Now here is my good, neutral, bad, and ugly break down. I did not try PVP so I will not comment on that.
The Good:
- Non stop questing without the constant kill X quests. Actually 95% of the quests are simple, rewarding and don't force you to grind on killing 50 monsters. However, those quests DO have bonus rewards if you decide you want to grind out X amount of monsters in the area. Up to you if you want to do the bonus or not. Even still most grind I had to do was 45 monsters. Typically the bonus kill objective is to eliminate 15-30 mobs which you end up killing just to complete to the main objective. Which means getting to a spot and click on something and doing some dialog, but getting to that spot means having to wade through monsters and kill them to reach it.
- TALKING NPCs!!!! Nothing helps the immersion factor like NPCs that actually talk and with pretty damn good voice acting. I love it!
- Dialog choices make a difference. Most of them don't make a huge impact on what happens. You can be a goodie jedi and say something sarcastic and it usually won't matter. When it comes time to getting either lightside or darkside points there is an indicator of which dialog option will give you which so you don't make the wrong choice. What you do not see is the companion affecting dialog options. Many companions respond to what you say in a dialog if they are nearby. Which may or may not be based on lightside or darkside. For example my companion was a super honorable Trandosian Hunter. So long as I was straightforward, deliberate, and "honorable" in my dialog choices I gained favor with him. If I said something not so honorable I lost favor. Favor with companion improves their performance in many areas from combat, to side missions, to crafting. So how you pick your dialog choices can make a pretty good impact on your character overall.
- Combat. Combat is actually pretty fun. Nothing seems over powered yet and most classes are pretty damn powerful. In fact everyone can solo any character with relative ease. There is no auto attack, and there is no spamming the keyboard for abilities either. You have to pick and choose your combat options a bit more strategically as you fight.
- All the traditional MMO goodies. Talent trees, social pane, LFG tools, maps, fast transport, instancing, and other assorted sundry things that MMO's have put in the game to make them fun without being tedious unlike the early MMO games (couh everjunk).
- Ease of play. Really easy for anyone to start right up and go about playing. No massive learning curve, no trying to figure out what the hell you are doing now or next. You'd have to be pretty brain dead to not figure out how to play this game from the start. Mastering everything is a different story. I prefer games that are easy to learn, but difficult to master. This is shaping up that way.
- The companion system. This is like Guildwars henchmen system. But you only can have out for combat. Other companions you receive later can be put to work as slave labor Literally. You can send companions out to do "missions" where basically they are unusable for a period of time and come back hopefully with some reward. They also do the actual crafting as well in this game for you. You can send a companion off to do work at any time. Which means if you are in a full group of 4 people you can have your companions crafting or gathering materials for you while you adventure with people. Speaking off which group sizes are capped at 4. With two players in a group the other two spots are filled with companions. Once a third player joins the lowest level companions drop out. Once the fourth player joins, all the companions are dropped out of the group. For reference you get your first companion around level 9 from questing.
- The social system. Love it. The more you group the more social points you get. The bigger the group of actual players will also net more points. The game random rolls during dialog options to see which person in the group gets to "speak" for the group for that option. Even still your choice is what directly impacts your character for lightside, darkside, or companion influence points. So even if the "speaker" chooses a darkside option, the actual event shown will be darkside but you won't get darkside points if you picked the lightside dialog option. You'll get the lightside points. Still it's funny to do this to see alternative points of the quest story you are in that you normally wouldn't experience.
- Moddable items that scale up with you. You'll find many items in the game take mods. Which can later be switched out. Switching out the mods to higher level mods will level up the item. So if you happen to like to look of an item, want to keep it, and it is a moddable item it is now something you can do. Just switch out the mods to something better and it will "grow" with your character. Not all items are moddable though. The great thing is that mods are NOT bound to your character. So when you find a better mod you can sell the old one away to another player.
The Neutral:
- Graphics. Could be better. Need to get AA working. Some might rate the graphics pretty bad, but I think they just haven't tweaked the settings. I am not saying they are mind blowing, or even really good graphics. They are decent enough though using a gaphic engine that looks to be about 5 years old or so. Which it is.
- Having to wait to craft. No level 1 crafting bots. You HAVE to reach level 9 and get a companion and then reach the first space station to train a crafting skill. Even then, it is slow going due to lack of node spawns early on.
- Quest spawns. It is still in this game that if you are clearing out a spot to click on a quest item and someone runs up and clicks before you then you have to wait on the respawn. Typically most of them are fast at about a minute or so. Some are longer though at 5 to 10 minutes. This really only sucks when there are a whole bunch of people in the are all trying to do the same thing. Which will be the case at launch. Afterwards this will be a non issue since nothing I've seen or heard of has the epic 8+ hour spawn timers from MMO of days of yore (cough everjunk).
The Bad:
- Graphical bugs. I hate them. At one point I couldn't look east on the map of Coruscant without all textures disappearing. If I looked another direction they came back, but looking east made everything poof. Reloading fixed it, but then after playing awhile random shit with the graphics would happen. Just annoying.
- Guild support is spotty at best. No guild bank, and a plethora of other problems. Most of what I heard was bitching from my guild mates and officers about it all. I didn't test it, but I took their word for it.
- Must have a healer for groups. While you can get by with 2 players and 2 companions for all group content (at least from my experience and the experiences of others I know up to level 34), one of the people in the group must be a dedicated healer. Luckily EVERY base class can potentially be a healer class at level if you pick that class progression. Sadly, most people pick DPS as always.
- Healers are OP. Like when AoC came out, the healer class is OP. Damn near the same dps as another other classes, and can tank almost as well with the exception of a dedicated tank. Not sure why more players weren't playing healers.
- Not all classes and races are in game as promised thus far on the forums. Whether they will be in at release or shortly after I have no clue. Right now all the races are "humanoid" in nature. Nothing outlandish at all can be picked. The other races are in the game, but they just are not playable.
- Game world feels a bit small and empty. The maps are a bit too small and not really all that populated. I also hate static NPCs just standing around. I like seeing kids run around chasing a toad, or a couple walking down the street holding hands and kissing. Things that only add immersion to the game world. Right now things are a bit to static and empty for my tastes.
- The disconnects and crashes. It could have been only because of the stress testing during the weekend. As many I've talked to who have been testing haven't experienced anything "bad" like that yet. Still having servers and the client jump from handling 5,0000 players to 100,000 players and both clients and servers having problems is not good. Then again that is what testing is for and I hope it gets fixed at released.
The Ugly:
- Level progression. Slows down massively once reaching level 10. I don't mind slowing down, I just hate the fact it felt like I was cruising along at 75 mph and then once I reached level 10 I got stuck in 15 mph traffic jam. That is what it felt like to me. Sure I still progressed without having to grind, but either the early part needs to slow down, or the transition to slower leveling needs to taper a bit to not feel so sudden.
- Game play progression still revolves around combat and questing, with a splash of pvp and crafting thrown in. The crafting system is pretty damn good, especially with reverse engineering option thrown in, but still it does not feel like a major focus. I like other forms of progression and play. Somewhat like Vanguard's diplomacy. It doesn't have to be that at all, besides I hated Vanguard, but allow other things to do to have fun without FORCING people to do those things. Like dancing naked wookies at the cantina. SWG had this which was a good idea but a bad execution of originally forcing people to watch them. Right now the game seems to 1 dimensional in progression. As long as the game doesn't resort to loot style progression only (ala WoW), I'll be happy. But add in something like puzzles or what not.
- The UI. Right now there is very limited customization. Hopefully this changes. It works, but not being able to drag things around or really customize my UI is a major pain in the ass. At least the default they currently have is usable. I've seen much worse UI's that couldn't be customized.
- The NDA. Nuff said This one will go away at some point though.