Throughout the whole time we had our hands on experience with the BETA that Bioware had kndly invited us to join on their program to make the game more productive and worthwhile for the upcoming gaming experience. The good positive thing about this game is you get to have a companion to come along with you for the journey. No matter what class or race you are, you would get a variety of companions (just like a crew from the good old Mass Effect and Knights of the Old Republic game) where you would be able to choose who you want to bring along with for your missions.

The above screenshot would give you an idea what the interface would look like. Your companion would be located on the bottom left hand corner of your screen and your companion would be labelld as Character name <Your companion> in this case just like the T7 droid I have in my group

What are the benefits of having a companion?

In terms of the MMO world you can accomplish a lot of challenging quests out there with a companion in your group. The companions would either be doing a Tanking, DPS or Healer role. In truth all companions have a storyline and past history about themeselves if you choose to talk to them more often, the more you interact with them throughout your journey by doing quests and chit-chat with them, you would get to know more about that character and choose how would you do it further with them.

Like all Star Wars games, there will be romance, thrill, unexpected plot twists and more. In terms of TOR, Bioware have made it designed that the player could choose how they want thier storyline to be told out there throughout the game community. So whatever your choices are, the game is all about how your and the companions fate would be.

The good thing about having a companion aside from quests, you could fill up your party if say you only had yourself and your friend online in a group. If you are doing say a Heroic Area for example. You could work together by unleashing your geared (or even so not geared) companions out there to help out with your questing.

As you could see that on the user interface on the left hand side you would see that both you and your friend would be able to use our companions to assit in battle against heroic mobs. However since they are not at good as another player should be, I would recommend not to get too carried away as they are not as good as another player would be in the group. However having companions helps out in the long run.

With the official game release has been launched this year, now we can discuss more about The Old Republic ingame companions in more detail.

So you are wondering about these companions strengths and weaknesses, furthermore some companions would be able to develop a deep romantic relationship with you in the long run. Each class in TOR (The Old Republic) would have either droids, female and male humanoid companions as I could best describe it.

We can generally see a positive aspect that your companions for your class can help you for quests and develop more affection points towards your decisions and perhaps open up more dialogue for them to consult with your character in more depth. Companions can also train up your professions when you instruct them to and whatever professions you are training on would apply throughout the whole team, including yourself.

Furthermore the companions would have a good storyline behind them where they tend to help you in the long run with your adventures and they can help you not only in Heroic areas but also in Flashpoints and Operation areas as well. Some would say that if you are looking for a particular class and need it badly, you could always fill it in with your geared companion for whichever role you wanted them at the time.

If you find yourself losing affection points to that companion, the alternative is to buy more commendation gifts for your companion and give it to your companion to win back their loyalty on you.