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Mediocre is really the best word to describe this game. Its easiest to take things one at a time. Sound - This is excellent and truly the best part of the game. Yes, it sounds like Star Wars. The voice acting is also very well done. Story- This section is kind of a conundrum. The class stories are truly interesting. They remind you of great Bioware titles and what you've come to expect. Planet arcs are fairly interesting as well. However, these aspects are only 15-20% of your time. The rest is boils down to "here is why I want you to kill droids". Minor uninteresting characters you never see again distract from the immersion Bioware was attempting to create. Mass Effect, Dragon Age, and other single player titles can do this, but in an MMO its just clunky. Flashpoint stories are cool as well, but again the dialogue parts are so far and few between that they don't create a sense of meaning. Gameplay- Many others reviewers are using uninspired and it really fits. Its not that its bad in any way, its just nothing new. And I mean nothing. Combat is exactly like WoW or most other MMO's. Its not that its bad, but its not good for 2011. 2006 it would have been lauded, now its tiresome. The ranged classes cover mechanics are clunky as well and have needed fix since early beta. PvE- Standard PvE fare. Kill boss, collect loot, wait for new instance, repeat. Fights (including hard mode) are not challenging which will probably turn away most hardcore players. PvP- Very far behind the curve. This game will not be an ESport in the foreseeable future, because of a number of questionable design choices. How a AAA MMO expects to not have to deliver arena combat is mind boggling as well. Guild Mechanics- Guild Chat. Ships may come in the future but on launch is not there. Overall this game needed to be launched with more features or years ago. As for the expectations of the current MMO market it meets them, but doesn't justify a Triple-A rating or the price tag (and subsequent monthly fees) in my opinion. Some will love this game, but most of us and especially PvP junkies will want to skip it. The only caveat is the hope of future updates and whenever BioWare gets to adding stuff from the mysterious "wall of crazy". 

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I don't know what Bioware was thinking when they made this game. It tries to be a singleplayer game with dialogue and story yet at the same time it also tires to be a competitive MMO. The fault here is trying to combine the single player and multiplayer elements together which leaves something that just doesn't feel right at all. I would dare not also note the fact that the multiplayer elements of the game are severely lacking what NEEDS to be in an MMO such as macros and endgame content. In it's current form the singleplayer elements fees just that singleplayer. When you quest in the game you feel very disconnected from other players and it just feels like a singleplayer game due to all the zone restrictions (most of the content is quests and some dungeons), yet at the same time the singleplayer feel is just watered down fetch quests with the actual meat given few and far between. Another major drawback is the size this game takes up on a HDD when you install it which can be 30gb with everything installed. The size is frankly ridiculous and due to the inane amount of voice acting that doesn't need to be in such a game. The result is something that is bloated beyond reason and would be equally difficult to create content with due to the promise of voiced content. The gameplay is probably the worst part of the game right now, as it STILL uses concepts from WOW which many people already know are outdated such as mobs that pull and aggro and hitboxes that make the character hit things that are farther away thus hit air and make models move through one another. The combat itself really tries to emulate WOW in every way possible, and I cannot praise a game that so blatantly copies another so much. The horrible part is that even though it tires to emulate WOW's combat so much it fails at it in many respects due to many encounters in dungeons being simple things that the WOW devs actually have already improved vastly on and the SWTOR devs seem to be stuck in the stone age with their encounter designs. The result is an absolutely game breaking error on their part to make the core of the game itself so very weak and in dire need of complete revamping. I'd also note that even the WOW devs themselves are planning on creating a new MMO, because even they realize the gameplay in WOW is very old. The decision to use such a system in SWTOR by Bioware baffles me and the only sense behind it was "let's just go with what makes the most money right now". The community forums is sadly also VERY moderated to a degree that many many negative complaints that are voiced are simply deleted by mods, I find this treatment of the community to be very insincere and terrible as Bioware seems to be just ignoring any kind of changes to be made to the game that make sense in favor of keeping a facade that he game is a great one which is far from the cause to to the many many incomplete or broken things in the game that I could never fit into this review. I know many people will take this review with a grain of salt with all the viral reviews that may give the game an unjust 10/10 and many paid journalists in the current joke of the videogame journalism industry, which I hope someday will reach the levels movies are right now, however currently too much dirty cash exchanges pockets of journalists and it frankly disgusts me that so much dishonest trickery about the quality of games is being fed to people right now. I am thus forced in order to create some accurate representation of the products actual quality to give a lower review score than what I would give normally ( 6/10) in order to cope with all the viral reviews made.

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Being a huge fan of the KOTOR games, I was pretty excited when I heard that Bioware would be making another foray into the Star Wars Universe. I looked forward to the innovation that they could bring to the increasingly stale genre and hopefully renew my interest for MMORPGs. As the beta grew closer, I of course bought into all the hype, the promises and the CGI trailers that I desperately hoped were gameplay. Instead of getting a true successor to KOTOR 2 in MMO form, I got World of Warcraft : Star Wars Edition. Needless to say, I was incredibly disappointed when I learned it was going to be standard fare in terms of MMO combat (hotkeys, stand there and watch your cooldown bar) but I had at least hoped that I was going to get some good quality controls. But when I got my early access build, I was incredibly disgusted to see that not only were the controls boring and uninspired, they were simply bad. Everything felt underwater and clunky and once I was in combat, it simply felt unresponsive. I had no real connection to the buttons I was pressing and the things my hero was doing on screen. However, the real story here is well, the story. A story driven, fully voice acted MMO, the first of it's kind. Heck, it's Bioware even, people who brought us such excellent work's like Baldur's Gate and KOTOR, so the writing can't be bad, right? Right guys? Well, I was wrong. This writing was much more along the lines of the recent abomination Dragon Age 2. Every line with the opposite gender was dripping with flirtation, every line that was supposed to be delivered seriously had a comical air to it. Everytime they were close to bringing me into the universe, I was ripped right back out into ours as some horribly delivered cheesy line was spoken. Most of the time I ended up just skipping right through the dialogue as it wasn't nearly good enough to warrant my interest. Voice acting is all great, but really, it's just an expensive way to sugarcoat the fact that you want me to kill 10 enemies and collect 5 of their body parts just like I've been doing for years. Visually speaking, this game is unimpressive for a game coming out in Q4 2011. From what we've seen with recent MMOs and ones yet to be released, this game is three to four years behind in graphical technology. I won't mention all the visual glitches that I was getting, because it's still a very early build, however, I will mention the overall very poor quality. The shadows looked something out of the Playstation 2 era and were so distracting, that I actually had to turn them off. Texture wise, while they clearly payed attention to things such as characters, weapons and armor, they also clearly went right over most of the environment and let most of it be incredibly poorly done for such a high budget game. It terms of the art style, it actually reminds me of a game called Free Realms, a free MMO. This may sound like an insult, however, it is not. Free Realms has a wonderful, cartoon style that is both technologically undemanding, yet pleasant to look at. Sadly, I have to say that SWTOR actually looks worse, whilst being in the same art style. The animations in various battle scenes had me in tears at points, mostly because of how pitifully bad they were. Now if you like Star Wars and/or Bioware, there is nothing I can say that will stop you from playing this game. You will probably enjoy it because of your brand loyalty and there is frankly nothing I can do about it. But please, if you are looking in on this game as an outsider, I highly recommend you do not play this game.

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Last I looked, this game was made by Bioware. Bioware: The innovator of western RPGs and deep character creation systems. Remember the character creation screens from Mass Effect? What happened? SW:TOR is cookie cutter from the beginning with pathetic character creation and continues being a cookie cutter affair thereafter. Although most people will compare the game to Warcraft, the more I played SW:TOR, the more I was reminded of the ORIGINAL Guild Wars: Instanced zones, lack of any real end game, rapid leveling, linear zones, 4-player groups. The biggest difference was Guild Wars gave you all of that for the purchase price where SW:TOR wants you to pay the purchase price PLUS a subscription fee for it. | | | The game itself is a buggy mess that chugs along. I don't claim to have a super-computer, but my system is far above minimum recommended specs and can play Skyrim fairly well, yet SW:TOR would often chug, choke, and drop frames. | | | Combat isn't spectacular at all. It's the same repetitive formula of MMOs since the days of Everquest. Cast and wait, cast and wait. The gave the classes fancy names, but it's still the same Tank/Healer/DPS trifecta from the last decade and the talent system looks like they literally transplanted it from WoW into the game and made it flow upwards instead of downwards. | | | The story was the key selling point of the game but even the story is lacking. Marred by bad writing, bad voice acting, and the lack of key Star Wars universe races, the story fails to inspire or even impress. For the company that was one of the first to really use a karma system, Bioware's implementation of a karma system in SW:TOR is laughably bad and has little impact on the story. | | | 300 million budget and the best Bioware could come up with is a poor hybrid clone of Guild Wars and Warcraft? Not only am I disappointed but this, along with Dragon Age 2's shortcomings, gives me pause to concern regarding the future of Mass Effect 3.   

Quote (Xeonics @ Jan 13 2012 07:37pm)

Is this all you do? You don't ever have any REAL retort.

Quote (Caedus @ Jan 13 2012 08:39pm)

It's hard to feel sorry for some clearly embarrasing themselves as much as you have.

Quote (Caedus @ Jan 14 2012 12:39am)

It's hard to feel sorry for some clearly embarrasing themselves as much as you have.

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This game plays similar to a mix between a typical mordern BioWare game and World of Warcraft. This may seem like a good idea on paper but the problem is this: The story completely retcons the events of the previous Knights of the Old Republic games, setting Revan(PC of the first game) as a generic, mid-strength sith and completely ignoring the 'wound in the force' concept of the second game. A change from the normal MMO storyline where you begin as a nobody that must make his way in the world, in TOR you begin as a legendary 'classname' and are a hero of 'faction'. While it nice to be special, once everyone is special nobody is. The character models, regardless of race, share the exact same frame and animations, defeating the purpose of having multiple races. Despite this consolidation of effort, the animations still manage to look unnatural and wooden. As an MMO the content can definitely be called limited. It is fully possible to reach max level in a single weekend without resorting to any exploits or guides(which don't exist yet), while even WoW(popularly considered an easy, streamlined levelling experience) takes at least week of solid playtime while following guides developed over months to powerlevel a character.

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Very boring and uncreative. Combat is basically the exact same you'll find in any other themepark. You get a lot of skills at a low level(this is a good thing), and many of them are quite flashy. The downside however is that the combat is slow and sluggish compared to most themepark games. Graphics are subpar, yet stylistic in order to function on more systems. However, the game is surprisingly unoptimized, which seems counter intuitive to that design decision in the first place. The biggest selling point to the game would seem to be the story and voice overs. At first I was attracted to the novelty of it. but it gets old very very fast. Most of the story twist are extremely predictable (as of all bioware stories of late), and you will found yourself space baring through the cutscenes fairly quickly. While the main storyline vo's were cool, I found myself wondering at times : 1) Why was my hero, that goes through so many epic story plots, doing so many mundane task. 2) Despite openly betraying the sith every chance I got, disrespecting my superiors every chance I got, I continued to become a more prominent sith even though everyone knew what I'm doing...it was completely stupid and immersion breaking. 3)Does EVERY side quest need cutscenes? This may sound cool to an outsider, but trust me it's horrible. Having to sit through cutscenes for people to tell you to travel ten feet to collect scraps off the ground...it's annoying. And finally. The world is utterly static. A combination of minimal ambient noise, huge open spacing with nothing in it, the lack of animation present in the world, and all the npc's standing still and silent. Every planet I went to besides one (and I went to most of them) looked liek a nuclear winter just hit. Still, lifeless, static, and boring. Crafting is automated, so this game isn't for crafters. The system was made for people who don't want to craft but want the benefits. It's essentially a automated lootbox. Rewarding the "crafters" for micromanaging timers. Pvp is what it is. The combat becomes loose and glidey against other players, similar to rif'ts pvp, so i your looking for something competitive, this is most likely not the game. Overall, very uninspired. The game takes no risk, amazes briefly, then became glaringly shallow. I have serious doubts about the longevity of the game, and most of my guildies are already bored to tears with it (starting in the headstart).

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Let me preface this by saying I love the Star Wars universe, and love Bioware as a developer. I have been anxiously awaiting the release of this MMO for some time now. Now that it's out, and I've played it extensively, I cannot quite express my severe disappointment with this title. You've probably noticed my score of a 0 by now. You don't have to take my word for it, but this game truly earned that score. The other things you may have read about SW:TOR are all true: it copies directly from nearly every other MMO, essentially ending up as nothing but a "skin" for WoW, and doing nothing to innovate save the addition of voiceovers. So, maybe I'll start there. The voiceovers, to their credit, aren't all bad. But, if you're anything like me, you will skip the dialogue because by the time they're done speaking two words of text, I've finished reading the on-screen subtitles, and will skip ahead. This feature, while highly lauded, is wholly unnecessary and only serves to get in the way and waste time - lots of time. Once your class-specific line is over, be prepared to be bored to death by questgivers touting the same monotonous and repetitive fetch-quest speeches, with only very minor variation thrown in. Now, you might be saying that in such a story-driven game, voiceovers are required, and Bioware obviously thought so, spending exorbitant sums to try to add value to what is nothing more than a carbon copy. Frankly, they failed. The story is something I was the most excited about, and while the class quest lines are somewhat interesting, everything else can be seen as nothing but a failure. I couldn't bring myself to care about anything, ANYTHING, in the game, least of all my own character's progression. To begin with, character creation options are the most limited I've seen in an MMO, and that includes WoW. As expected, this is how you start the game, and right away I felt like I was missing something - surely the game wouldn't fall so short on something so integral (after all, the cutscenes show you (and your friends) prominently quite often). There are only four body types, and you had better get used to seeing them, because they are all very distinct. I can't tell you how many people I ran into that used the "big" body type, and all looked visually IDENTICAL in EVERY WAY. There is no individuality in this game, no personalization of your character to make you feel like you're in any kind of RPG. It's tragic how many corners they cut here. I'll gloss over combat only a little, because I feel like that's where Bioware really glossed over in development as well. In a word, it's BROKEN. Glitchy, mindless button-pressing, cooldown-watching tedium. It's your typical MMO fare - tanks, heals, and DPS, fights that require you to move mobs away from explosions, or bosses that suck you in for an AOE you must escape. PvE is brain-numbingly repetitive, to the point it might actually drive some insane. For the record, I tried playing Aion, notorious for being 99% grinding, and to be blunt I do not see anything separating it from SW:ToR. PvP is another story - I don't even think they attempted any semblance of balance, because there certainly is none. Pray you didn't roll a bounty hunter, or else you'll be using one of 3 different types of blaster abilities the entire time. Characters have no collision, so there is constant overlapping of people fighting literally inside each other, spamming their abilities willy-nilly, needlessly circle-strafing in place as if it even matters what direction you're facing. Again, this is very reminiscent of WoW. If only that was a good thing. I could say more, MUCH more, but I will spare both myself and you. This game, I am sad to say, is a complete **** disgrace, and there is no chance in hell they will ever get another cent out of me, regardless of any expansions or "improvements" they make in the coming months/years. I have been let down in such a powerful way, there is no question of this. Rest in peace, my hopes and dreams of an even halfway decent Star Wars MMO... rest among the stars with the rest of Bioware's broken

Quote (GEZodiac @ Jan 13 2012 07:41pm)

says they guy who cannot even muster the courage to counter arguments of this game being bad.

doesn't know what concurrent means, and all he can say is "look at dis nigga he doesn't like it, but all you other guuys not posting like it so hahahahah"


I'll repeat user reviews are 50/50 on positive negative throughout the internet.


Consumers, who pay the bills of this game, are unimpressed.

Quote (Xeonics @ Jan 13 2012 07:40pm)

Are you even level 50 yet?
Have you done ANY endgame content?

You literally know nothing about the game apparently.

Quote (Caedus @ Jan 13 2012 08:46pm)

Im not going to waste time providing an arguement to idiots who wouldnt change their mind unless someone had a gun to hgeir head.

User reviews mean nothing. Everyone knows that. The only people who use them as arguements are idiot such as yourself.



Youve never played the game thats why youre asking so many questions

Quote (Xeonics @ Jan 13 2012 07:47pm)

I've already proven I know more about the game than you.

Quote (Caedus @ Jan 13 2012 08:50pm)

Youve proven your a WoW fanboy who is jealous of a superior game and because youve never played this superior game.

Maybe you an Zodiac can get together and talk about WoW while watching anime and discussing how user reviews are terrible.

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When one thinks of Star Wars, what do you picture? For me it's Lightsaber duels, blaster battles, strange aliens, lovable characters and stories you find yourself drawn too. From the start BioWare disappoints, you are presented with five races to choose from, all of them slightly modified humans. The standard human, the red human with spikes, the human with tentacle hair, the green human or the human with cybernetics. This leaves even the layman Star Wars viewer asking "Where are the Wookies?" or other races. The dialogue options are a waste of time. For example, lets say you want to go Dark Side on this character. The NPC gives you options A B and C to answer him. You chose A. A gives you Light Side points. You just cancel the dialogue and talk to the NPC again either to avoid the Light shift or to find the option that will grant you Dark Side or Companion points. In essence, the only true choice in this game is your decision to go Dark or Light. The combat is what you expect out of MMOs today. Find a rotation and use it each fight. Nothing innovative. The same is said for most group content, you get the holy trinity and find yourself spamming whatever rotation the role requires until the boss is dead. Amazing boss mechanics include "Don't stand in the fire" and "get out of LOS". Finally the UI. What was acceptable in 2004 is not acceptable now. Rift launched with a fully customizable UI. World of Warcraft has a plethora of websites devoted just to mods for it's UI. Old Republic has neither. You cannot macro this game. You cannot mod this game. The UI you see is what you get. In closing, Old Republic at best is a way to kill time and enjoy a story told by BioWare in the Star Wars Universe. However, it is not a story worth $60 initially and another $180 over a year.

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Simply put, it's a very poor game and they should be ashamed of it. It's a Kotor 3 with a MMO multiplayer attached to it. - Very dated graphics and pretty bad performance. They’re using Heroengine so no surprise there. - Non-dynamic combat, you stay in one place shooting or waving your lightsaber, that's all, very WoW alike, yawn. - No appearance options at all, and believe me, your character is going to look awful in this game. - Inability to choose your character's voice. - Poor character creation, very few options, all of them human or human-alike. - Very poor interface, can't move or resize any window... - Horrible class design. Dark jedis without sith powers? No hybrid classes? Even Kotor had a better class system than this. Light/Dark choices have no impact other than story fluff things, who cares. - Space combat looks pretty but it's boring and repetitive, very few missions and you can't play with your friends so what's the point? - Non-jedi classes's combat is horrible, cover and stealth mechanics are pretty much broken. - Without spoilers, the class stories are all pretty badly written, the jedi knight one is laughable at best and the sith inquisitor is probably the worst. Imperial agent is ok but this is not Mass Effect so again, what's the point? - There is way too much grind and waaay to much running around. Revive mechanics can leave you waiting for many minutes simply staring at a countdown to be able to play again. Same goes for the taxi system and the load times, in some raids you load 3 times in 1 minute, talk about bad design. The game economy is separated between factions so there is no way to move money from characters on your own account if they're in different ones, which is silly. Don't waste your money on this, you've been warned!

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I'll begin with character creation. I was expecting a hefty load of options in the creation of my character such custom face shaping. Also I have to point out that the choice of facial hair is beyond a joke and it also looks so bad, almost like it's super glued onto the model's face. You can either have no beard and moustache and or an ugly thick one -- there is no in between. The same goes with the bodies, infact there is not one normal looking body for the jedi archetype -- it's either too skinny or too bulky. Not including the true cinematics, the gameplay graphics are deceiving. After creating my character I get some true CG cutscenes like you would see in a motion picture (money at this point that would have been better spent) which is great. Then I get to the cutscenes that appear to be the game's graphics engine. My character lands into a spaceport with crisp, colourful graphics -- im thinking woah, they really went all out here as well as with the voice acting which is superb. Shortly after being told what I need to do and who to talk to, I am thrown in to a world that looks hideous and completely different than the rich vibrant cutscenes. Compared with the mission/NPC cutscenes, everything just looks flatter and less vibrant. I was also informed after walking around the environment just how linear and lifeless everything is, something I wasn't expecting from a game this long in development. The envrionments outside the cities are also very linear. I found myself being restricted to certain paths where there was hilly terrain. Why can't I just walk up and around this? Dragon Age had the same issues too. This game has been hyped so bad that alot of KOTOR fans will think it's for them, but after EA/Bioware/LucasArts grabs their money they realise it's just another MMO, nothing special.