It's hard to point to any one thing, because for me there was a whole list of things that caused a rather drab experience despite my completly batshit insane love for Star Wars.  I didn't even make it much past level 30 before I was bored to tears.

If I had to put it in a nutshell though, I would say it was just too "themeparky".  And I say that in the spirit of someone who thinks GW2's PvE gameplay is pretty damned good despite being mostly typical themepark fare. (it's no secret I'm a sandbox lover)  SWTOR felt so devoid of environment, so linear and scripted, so contrived and drull that I didn't once feel like I was playing a Star Wars game.

What I mean by that is that you can't just put some light sabers in a otherwise weak experience, and make me feel like I'm in a Star Wars world.  The now ancient Star Wars Galaxies does this a thousand times more effectlively despite its many flaws.

GW2 is what I would consider state of the art themepark PvE, even though I wish it was more hybrid.  SWTOR felt more like MMO-lite to me both in gameplay and spirit.  The cut scenes, as cool as some believe them to be, could not rescue a lackluster game.  Bioware put way too much work into story, and not enough into everything else, and frankly, the stories were juvenile at best.

Originally posted by DavisFlight
Instances.

 Well you might as well never play another MMO ever again. I don't see many un-instanced games release in the last 5 years or even the near future. Good luck with that one. Hell, even SWG had instances.

To the question , a complete and through lack space experience. Just flying around on rails doesn't cut it. If as rumored they added something akin to Freelancer, I'm in for a long time. If they make it mesh , then even better.

Originally posted by AG-Vuk

Originally posted by DavisFlight
Instances.

 Well you might as well never play another MMO ever again. I don't see many un-instanced games release in the last 5 years or even the near future. Good luck with that one. Hell, even SWG had instances.

Vanguard, Darkfall, Planetside 2.

Even GW2 has minimal instances.

All the best MMORPGs have little to no instancing. Some "MMOs" have so much instancing I really wouldn't even call them MMORPGs. WoW clones have to much instancing. Good MMOs do not.

But on top of the abuse of instancing, SWTOR was just a stupid WoW clone with absolutely no attempt to make it a social game.

You guys, it was not worse than what was WoW during its early days, heck it was dare i say even better - much less bugs, no server downtime, and PVP that altough had some issues was there and working(yeah illum was a bust, but heck who remebers AV?).

The community, thats the haters that just moaned all day on and off(in game that is) the forums just made me want to stop playing it. There is little to enjoy when everyone is bashing on the game you're playing, people did not want to raid(EV was a hell of allot better than MC especially before they made alot of fixes to it) they prefered spending that same amount of time trolling in guild chat about how bad the game was, the content was not bad even tough i had to skip like 3-4 planets due to out leveling but since i PVPed a ton while leveling and the XP from that was pretty insane thats a bit my fault too. And the PVP was actually fun, yeah it had allot of CC so what? it was not like WoW Vanilla rogue stun lock -> death bad, all classes had tons of it and one on one fights for all classes took a while and were engaging and fun.

SWTOR was not a bad game, it just wasnt the 2nd comming people expected, but it is allot better than most people give it credit for, i dont expect the same from an MMO as it do from any other game because MMO's are ment to be played for years and grow and evolve.

I would not buy an FPS that does not give me a better exprience than say CoD or BF, but i dont mind playing an MMO that is "not as good" as as the previous one, since i want to exprience somthing new. No matter what you do you cant just compete with the level of polish and the amount of content an older game will have. And sadly untill people realize that they wil never get that great game they are looking for, and no dont say GW2, GW2 even compared to day 0 WoW a has laughable amount of content, horrible game breaking bugs, and a ton of gameplay issues.

It felt to me like WoW in space.

the gameplay on rails. the space aspect of the game (what aspect?). the small "worlds". the Spacebarring. the uggly clothese. the unfinished graphics. the fast travel. the class inbalance. it all felt so....small and funnelled.

Hutball was actually kind of fun...if not for the Sorc God class.

The Hero Engine breaking randomly everytime they changwed something.It's worsening performance since launch and the ridiculous load times for planets of a decent size.

The after Launch developement which was directionless and released lots of updates but each update was tiny in content compared to similar MMORPGs.

Their total failure in Illum and any open PvP area.

The pulling of rated Wzs less than a day before suppsoed launch then taking another 3 months for it to appear by which tiem I didn't care anymore.

The short and for the most part easy end game instances.it woudl take a night or 2 to leanr bosses and thne you could finish all the raiding and small party instances in 2-3 hours  if you chose too.

Their constant revamping of their token systems for PvE and PvP mostly to artificially  create money and time sinks to a game they knew had very little end game content.

I quit for the following reasons:

1) Open world PvP was missing.   Not just Ilum, which was a disaster, but even open world PvP on PvP servers was practically non-existent.  Furthermore, open world PvP never had an impact on anything....

2) Persistant class imbalances for PvP.  Every ranked warzone has powertechs and marauders for DPS....nothing else is wanted.  Might be a clue as to what is overpowered and what is underpowered....yet developers continue to ignore it.

3) Played the same 4 warzones too many times.  Wish there was some variety, since there isn't any open world PvP.

4) Themepark PvE to the extreme.  I don't mind themepark per se, but this was too extreme.  You HAD to do the class quests, and light side and dark side choices had no impact other than graphics, which you could turn off.  What a joke.  Why even put in light-side and dark side options?

5) It's a single-player game at its heart because of the companions.  This was just too much like the previous console versions that was shoved into an MMO, which was a mistake.

Frustrated to say the least.  I played for a long time, but just couldn't take it anymore without fixing Ilum, class balances and adding more warzones.

The hero engine

Ilum not working and being ignored by the developers when they allowed the ilum objectives to be completed with battlegrounds

endgame pve was dull.

I only enjoyed 1 pvp map, huttball, the rest were tired and boring mechanics. i couldnt chose which pvp match i joined and after ilum was ignored and dead , and pve endgame was boring and pain to get into even if you wanted to...queuing pvp for one map i liked killed it.

Had a solid progression, was entertaining, even after a few runs through.

Ilum had so much potential but the hero engine didnt allow for everyone who wanted to participate in it to do so.  Also mechanically the persistant battleground was designed as follows " strong side camps weak sides base...base instant kills you"

It should have offerd seige weapons inside the base, but also the ability for people to over run and sack the base...perhaps adding several bases across that map that were desigend to be ninja'ed by small groups but giving them the ability to defend against a zerg...

All illum was was big standoffs, lag, and boring objectives that were never really faught over, and it offers nothing to make it fun for either the zerg side or the weak side.  Boring for both weak/zerg but also boring when even matched.

I did however find the questing on the pve side of ilum offerd occasional fun pvp encounters...

First off the character creation wasn't anything special. Then with the Legacy system you could play the races you went to end game with on the other faction side...instead of doing some work and introducing actual "alien" races - who are all over in the game world.

Playing on a pvp server, to the end game on both factions, was very un-pvp. Some planets allowed this, other planets were instanced for you to never see the other faction.

Their first major overhaul of the warzones killed the pvp for me.

And of course the lifeless / souless worlds - that didn't have much value to them after you passed through once. Going back for the after-quests were some of the worse experiences I had and heard others talking about. Your character's major story may have some backtracking to the major planets for your faction, but then you'd just fly off.  NPC companions had some interactions on planets, one reason to go back and possibly fight something super easy.

And then running out of story, for a mostly single player game - that was nice, i'll go play the other faction then quit. I did play a lot of this game in a group too.