AI or not, a story has to be internally consistent. Rewards should be related to what was done or not done.

You hunt down and recover a lost treasure, at least see a treaure and/or get some of it. Your character raids a shipyard and slices terminals for advanced ship designs, wouldn't it make more sense to get a ship upgrade or a craftable blueprint then a handfull of credits and a pat on the back?

From what I could see the Empire side storylines were much better, and had better flow than the Republic. Likely a hold over from 'Mass Effect' and 'Dragons Age' where being the bad guy was ever so much more interesting play than the altruistic hero.

They cannot  animate cutscenes individually GTA4-style like you suggest, because it costs too much.

Here's a hint.  GTA4 cost over $100m.   It's campaign lasts probably 20 hours at most.   SW:TOR has 2 faction storyline, each about 200 hours, so that's 400 hours, plus 8 storyline each about 20 hours, so that's an additional 160 hours.    Total=560 hours of storyline.Now, presumably a game like GTA will have a higher 'cutscene density', but even so, there is HUGE difference between those two numbers.

Also, GTA's storytelling is a joke.  Immature, boring, trying-to-be-funny, lame, graphically poor (even in GTA4 which is a current gen singleplayer game so should have pretty good graphics), full of unlikeable characters and bad animation.   

Frankly, I'd much rather play SW:TOR.

As to the whole 'good and evil' thing, THAT'S STAR WARS.  It's a morally black-and-white universe.   Jedi are good, Sith are evil.  You can't change that, it's part of the core mythology, and books that go outside of that are generally fringe stuff.  

Originally posted by CyclopsSlayer

AI or not, a story has to be internally consistent. Rewards should be related to what was done or not done.

You hunt down and recover a lost treasure, at least see a treaure and/or get some of it. Your character raids a shipyard and slices terminals for advanced ship designs, wouldn't it make more sense to get a ship upgrade or a craftable blueprint then a handfull of credits and a pat on the back?

 

From what I could see the Empire side storylines were much better, and had better flow than the Republic. Likely a hold over from 'Mass Effect' and 'Dragons Age' where being the bad guy was ever so much more interesting play than the altruistic hero.

I agree that the writing for Empire was stronger. My thoughts lean towards the writers of the jedi storylines (especially) allowed themselves to get caught in "paladin" trap of the goody two shoes character that is very boring (oh geeze another super weapon). The jedi storylines were not that strong.

On the empire side, I agree you feel closer to the story. The small choices feel like they matter. There is also less of a defined archetype. This allows greater room to maneuver within the story. I am currently enjoying my agent storyline.  

The story was better than any other MMO, that much is obvious.  But because it's an MMO you can't have the kind of freedom you have in single player RPGs, you can't play major characters or effect the whole game world.

They were supposed to have more branching during things like flashpoints, where you had different paths depending on what classes you bring.  But that seems to have got scrapped early on.

Also in the beta you could loose companions and dark/light made a much bigger difference.  But people cried endlessly when they perminently lost companions (even after warnings, which you did get during the dialog), or made the wrong choices.  So they caved in to whiners and changed it...

It is really hard to do a 'grey' story in Star Wars when most people's thoughts about Star Wars is 'Darth Vadar vs Luke Skywalker'.

This is why KOTOR2 is NOT a good SW game. It is an awesome story-driven game but it wasn't SW.

SWTOR has an awesome story / char / lore (although lore is a given since this is SW) that feels Star Wars(y).

Whether you enjoy SW stories or not is another issue.