After having experienced two Beta weekends now, I have to finally say something somewhere about this game.  That something is that I'm highly disappointed in this installment of the Star Wars franchise!

TL;DR VERSION:  Star Wars: The Old Republic is simply more of the same old garbage that you've seen in every other WoW clone to date.  It is less refined, less polished and you're simply trading swords for lightsabers.  Their single point of ingenuity is an abundance of voice acting which takes the same exact dialogue options found in any other game and puts a voice to them.  It has zero longevity and will probably hemmorage the majority of it's player base within 3-4 months of release as players finish the main storylines and realize that WoW, EQ2... ect offer the same end game experience with more polish, customizable UI's and better graphics.

Back to my highly opinionated review:  This game pretty much takes the worst part of MMO's and puts them all in one place.  I work better with lists, so let me list out the issues that drive me crazy:

1)  Bind on Pickup, Bind on Equip.  This is one of the most immersion breaking aspects of MMO worlds in existence.  My first MMO experience was EVE and it has set the bar extremely high.  If I want to fit laser beams on my Hurricane, then I put the damn laser beams on there.  No, I don't get any bonuses for using the wrong weapon on the ship, but at least I have the choice to do whatever I damn well please.  This extends to finding a lightsaber that I don't want or need and not having the option to give it to my buddy just because I equipped it once.  Apparently there's this magic superglue in MMO land that permanently attaches items to one single player at which point your options are to use it or throw it away.  How ridiculous.  I can't believe people aren't up in arms that this convention is still being copied ad nauseum from World of Warcrap.

If you need people to keep questing for items, then simply give items a chance of loss on death or make it to where a weapon can only be repaired so many times before it needs to be replaced.  Poof, no need to glue everything to everyone anymore.  If game items can be lost or destroyed through game means, then people will need to keep searching for them just in case the one they have breaks or gets lost on death.  Not only that, but it creates a vibrant economy where crafters will know that there will always be a need for their products rather than selling it to someone once and now they'll have it forever and never need your item again.

2)  Classes.  Yay, another MMO with the class system lifted right out of 1970's Advanced Dungeons & Dragons.  *puke*.  Can we please let this convention go?  Are we really this imagineless when it comes to creating games?  Why can't I make a character with Attributes and Skills and then play what I want to play?  Hey BioWare, Gary Gygax called from fourty years ago and wants his antiquated and clunky character system back.  Give us Attributes, then let us choose from a list of skills and advantages. 

For instance, if  I want to create a double bladed lightsaber wielding Jedi who wears heavy armor and has a small amount of skill in blaster pistols, then I should damn well be able to.  If you're afraid that force powers and heavy armor are too powerful a combination, then give force powers a percent chance to fail that grows higher with heavier sets of armor.  See?  That took me less than two seconds worth of imagination to balance heavy armor and magic.  You think that Jedi that can use heavy blasters might be game breaking?  Well there's a way to mitigate that with a teeny bit of imagination.  If you want to play a Jedi, then you need to buy into an advantage called Force Mastery.  Different force powers and combat stances require a higher level of Force Mastery, therefore if you want to be a decent Jedi, then you won't really have enough points left over to spend on heavy blasters anyhow.

3)  Inventory.  Why why oh why do games still have slotted inventories?  I can carry 50 sets of heavy armor chest pieces or 50 pieces of chewing gum.  They all take up the same amount of space on my character, and when I run out of that space, well, I just couldn't possibly carry another stick of gum.  But If I take one stick of gum off of my character, then I can suddenly carry an Ewok in my left cargo pocket.  Give each item a weight and give our characters a carrying weight limit based off our combined strength and endurance attribute.

4)  Levels.  This goes along with classes.  The 70's are calling again and this time their getting ready to sue for plagiarism.  Levels are so boring and old school.  Oh, you're a level 50 Sentinel.  Well, I know exactly what you can do to me since you're just a cookie cutter, carbon copy of all the other level 50 sentinels in the game.  Instead, they should have quests reward us with force points that we can either invest into attributes at a high exchange rate or skills and advantages at a lower exchange rate.  Then we can make the character that we want to play instead of the one we're shoehorned into.

5)  Space Combat.  I'm having a hard time even trying to figure out what StarFox is doing in my Star Wars MMO.  What the crap is this pure utter garbage BioWare?  I know you guys have meetings to discuss content.  You know the guy that stood up and said "Hey, lets put StarFox in the game and call it space combat"?  Yeah.  Fire his ass.  Then fire the guy who said "Hey, that's a great idea!".  If you didn't have enough time to develop good space combat, then just don't do it!  Tell us it will be in a future expansion and leave it the hooha alone!  ... and for heavens sake, if you're going to copy someone elses game then why didn't you copy X-Wing or Tie Fighter?

6)  Character creation.  Honestly, if you're not going to put sliders in the game that allow us to modify our characters in every shape and size, then don't bother with character creation at all.  This system has to be one fo the worst I've ever seen in my life.  If you want some inspiration, then go download the free trial of EVE and create a few characters in that game, then redesign this crap.  The short skinny body type is absurdly short and skinny and the big fat body type is a beached whale.  Now I realize that I was just testing the beta and maybe the character creator was simply limited to a few options, but with only a couple of weeks to go until full release I don't see a lot of possible changes here.

7) Character progression.  Go to place "X" and kill a bajillion of "Y" and bring their lower intestines to "Z" has been done before.  In fact, it's been done to freaking death.  You've beat the dead horse so much now that it's just a pile of organic goo.  Not only that, but it makes absolutely no sense that my Light Side Jedi needs to go slaughter 50+ justicars to complete a quest... especially when I just finished another side quest that shows the Justicars treating their prisoners fairly and honorably.  "Just don't do it" some of you will say like some anti Nike spokepeople.  Well, if I "just didn't do it", then I'd never gain a level past 10 during the entire game. 

I never complain without providing an alternative, so here it is:  Instead of slaughting our way through thousands of innocent people who inexplicably attack us for walking within some arbitrary agression bubble, let us have fewer and more meaningful fights.  Give us situations where we know that there's a sith presence in the Black Sun territory, but we don't know where, so we have to talk to NPC's, hack terminals and use the force in other interesting ways in order to locate this sith operative and then we need to carfully plan our attack.  For instance, we find out that he's operating out of room X and wth a little research we discover that room X runs directly under a main hot water pipe so we send a droid in to make sure that the water pipe bursts just before we attack which distracts him and causes hot water damage... ect.  So many imaginative ways to have character progression without wholesale slaughter.

... and don't ever send my highly trained and skilled Jedi to fetch some ridiculous item that a droid could go pick up and bring back.  It IS beneath my character and his/her abilities.

8)  Tab Targeting.  This is really boring.  Tab+1+2+3, Tab+1+2+3, Tab+1+2+3, Oh this ones epic so +4,+5,+6... *puke*.  There's a game that came out in 2008 that pretty much had the perfect combat system.  That, much disregarded, game was called Age of Conan, and although it failed very hard on so many levels it did give us one of the best combat systems I've ever used.  You walk up to what you want to fight, hit a combo hotkey and then you have to push some other keys to execute whatever combo you want to execute... oh and if your sword, spear, giant hairy banana manages to hit three enemies facing you, then you damage all three of them!  How novel!

9)  World on rails.  What's the point of playing a game if everything is spelled out for you and you're simply guided straight down a walled in path?  That's what a movie or TV show is... you get the same experience every time you watch it.  A game should have the ability to have a different experience every time you play it.  If there's an island that we need to assault, then put it out there, let us find it and let us plan our own way in past the guards and defences.  Instead we get a straight path right to the door that we aren't allowed to veer off of because if we do, then there's this magic invisible force field that tells us we just went off the railroad tracks and how dare we try to play the game our way!  They wrote it and dammit, we're going to experience exactly what they want us to experience!  How dare you, sir, want to approach the island facility from it's less guarded western approach and sneak through the pineapple plantation unnoticed to one of the rear air ducts and crawl past the guards to drop down on the sith lord from behind!  That simply wouldn't be as fun as beating up and a bajillion pixel punching bags along a straight path to your target!

10) Graphics.  Again, I realized that we've only played the beta so far, but there's really only so much more they can do with the engine they are using and it's not much.  If the goal was to create a cartoony game that everyone can play, then why not go the shaded cell route like Borderlands.  If it's going to have a comic book feel, then go the extra mile and make it look like a comic book.  I'm really starting to believe that this game powered by the same engine that KOTR and KOTR II were powered by.  It doesn't look all that much better to be honest and those games were both released last decade.  If you don't want photrealism, then don't do it, but this halfway in between stuff is just painful to look at after playing Witcher 2, EVE, Age of Conan and Skyrim.

On a final note I'd just like to say that I'm sick and tired of playing the same game over and over with a different skin and a different name.  I pre-ordered it long ago and therefore I will play through the main quest line on a couple of characters, but then it will go right on the shelf beside all the other WoW clones while I pack up and go back to a game where I'm not shoved in a tiny box and pointed at my next target like a guided missile.

Yes as a sandbox type of player myself theme park games seem pretty bad..

I had a hope that ToR would be story/ theme park/ with a few sandbox elements on the crafting, exploring and market side.

But its just more of the same old... Not a next gen MMO imo.

Originally posted by h0urg1ass

After having experienced two Beta weekends now, I have to finally say something somewhere about this game.  That something is that I'm highly disappointed in this installment of the Star Wars franchise!

 

On a final note I'd just like to say that I'm sick and tired of playing the same game over and over with a different skin and a different name.  I pre-ordered it long ago and therefore I will play through the main quest line on a couple of characters, but then it will go right on the shelf beside all the other WoW clones while I pack up and go back to a game where I'm not shoved in a tiny box and pointed at my next target like a guided missile.

 

 I actually read your review. You have some of the same problem others have said in theirs as well. Some of them, people don't see a problem with. Most of them I couldn't look past if I played. 

The part that bothers me is the ending. I understand you are very unhappy and sick of the same ol. I just wonder why you are keeping a Pre order and planning on playing through it a couple times. I would think if you were as dissappointed as your review seems to imply, then you would cancel your preorder and not give the devs your money. Seems kinda ass backwards to complain and then give them your money.  

Long winded, very negative...but with this many gripes, why are you planning on running through a few alts? 

Originally posted by h0urg1ass

After having experienced two Beta weekends now, I have to finally say something somewhere about this game.  That something is that I'm highly disappointed in this installment of the Star Wars franchise!

{mod edit}  I must say I like your Review, the game sounds exacly what I thought it would be... Nothing new under the sun "this is not the GAME you are looking for"

Thanx for taking your time to write this.. sorry you are going to get trashed for speaking the truth....

How shocking!?

Who would have thought that a sandbox-oriented player would be dissatisfied with this game? I don't think I have ever heard any of these complaints before!

/sarcasm

Seriously... we all knew exactly what this game was going to be like for a very long time now. If you honestly expected something different, you haven't been paying attention to the wealth of information that has been released about it. Clearly this formula is not going to be enough for someone like yourself. Why even bother playing?

Originally posted by FlawSGI

Originally posted by h0urg1ass

After having experienced two Beta weekends now, I have to finally say something somewhere about this game.  That something is that I'm highly disappointed in this installment of the Star Wars franchise!

 

On a final note I'd just like to say that I'm sick and tired of playing the same game over and over with a different skin and a different name.  I pre-ordered it long ago and therefore I will play through the main quest line on a couple of characters, but then it will go right on the shelf beside all the other WoW clones while I pack up and go back to a game where I'm not shoved in a tiny box and pointed at my next target like a guided missile.

 

 I actually read your review. You have some of the same problem others have said in theirs as well. Some of them, people don't see a problem with. Most of them I couldn't look past if I played. 

The part that bothers me is the ending. I understand you are very unhappy and sick of the same ol. I just wonder why you are keeping a Pre order and planning on playing through it a couple times. I would think if you were as dissappointed as your review seems to imply, then you would cancel your preorder and not give the devs your money. Seems kinda ass backwards to complain and then give them your money.  

Yes, this^

Originally posted by Narcin1

Long winded, very negative...but with this many gripes, why are you planning on running through a few alts? 

Zactly.  If I felt that way about a game that a person would HAVE to feel about a game in order to take the time to peck out a wall of Eeyorric prose, you couldn't PAY me to play that game, let alone preorder it.

While I do understand the sentiment of the OP, why did you believe there was a chance this game would live up to any of your recommendations/expectations? I'm sure you did some research before playing the beta, or did you?

So far, SWTOR has lived up to what the developers elucidated early on.

Originally posted by Ibanezguitar

While I do understand the sentiment of the OP, why did you believe there was a chance this game would live up to any of your recommendations/expectations? I'm sure you did some research before playing the beta, or did you?

 

So far, SWTOR has lived up to what the developers elucidated early on.

Actually, I spent the better part of the last year in Iraq and just got home 12 days ago with a beta invite in my mailbox, so no, while all the rest of the people on this site were gaming their hours away I was dodging IED's and rocket attacks and not reading up about the latest MMO news.  :)

And for the rest of you, the only reason I'm going to play is because I preordered without doing my due diligence and I'm going to play through at least one character's story since that seems to be the only redeeming quality coming out of a 120+ million investment in development.

He lost me when he said EQ2 had more polish... Also, first post from this guy. SOE employee?

What is curious is that the OP states that both Everquest 2 and World of Warcraft have better graphics than Old Republic, which is simply not true.

Also better UI and polish, yes because they are both well seasoned games having been released years ago.

Old Republic is in beta and from what i hear, all its graphical options weren't enabled in the beta thats just been. Let the game launch and have a few months to flesh out and come to life before coming here to complain about the game.

And on a final note like others have said, if you are a sandbox fan then yes this is not the game for you, and its been known since its announcement that it was not going to be or was ever intended to be a sandbox.

unfortunately it isn't Galaxies and unfortunately there is no real game with sandbox potential coming out anytime soon except for Archage, which i will be looking foreward to.

Hm.. a pro-sandbox post without a mention of SWG.. rare.. Props.

Originally posted by h0urg1ass

Originally posted by Ibanezguitar

While I do understand the sentiment of the OP, why did you believe there was a chance this game would live up to any of your recommendations/expectations? I'm sure you did some research before playing the beta, or did you?

 

So far, SWTOR has lived up to what the developers elucidated early on.

 

Actually, I spent the better part of the last year in Iraq and just got home 12 days ago with a beta invite in my mailbox, so no, while all the rest of the people on this site were gaming their hours away I was dodging IED's and rocket attacks and not reading up about the latest MMO news.  :)

And for the rest of you, the only reason I'm going to play is because I preordered without doing my due diligence and I'm going to play through at least one character's story since that seems to be the only redeeming quality coming out of a 120+ million investment in development.

You can always cancel the preorder. I did, and then I pre-ordered again lol.. So on the fence with this game.

Originally posted by ghettobooste

He lost me when he said EQ2 had more polish... Also, first post from this guy. SOE employee?

I work for L3 communications, Command and Control, Systems & Software division as a Field Software Engineer.  I'm most definitely not an employee of any game company.  Also, if you stop at the first thing you don't agree with, then good luck getting through college. lol

You know, if I hate something I usually do not take an hour of my time to bash it as I have better things to do. If I play a game and hate it, I put it on the shelf and move along and let others decide for themselves.

FYI, I've been in beta and have greatly enjoyed my time playing TOR.

Originally posted by ghettobooste

Originally posted by h0urg1ass

Originally posted by Ibanezguitar

While I do understand the sentiment of the OP, why did you believe there was a chance this game would live up to any of your recommendations/expectations? I'm sure you did some research before playing the beta, or did you?

 

So far, SWTOR has lived up to what the developers elucidated early on.

 

Actually, I spent the better part of the last year in Iraq and just got home 12 days ago with a beta invite in my mailbox, so no, while all the rest of the people on this site were gaming their hours away I was dodging IED's and rocket attacks and not reading up about the latest MMO news.  :)

And for the rest of you, the only reason I'm going to play is because I preordered without doing my due diligence and I'm going to play through at least one character's story since that seems to be the only redeeming quality coming out of a 120+ million investment in development.

You can always cancel the preorder. I did, and then I pre-ordered again lol.. So on the fence with this game.

I'm also not cancelling the pre order because my 11 year old son and 9 year old daughter will probably have lots of fun playig it after I walk away.  It's about right for their age.  I like how people are attacking that and not the actual content of my post.  Must mean most people silently agree, but have to find some point of contention to bitch about.

EQ2 is polished. SWTOR still  has some rough edges (graphical bugs, etc)....

But to compare the two is silly. One has been out for years. One is still in beta. And those kinds of problems are fixable, and quickly.

The main question is: Is it fun? I had a blast both of my weekends. It wasn't the "Same ol' same ol'" to me, and I've played every western MMO out there except for UO. Sure, it has a lot in common with the rest, why shouldn't it? Quests, items, achievements, levels... smells like.... AN RPG! Wow!

And there really won't be anything new under the sun for MMORPGs. What's left to do?  First Person shooters are the same "rut" since Quake 1 if you use this logic.

And the classless rant again. Sigh. Skyrim doesn't have classes. Yet I've managed to make a thief, a mage, and a warrior! I also made a thief/mage/warrior multiclass! Yet it doesn't have classes.... every game has classes, even the classless ones, its delusional to think otherwise.

Dude... I could have saved you all 10 pages of your dissertation... next time just say "SW:TOR is a themepark, not a sandbox" and save yourself the trouble.

Or don't... given that everybody on this site has know for years that was going to be the case.

Seriously?  "OMG they use INVENTORY SLOTS!"  That's it... cancel my pre-order... this game is going to fail.  

LOL.

Originally posted by dreamsofwar

What is curious is that the OP states that both Everquest 2 and World of Warcraft have better graphics than Old Republic, which is simply not true.

Also better UI and polish, yes because they are both well seasoned games having been released years ago.

Old Republic is in beta and from what i hear, all its graphical options weren't enabled in the beta thats just been. Let the game launch and have a few months to flesh out and come to life before coming here to complain about the game.

And on a final note like others have said, if you are a sandbox fan then yes this is not the game for you, and its been known since its announcement that it was not going to be or was ever intended to be a sandbox.

unfortunately it isn't Galaxies and unfortunately there is no real game with sandbox potential coming out anytime soon except for Archage, which i will be looking foreward to.

Sandbox was the ONLY thing going for SWG. Beyond that SWG sucked!

Secret World is pretty close to a sandbox coming out and will be interested in that along WITH TOR