I was recently invited to play in the public beta test of Star Wars: The Old Republic. (SWTOR from here on out).  Built a level 22 Powertech Bounty Hunter which is about half way through the leveling process.  I came away from the experience with mixed feelings.  You won't catch me talking about game mechanics or this class is too powerful.  The game's in beta and I understand that.  What I can talk about is vision, direction, implementation as I see it from the player's eyes.

As with any Star Wars based video game, the vision for the game is grand.  Bioware chose a very scripted story-driven approach to their vision.  To their credit, it's a beautiful game with a great story.  However, it is almost not an MMO.  I feel like the game has very little vision beyond, we're making a MMO, including a bunch of voice acting and trying to be everything to everyone.  Space combat, Flight sim, raiding environment, PvP, CRPG and Star Wars all rolled into one amazing beautiful sexier than supermodels in langerie experience.  It sometimes works and mostly doesn't because it does nothing exceptionally well, all the time.  In other words, meh, but there's hope.
The Good:
  1. Getting your own starship is flat out cool. It's hard to understate this. For some reason getting a starship to call your own is inifinitely more satisfying than buying a home in LotRO. They're the exact same game mechanic so this could mainly be a personal taste thing.
  2. Powertech's explosive shot is very satisfying. Never gets old. Favorite tactic is to shoot the delayed bomb shot into the front mob and then immediately fire the knockback shot at the same. When the target lands from the knockback, he explodes, knocking back the other mobs. Like I said, never gets old.
  3. Companions are fun to use and generally influence story and gameplay.
  4. The voice acting is superb.
  5. The game is visually beautiful.
  6. User interface is well done for solo/small group content.
The Bad:
  1. The voice acting and quest lines get repetitive by level 15 or so.
  2. Party voice acting sequences are horribly implemented. You spend most of your time pressing space bar and then waiting anyway for the one guy that hasn't seen the animation/voice acting to catch up.
  3. Class trees and skills are derivative of WoW circa 2009.
  4. User interface blows for raid content.
  5. User Interface is still immature for group content and has no addon capability.
  6. No macros.
The Ugly:
  1. WoW's Annual pass. Read why here.
  2. Bugs in the starter zones still exist.
  3. No one knows about the end game and how it will stack up. I'm betting on it being better than LOtrO and worse than WoW.
 
SWTOR's a good game from what I saw of it. I am no longer playing the beta because I think I'll play SWTOR's leveling game 3-4 times, 1 for each character class. That's where this game seems to shine and in that regard, I am looking forward to release day in two weeks.