I lied - I bought Star Wars: The Old Republic

"Why would I spend $60 on Old Republic? I have Skyrim to play!" I said. "Ugh, this beta is pretty bad - how could Bioware have released such a half-baked product?" You may have heard. Well, now you're seeing me eat my own shoe. I broke down and bought The Old Republic for its launch and have been playing it daily for an hour or two (or many more on select weekends) pretty consistently. I only partially feel bad about spending the money on it.

What it gets right

Warzones - like battlegrounds in World of Warcraft, Warzones are your quick two-team PvP affairs. The maps are all based on objectives: Voidstar = Assault a thing, Huttball = Capture the flag named "Huttball," Civil War = Control things. As simple and fast as these warzones are, they actually promote playing the game and not just farming kills. You get more rewards for winning and you get rewarded for performing or assisting the objectives of the game (kind of), which is a nice switch from WoW/Rift where kills are generally what anyone cares about. Not only that, but you can participate in Warzones even if you are level 10 - you get scaled up automatically to 50 (kind of).

Star Wars - yep. It's Star Wars. The sound/music/weapons/armor/visuals are very Star Wars. Lore too, besides some healthy ret-conning (will not give spoilers, but let's just say you encounter someone that shouldn't be in this game)

Class Stories - actually pretty decent. Very engaging once you make it out of the prologue, and provides a steady beat through the cacophony of random planets and random side quests for random people you don't care about.

Space Combat - repetitive (basically just 4-5 quests, recycled per level) but surprisingly fun. Doesn't really mean anything in the game, but is a nice diversion for when you don't want to slog through Taris/Hoth/Belsavis.

MMO Feel - It's a familiar MMO feel. So you can slip right in to playing if you've played Everquest, World of Warcraft, Age of Conan, Rift, etc.

Crafting - Actually kind of neat in its mechanic - your companions do your crafting "missions" for you, so you can do normal stuff. You can also reverse engineer items (thanks Star Wars Galaxies!) to make even better versions.

What it does wrong

EVERYTHING ELSE!

No, not really. But there's a metric crapton of stuff that SW:TOR gets completely wrong or only 75% correct.

Warzones - there are only three of them, and while they are thankfully short (15 minutes) they are almost impossible to play with a barely competent pick-up-group. Hope to Yoda you at least get 4 players that know what they should do, or else you'll be utterly crushed. I guess that's a fault of the players more than design, but especially Huttball favors strategy and teamwork just not possible with random people thrown into the mix together. The objective based PvP is also mostly an afterthought at 50 - where farming "medals," which reward you more commendations to get gear, becomes the primary focus of all players. The fun of 10-49 PvP gets thrown under the bus for the huge, HUGE grind to hit Battlemaster and get the best gear.

Star Wars - the veneer is there, but it's not Star Wars as the original trilogy or Expanded Universe would have it. In this game, everything is a good/bad stereotype and there is really no grey area. Even smugglers/bounty hunters have pretty cut and dried "I'm an A-hole" or "I'm a saint" dialogue/story paths. As republic, you will constantly be betrayed by a double-agent, taken by surprise by expertly prepared Sith forces, and basically every other story-driving trope regarding you (in this case a hardened Commando or wise Jedi Guardian) being taken completely unaware and/or taken advantage of. It really gets old by the third planet or so. "Oh my, who would have thought Evil McStabDeath the obviously double-agent tricking me into this quest, would BETRAY ME?!"

Side Quests - same old massively multiplayer gaming tripe, but with 3-5 minutes of expensive (but mediocre) voice acting thrown in with false "choices" to try and cover it up. I don't care about your stupid village needing needing some Mandalorians removed. I don't care about scouting 4 perimeter beacons so you can then blow up someone else I don't care about. Blah!

Interface - I stand by my original post, the UI is horrible. The most recent patch even makes a godawful animation play over all your abilities to let you know you can't press them. But that was to fix the "apparent" ability delay, that still exists, where your instant, non-global-cooldown abilities absolutely would not fire off if you kept spamming them. And that brings me to my next complaint:

Gameplay - it's WoW on Star Wars, but without WoW's silky smooth refinement and amazing responsiveness. No game gets this right. Rift came close, I'll admit, but the animations were clunky. SW:TOR feels like a huge step backwards from WoW. Instant, non-global-cooldown abilities that STILL do not fire off, damage not being dealt until an animation finishes, effects that cause animations breaking your channeled spells inadvertantly, an interface that now makes it nearly impossible to tell what is ready to use and what is on cooldown (they turned the contrast between button states DOWN, why?!). It tries, it really does, but it feels so bad to play that it's almost distracting. Oh, and yeah you have 48 abilities, all of which you have to use, but you can't macro or re-arrange your ability bars so you have 10% of your screen taken up by stupid buttons you don't want to look at.

Social/Grouping -

Republic Fleet: "LFG Maelstrom, need healer and good to go!"

1 hour later........there is no real way to group in this game, besides spamming chat. No one uses the LFG flag (which is 2003 era MMO technology), so that's worthless. You have no cross-game channels, so you can't look for a group while doing anything else (like questing) so you just sit...in the fleet...until you maybe get someone to join...and then they didn't do the pre-requisite Flashpoint...and you have to do that one first...then they have to go...then you find 3 hours have passed by and ponder the meaning of the MMO part of this game...

Sound - The sound is Star Wars, and is good most of the time - but sometimes, the sound effects can't quite figure out where to play. You'll hear a fighter coming up on your left, and...it's actually your right. You'll ignite your lightsaber in your right hand, and the sound plays in your rear left speaker. You ride your speeder and halfway through your journey it just stops making sounds. I've confirmed this happens to both a Realtek IC sound card and a dedicated Soundblaster Audigy 4.

Crafting - Pretty much worthless for the endgame. Great for leveling! Terrible for the endgame. Your best items are about tier 1 epic (sorry, "Artifact") quality and take a ton of resources to reverse engineer out.

What I don't know about yet

Endgame - I hit 50 and now SWTOR is basically just the MMO gear grind with less raid content, easier mechanics and fights, and no looking for group tools of ANY sort. Oh, and after your class story you're just done with the story. Back to the WoW gear grind! No point to this Operation (raid) except gear! Enjoy! In PVP I routinely get crushed in my part Tier 1 epic / level 50 blue tank gear, as a tank spec'd tank - but when I have 15k hitpoints and fight Sith healers in full Battlemasters gear (best gear in the game) with 22k I just don't have much of a chance.

And that's the main problem - There is really no point for a casual gamer, or someone like me with little time available, to play the game after hitting max level. You need to grind at least 3.5 hours of PvP (assuming 8-9 "medals" per game) to get ONE bag of commendations, and it will take about 3 or 4 bags to guarantee a piece of gear. Daily quests for PvE will require a few hours of your time, each day, doing the same thing, to get a piece of gear every few days. Fine, whatever, it's an MMO. Here's the problem though - before they nerfed the gearing rate in the most recent patches, nearly every existing 50 already maxed out their Valor (PvP rank) or cleared every Operation (raid) and Flashpoint (instance) and are running around in either Battlemaster (Tier 3 PvP) or Rakata (Tier 3 PvE) gear. So what does a 2-months-to-50 player get? A daunting gear grind, trying to group with overgeared people who have already cleared all content a month ago - OR - a PvP group full of people who perform infinitely better than you, against incredibly deadly opponents.

For comparison, Ragnaros (end boss of the 40-man raid Molten Core in World of Warcraft) was not even killed until nearly 6 months after WoW was released. People in full epic tier 1 were very rare. PvP barely had rewards for it, so most people were walking around in low-end-raid gear and it was a pretty level playing field. All nightmare-mode, 16-man Operations (raids) were cleared within ONE month of SWTOR being released. It just feels like I'm so far behind already, there's no point trying to catch up.

But, unlike WoW, there is barely any story surrounding the end game. "Fight for your faction!" "Stop random evil dude/good dude from doing a thing!" That's pretty much the extent of the endgame story.

So I rolled an alt.

"But Alex," you say. "Why keep playing the game if you have so many problems with it? Save the money!"

To be honest, I ask myself this for about 10 seconds every time I start the launcher to log in. And the answer is that the 1-49 game (and the class stories) are good enough to keep me interested in trying new characters. Not that I'm rich, but a few months at $15 is tolerable for several hundred hours of a good single-player game. The game needs some pretty serious improvements to keep relevant (helloooooo Diablo 3!!!), which I am skeptical that Bioware will be able to perform in time. Why couldn't they have just made a "Star Wars Galaxies: Jump to Lightspeed" quality Old Republic game, with a better engine (Hero engine is TERRIBLE, even Rift's use of Gamebryo is better), lightsabers and blasters that don't feel like Nerf bats and Nerf guns...sigh. A man can dream.

Too long, didn't read!

In summary, the real strength of SW:ToR is its single-player game and the Star Wars lore. Max level is the typical, uninspired and mostly aggravating thousand hour (not joking) gear slog. If you're looking for a good (mostly) single-player Star Wars game, ToR is worth a shot for the free month.

If you're looking for an innovative massively multiplayer game with an engaging community and endgame, you will be sorely, sorely disappointed. Expect to quit or roll an alt once you hit max level, unless you REALLY love slaving away for hundreds (thousands!) of hours to make your character's ability math calculations more in your favor.

Completely Arbitrary Review Enumeration (C.A.R.E)
1-49 game 3,300,000 / 5,000,000 dead gungans
50 game 2,000,000 / 5,000,000 dead gungans