I just "capped" a character on SWTOR and feel that is enough to add to the journal. The game is a bit of a conundrum and hard to really describe, so let's just say that I leveled a Bounty Hunter to 50 within a month and stopped my subscription.
There are parts of the game that work really well, but all of those parts have absolutely nothing to do with the "Massively" in MMO. The story is about as good as any MMO I have ever played, and the questing and companion systems are really nice. Most of these elements would be better suited in a single player game but feel a little disjointed and watered down in SWTOR. The best way to frame this is with the fact i married one of my companions and all it did in game was a couple of letters with some gifts. The game really didn't respond to me getting married, the same way it didn't respond to many of the choices I made in game.
I also loved the space battle mini game and liked that it gave me something to do to break up my time with PVP, questing and dungeons. That really speaks to the design philosophy of this game, you can tell Bioware wanted people to play the way they wanted to play. What felt counter intuitive to that was the traveling in the game, in that it took forever to get anywhere. When I first got my ship I was really excited about traveling the galaxy, until I had to sit through the load to get on the ship, travel, get off, walk through the same spaceport on every planet and do it all again to leave. I felt like I was playing Final Fantasy 11 again where it would take an hour to travel across the ocean. It really feels like all that travel was put in to extend play time, because like i said before, I capped in a month.
Finally I want to touch on the PVP element. They went with a truly bizarre idea of grouping all 10-49 players together and raising everyone's stats to level 49 for warzones. This means I would roll over a level 49 trooper only to be two shotted by a level 12 sorcerer. Also you ended up playing you own faction sometimes, which can only lead to tears. The biggest issue though is I played on a PVP server and only crossed paths with an Alliance player ONCE. What is the point of having a PVP server then? It just kind of sums up what SWTOR really is, a really good (sometimes great) single player game wrapped up in a ho hum MMO wrapper.
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