Difficulty:

Hard

Time Spent:

40 to 100 Hours

The Bottom Line:

"Ambitious"

SWTOR was really impressive to try out. I played for a couple months. I played a lot of World of War craft about 6 years ago, so I'm pretty familiar with the MMO genre.

One of the notably fun things about the game is the PVP system. Their system of PVP allows for players to begin doing "battle grounds" with others starting very early in the game. When you enter the battle ground, all stats are improved to that of a level 50 character. The only thing that is limiting is the level you are, so the lower level players will have few attacks and spells, while higher level players will have a lot. Allowing players to get into the fray at an early level really makes for a fun experience.
Another great part of the game was the voice acting for quests. Every single character and quest has voice acting, so it makes for an experience of total immersion. Additionally, the quests are well thought out, and you are led from one quest to the next fairly well. Each class has class-specific quest lines, but there's also general quests that everyone can access on the different planets.
A final good note is about the "lineage" system. Once you get a character to a high enough level, you create a last name. From then on, all other characters created will share that last name. In addition, they can share spells; once you get a high enough character, you can create other classes using that same character's race (classes are limited to certain races when you first start). This lineage feature is very unique to SWTOR and makes the game more fun.

But with all of the good parts of the game, there were also things left to be desired. One of those things is dungeon "queing." In a lot of MMOs currently on the market you can que up for dungeons from anywhere, and it matches you up with players. SWTOR doesn't have that, so players are forced to find others using general chats in different cities. Since there's no galaxy-wide chat, it's rather frustrating sitting in major cities, looking for a group and advertising yourself.
A second negative feature is the lack of player base on the many planets, although you can't really blame the developers for that. You have these massive planets to explore in the game, yet they feel empty. Even a lot of the trade cities, where a lot of people should be, are often pretty desolate.
A third negative feature is end game content at level 50. There are only a couple pvp war zones, and the pve content is really limited right now. I'm sure as time goes on the developers will release more and more content.
The final complaint I had was the tech requirements to play the game. I have a quad core, 8gb ram, intel i7 system, and it ran the game at below mediocre levels. Games like WOW offer low intensive graphic settings for players with bad computers. I would like to see the developers add more features for that.

All in all, i give SWTOR an 8/10. It does so much right, and brings a lot of new things to the MMO world. However, with some of the features lacking, many MMO veterans may find themselves desiring more.