This game starts out fun but by the time you hit 50 you're going to really really hate it.I'll do a mini-review here.
GAMEPLAY
The most important thing about a game is without a doubt gameplay. ToR just flat out fails in this department. I'm playing a Sith Inquisitor Assassin (Jedi Counselar Shadow mirror) which is the equivelant of a rogue in WoW. Rogues have "energy", Assassins have "force". Now, Bioware thought that auto-attack is stupid because it doesn't involve any participation, you just enable it and that's it. I agree, I prefer more control as well. Instead of removing auto-attack and boosting energy/force regen, they reduced energy/force regen and introduced a low-damage attack that does barely any damage and has no cost. I call it "Manual auto-attack", because it is.
Now you're wondering, what's the problem? Your "Manual auto-attack" does barely any damage. It's roughly 10% hp of a same-level weak mob, and 1-2% of a strong mob and also trigger the GCD (Global Cooldown). Now imagine having to spam that 50% of the time. Sound like fun huh?
On top of that the game is just unresponsive. I'm not sure what it is but there's always some sort of delay. It just does not feel fluid.
My next gripe, the amount of copy/pasting is truely disgusting. (1) Stealth = Stealth, (2) Thrash = Sinister Strike, (3) Maul = Backstab, (4) Low Slash = Gouge, (5) Force Cloak = Vanish, (6) Lacerate/Wither/Discharge(LC) = Fan of Knives with different costs/cooldowns/effects, (7) Electrocute = 4sec Kidney Shot, (8) Recklessness = Cold Blood, (9) Force Speed = Short Sprint, (10) Jolt = Kick, (11) Mind Trap = Sap, (12) Assassinate = Eviscerate for sub-30% targets (basicly Execute), (13) Force Shroud = 3sec Cloak of Shadows, (14) Spike = 2sec Cheap Shot, (15) Crushing Darkness = Rupture with cast-time, (16) Whirlwind = Blind with cast-time. (17) Deflection = Combat Readiness with a twist.
Add (18) "Manual Auto-attack" and (19) Unbreakable Will (PvP Trinket) and your bar is pretty much full (24 spots). Despite all this there's barely any synergy, it just feels like you're chaining random moves as opposed to the combo-system in WoW. It's not perfect in WoW, but sure as hell beats this crap.
I basicly mapped out all these abilities the same as my rogue in WoW so I was a pro from the get-go.
STORY
Only 2 seem to jump out from what I've heard. The Sith Warrior & Imperial Agent storylines. The rest, including Sith Inquisitor, is just ... it doesn't even compare to a B-movie for god's sake. Now the problem is that everything has fully-voiced cutscenes. Now for the main storyline this is pretty nice, I'm just not satisfied with the story but the whole presentation is pretty decent. But for every single quest? It's a grind and nothing changes that really, at the end of the conversation it's the same ****: Go kill # amount of people/aliens/whatever. I'm just spacebarring through conversations after a while because you really don't care.
I changed some words/bits as to not spoil anything, this is basicly a summary of the class storyline for one of the 8 classes: Every class storyline is divided into 3 acts. In the first act my "buddy" commanded me to go search for 4 items, which were on 4 different planets. Each planet requires a higher level, in each you gain roughly 3-4 levels. So out of the 50 levels I have to level 12-16 to finally progress to the next part of the story. Act 2: Go collect 4 "other things" from 4 different planets. Act 3: Go find a "solution" on the next 2 planets, but go level on 2 other random planets first to get to the appropiate level to be able to visit those planets. You've got to level soooooo much to finally be able to progress the story, it just becomes a drag.
Why not put the entire budget for all 8 storylines together to make one very epic storyline EVERY class can participate in and a couple of small class-related quests?
DIALOGUE
This stuff makes no sense. I can assassinate every alien up till the boss and not get a single dark/light point, but it's not OK to kill the leader? It's not even OK to kill traitors which caused the deaths of millions of aliens/people?
Certain dialogue options don't even correspond with what your character ends up saying, but ultimately you won't care. Why? Certain items require Light/Dark I/II/III levels. Also, your compagnions will lose/gain affection depending on the dialogue option you pick. The higher the affection the better they perform.
If you don't go all Light or all Dark (human beings tend to be shades of grey) and end up around neutral/grey there's absolutely no gain and a lot to lose. You'll have to pass on some fine gear. Same for compagnions, if you pick whatever YOU want, your compagnions are not going to perform as they could have.
Instead of restricting the choices you make to only have an impact on the storyline, they also let it affect your gear progress/compagnion's performance which both hamper your progression through the game. You might think this has a minor impact but it doesn't. A large % of the people simply pick the Dark/Light choice just to get the points, not caring at all about what that might mean story-wise.
GRAPHICS
This game does not run well on low-end machines. By low-end I mean machines that can run Crysis 2/Skyrim decently but be met with a lot of stuttering, choppy animations, and many many other issues in this game. Why is this? Maybe because ... they build their entire game on an unproven, not finished yet game engine? Say what!??!?! Yeah.
This article from Gamasutra goes into some detail.
END
There are a lot more issues with this game but I can't be bothered with mentioning them all. When I was playing WoW I complained a lot, about the lack of world PVP, flipflip-balance between ****s, certain flawed game-mechanics. I considered WoW the McDonalds of MMOs, good enough as long you play it casual. ToR has given me an unbelievable amount of respect for WoW, ToR manages to deliver food that is worse than McDonalds.
I'd like to end with this. This is also the the tl;dr: "Bioware developers making a joke out of themselves, lying with a straight face"-YOUTUBE VID.
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