A review by a beta player and decade long veteran of MMOs for a game that's going to revolutionize the industry.
The primary issue with making a groundbreaking MMO is the development time and costs. Anyone who's played one of these games can tell you just how large these games are. In terms of money, it costs anywhere from 60-100 million dollars to develop an MMO. For most studios this is a make-or-break deal. If the game fails, their studio goes under. This happened to Mythic for their failed "Warhammer: Age of Reckoning" when EA forced them to merge with BioWare and Destination Games when "Tabula Rasa" failed. When you've got something that might crash your studio and put all your employees out in the cold, the safe bet is to copy something you know will sell: World of Warcraft.
That brings me to "The Old Republic". Electronic Arts hired BioWare, likely the single best development studio in the world currently to develop their game. They gave them a nearly unlimited budget, capping at over 300 million dollars and told them to get to work. The end result is the best MMO made to date.
SWTOR toes the line perfectly. The interface and combat system is similar enough to the industry standard as to not be jarring or potentially inferior, but it utilizes the system in a completely new way. For example, Sith Warriors don't generate their rage from incoming damage (although they can spec to gain some rage this way), they generate their rage from attacking with abilities. Attacks are multi-hit processes with individual combat graphics, not just a standard attack animations with a graphic put over it. There is no auto attack, but unlike titles like DCUO or AoC they don't replace auto attack with arbitrary mechanics. Even the ranged classes get more than just single "spells". The several of the Bounty Hunter Mercenary's abilities involve opening up full auto with their blasters. While the function of the abilities don't differ from other titles, their individual graphics and the way they feel makes combat a cinematic experience.
Fighting enemies is more than just pulling 1 at a time while you move through the game world. You're a part of a military campaign, you're attacking well organized military outposts and as such you're attacking squads of enemies solo. Typical combat involves between 3 to 6 enemies at a time. Another new idea BioWare implemented is that your character is never out of options in combat. Rage starved? Used too much energy or force? Your weapons overheated? No problem! All classes come with abilities that have low or no cooldowns and don't function on your primary resource so you can continue to fight while your resources regenerate. Compare this to games like WoW where rotations are wholly dependent on making sure you don't overuse your resource and you're punished by several seconds of not having a button to press if you mess up.
The heroic combat system makes combat even more cinematic. As a Sith or Jedi if you avoid an attack you literally deflect with your lightsaber. In melee this will actually change the attack animations of enemies as your character engages them directly to block their attack. You will actually block in 360 degrees based on the origin of the attack. Fleeing from enemies your character will literally begin blocking shots fired from behind him.
The stat system has been streamlined as well. All Smugglers/Agents use Cunning regardless of spec or specialization. All Sith Warriors use strength regardless. This means that a Tank Inquisitor will use similar gear to a Heal Inquistor. The difference in gearing comes up in secondary stats like defense for tanks, alacrity for spell casters, etc. There are also "orange" quality items that can be updated with item modifications if you like a particular style. Unfortunately once you hit high level operations or PvP the "armoring", "hilt" or "barrel" of the item is no longer moddable and you're forced to use your end game gear. Its currently hoped by a large percentage of the player base that these slots will be moddable in the future so we can use our favorite pieces in the end game, and since this idea is so popular its likely to be implemented sometime in the future.
There's already tons of content to do at endgame. There are 2 raids, and 9 or 10 heroic dungeons. The leveling will take you about 8+ days played to get through. All of the quests are fully voiced acted and interactive. You don't get a recycled sound byte and a wall of text you quickly hit accept. You have a full on conversation dialogue with your quest givers, with your companions reacting to your dialogue choices positively or negatively. Even one of the dungeons is a fully voiced dungeon (Black Talon). Not all are like this though since it would get very tedious very fast for dungeon grinders to have to wait for 4 people to skip through the dialogue. You get an arsenal of 6 companions chosen based on your class by the time you finish the primary storyline. These companions fill individual roles to complement your needs depending on the situation. Each class gets its own class story that is independent of the other classes that involves you rising to the height of your profession, whether that means becoming a Darth as a Sith, a Grand Master as a Jedi, or the top agent or smuggler in the galaxy.
The crafting system is a totally new system as well. Your companions do the work for you. You select one crafting profession, one gathering profession and one mission profession. You can mix things up a little, but your crafting profession will be unable to support itself without this set up. Depending on your level you can send your companions out on missions such as gathering materials for you to craft, or head back to the ship to start crafting. Missions cost a small fee and each companion has areas they specialize in to help you along. You just queue up what you want them to do and go about your business.
You also get your own space ship that you can outfit with different modifications to help you with the space combat missions. Space combat is a fun minigame where you get to fight in a large fleet battle mission Star Fox style.
All in all, the game's launch has been incredibly stable and well executed. The game is functional, and incredibly fun. You'll have to keep reminding yourself that you're playing an MMO. The game is that good. Like ALL and I mean ALL MMOs at launch, there are a myriad of bugs, graphical errors and glitches, but MMOs are about the long haul not the short term and these will get worked out in due time. There have been roughly 3-4 patches a week addressing these bugs, so they're moving quick on fixing these issues and that's not counting hotfixes they don't tell us about (those are serverside, no download necessary). If you're on the fence, get off the fence and get the game. This is history in the making, and this isn't the hype like every MMO that came before it. This is an MMO experience like nothing that's ever been seen in the industry and its going to change everything forever. I can't stress enough how this new system is going to be the benchmark future MMOs are measured against like WoW has been for so long. Its new, its fresh, it takes the risks no one else did and you need to play it.