logged into the game to join up or for those times when you'd prefer to fly solo. One of the Sith Warrior's companions will be Vette, a wisecracking pirate of the Twi'lek race (the humanoids with those crazy tentacles growing out of their heads, like Bib Fortuna from Return of the Jedi) with a dark past.

It seems that Vette was born into slavery, but her owner was ruined financially by the infamous pirate Nok Drayen, whom she decided to join in order to explore the universe--particularly, those places she wasn't supposed to be. Later, Drayen mysteriously emancipated all his slaves, and the young pirate found a new lease on life on the smuggler planet of Nar Shaddaa, where she meets your character and comes across as a character who has both a cynical side as well as a lighter side that comes out when people around her take themselves too seriously and seem like they need to be taken down a notch. It's suggested that Vette has some family out there, a sister and her mother, though she lost contact with them years ago.

Having learned more about both the advanced professions and the companions available to the Sith Warrior class, we're really looking forward to more updates on how the game's other professions will differentiate themselves as they become more powerful. GameSpot looks forward to bringing you new updates on the game very soon as we approach this year's Electronic Entertainment Expo in June.