If You Just Want to Waste $60 paypal it to me instead
It is a highly disappointing game and does not live up to the hype built up around the game. Its design is generic MMO cut & paste stock, when combined with the plethora of bugs the game has at launch and it really not worth playing on a long term basis in its current state. It also has a legion of rabid reverse troll fanbois that defend everything terrible about the game with excuses like, 'it just launche' give it time' and 'WoW didnt have that at launch'.
I am a pretty big MMO fan and I've played almost all the major MMO releases in the last 10 years. I'm not a huge Star Wars fan, but I had a lot of friends that are and wanted to play the game so I joined in to play with friends.
The first glaring problem with the game that should have been a red flag in the design process was that the game wasnt designed with space combat as a major piece of the game design. All the fanbois will tell you that the designers have said this wont be in from the beginning so it basically gives them a pass, but the reality is how can you make a serious Star Wars game and not have space as a major feature in the game? I dont know what Star Wars movies you guys watched but every Star Wars movie I've ever seen was 50% space combat and 50% ground action. The starships and space battles were a huge part of the plot and story. TOR turns space combat into a cheesy minigame thats not even required and basically plays like an iphone app. Major disappointment at least for me. Fanboi excuse for this is Bioware said space combat will get fleshed out in an expansion, but for me this was a major fail in design, especially considering SWG had the Jump to Light Speed xpac years ago.
Next major problem with the game is the character creator. In a galaxy filled with hundreds of types of aliens you only have a choice of humanoid aliens to play. Basically all of the characters look human barring skin color and minor facial structure features, sorta like all the aliens on Star Trek the Next Generation. Bioware can use whatever excuse they want, but the basic reasoning behind this was design laziness. All of the characters use the same 4 body types with basically a different head. It would have actually been work to design different animations for alien body types, and its obvious this wasnt the design goal of the game. All of the emphasis was put on designing the voice acting, which in the long run is overrated. (see more on this later) I was seriously expecting a City of Heroes type character generator where you could make up an alien species.
The class system in the game is actually decent, with four archtypes each with 2 advanced classes for a total of 8 classes per faction. Most of the classes tend to mirror each other on the opposite faction. The problem with the class system is its basically copy and pasted from WoW, even though the designers spent a lot of time heralding how their system would be different both class and boss fight wise which is a complete lie. For example the Jedi/Sith Warrior class is pretty much a copy and paste of the WoW warrior:
http://glosslip.com/entertainment/gaming/article/how-and-why-star-wars-the1/page-2/
The fanboi defense for this will be 'every mmo warrior has skills like this' but look at the skills+ descriptions and decide for yourself. Some are exact carbon copies except the name is just a lil different.
That said, this wouldnt actually be a problem if the game actually played fluidly. The BIGGEST issue with SWTOR is how the game actually is controlled and plays.
1. The UI is terrible. The UI is incredibly basic and lacks many many standard features that any 'next-gen' mmo should have. The game lacks target of target, doesnt have enough action bars, the UI cannot be resized or moved, it lacks macros and keybinds. The Auction house interface is terrible. It has had all sorts of technical problems that persisted from beta to launch like the raid frames not displaying the correct health for your raid members. When I first played the game in the last beta phase it was the first thing I noticed and hundreds of beta testers complained about it but Bioware basically ignored the issues and they made it into launch. Typical fanboi defense for this is 'my UI works fine you just need to L2P' But if you dont see how having no target of target or raid frames showing inaccurate health numbers is terrible for both tanks and healing the game is destined to fail. I have a feeling that the UI was designed by one of the lead designers and the rest of the team was too afraid to tell their boss that the design sucked which is why the design made it into the launch version. I can tell what they were trying to do with the UI is make it incorporate into the story-mode of the game, but overall the design is very clunky olf-fashioned and cumbersome. Granted the do have a few updates coming, but for a game that was in development for 6 years how this was overlooked and suddenyl realized to be important after launch only when ppl start quitting emphasizes how the developers fail when making this game.
2. The combat in the game was designed around 'cinematic action'. What this means is the game uses elaborate character animations for 'cinematic effect' when your character performs skills. The flaw in this design is that it doesnt sync well with the engine they used for the game which is causing all sorts of ability delays/stuttering/and misfires. The way the game is designed, abilities dont actually fire until the character completes their animations, which is actually has the potential to be unique and make for some interesting new style combat. But in SWTOR this was poorly designed which makes the combat feel very clunky and laggy. I personally feel there is a client serve sync issue, and people in having problems with high rez textures have noted that there are character model copy protection files that require the client to take an extra step to talk ot the server before rendering which is probably causing a bunch of the sync issues. Often times abilities just dont fire but reset the GCD, or they take so long to activate that they are useless like interrupts in pvp. Another flaw in this design is that your character cant perform actions until they finish the current animation they are doing. Which sounds good in theory and on paper but it practice comes out terrible. A prime example being that its possible to be stunlocked as a tank by your own defensive animations. Say you try to tank a group of 5-6 mobs and they are all firing blasters at you. If you are a jedi tank, your character can get stuck doing blaster block animations which prevents you from doing any other actions, which is a major fail in design, as you lose threat doing block animations that you have no control over. I personally believe they omitted a combat long on purpose because they knew it would reflect these bugs in the combat system at launch.
There have been dozens of maxed threads about this problem in beta and after launch, all of which were culminated into this thread and video:
thread on SWTOR forums-
http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=227621&page=18
Video explaining issue-
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=33rZGc3EpZM
To give Bioware credit, they *finally* acknowledged the issue after having countless people post videos and complain and supposedly have fixes in the works, but just the way they handled the issue (wouldnt admit that it was happening/ignored all the complaints about it during beta) was really bad and made a lot of people quit the game. Its exactly how Funcom handled these type of issues at Age of Conans' launch which basically made their game fail.
3. Failed game designs and exploits in game at launch. Because the game was so buggy and Bioware doesnt take criticism well, the game launched with a number of huge exploitable bugs. At launch there were item duping issues as well as boss exploits and crafting exploits. There was also many exploits in the endgame PvP zone which basically let one faction camp their way to maxed pvp gear in 4-6 hours, permanently causing pvp imbalance on some servers. Bioware also failed to test the actual endgame in beta since they did a character wipe after almost every beta phase so the game launched with very buggy raid bosses that sometimes didnt drop loot and had placeholder names like, 'raid boss 1' in game.
SWTOR isnt a total failure and did do a few things right. The companion system and the story quest system are interesting. The only major criticism I have is later into the game 75% of the voice acting is all done in 'galactic basic' the alien Star Wars language, which kinda defeats the purpose of having voice acting since you have to read the subtitles anyway. While cool at first, after 30-40 levels it gets pretty tiresome listening to long conversations with guys 'blathering in a made up alien language. They should have just used the alien language sporadically for effect instead of having almost all the npcs speak alien and you having to read the subtitles anyway. The Clone Wars tv show has aliens speaking english and it doesnt break 'immersion' this is something I thought they should have recognized as well.
All in all the way the game is designed it is heavily phased and doesnt really feel like an MMO. there are a number of other minor issues that are also very annoying (like any class being able to need loot for your class so everyone basically needs gear for their companions and makes it hard to gear up) and overall the game just feels incomplete. They spent most of the huge budget on the gimmicks instead of the core mechanics and the game just feels very generic. Star Wars fanbois will love it to death and defend all of its faults with excuses, but overal just the mechanical problems and exploits in the game make the game a chore to play, which is something a game isnt supposed to do.
If you are a Star wars fan, its worth picking up to play thru the story modes because it plays pretty much like the Mass Effect or KoToR RPGs when played solo, but I dont really see the game having any long term replayability due to current mechanical problems.
If they fix the bugs it would be playable, but if Bioware's response to the pushback from its playerbase is any indication (basically locking/deleting posts that criticize the game and/or ignoring issues that have been complained about for months in the beta) it probably wont get fixed any time soon. Especially when the same designers working on this game worked on Warhammer Online and basically incorporated a bunch of the same flaws and bugs from that game.
For me, its not worth the money or time to play a game that needs so much work to fix it to actually be enjoyable.