I love it.
As a long time player of WoW (which I really also liked for the first 30 or so levels) I can appreciate the inspiration it took as well as the innovations it’s made.
So far (first 15 or so levels) it plays remarkably similar to a single player RPG that you can bring your friends into if you’d like but don’t need to (WoW was this way too). For me, it has some advantages over WoW in that I care about the Star Wars lore, find it more interesting and prefer the appeal of something that is galactic-wide.
The Sith, which I chose to play as, are interesting to say the least. Each Sith Lord is a power unto themselves. Each one behaves as if it is its own “great house” from the Dune universe. I don’t know how the Jedi play but I find the Sith very interesting.
My main gripe with the Sith is that the writing for it is remarkably uneven. Some people writing clearly decided that Sith = Evil which is not how I (or a lot of other people) view them. Strength through passion. Power through Strength. Understanding through Power. That is the Sith code that I’m familiar with. Not “Hate and random cruelty”. I prefer the Sith path to the Jedi paternalism path but that’s for another discussion.
The quests are very standard quests. Fetch this. Press these. Collect those. The difference being the story and the enjoyable gameplay of doing those quests. My biggest complaint about the quests is that there’s a lot of lazy idle animation in there which is, for a title with this kind of budget, unforgiveable. There’s a lot of “crazy” people you’re supposed to dispose of. But their idle animations are as if they’re casually conversing with one another. It makes me feel like Lancelot in The Holy Grail where people are just minding their own business and I jump in “have at thee!” and start slaughtering people in the middle of afternoon tea.
The music is particularly nice, a good blend of traditional Star Wars and some amazing original sound.
The user interface still has a long ways to go. It’s better than WoW was when it launched but that was years ago. It’s not bad but I look forward to modders getting ahold of it.
The graphics are good but I had to use my external GPU tools to turn on additional effects (such as anti-aliasing) because there are no in-game options at this time.
Character choosing. Yea, my character doesn’t look evil. Which is party of the point. The Sith aren’t evil in my view.
The green field tells you that this is an area dedicated to your story. It’s your own personalized instance.
Tired of not being able to play a lot of missions because you have to have a party? No problem. You can get companions as party members who you can even send on various tasks for you and they in turn gain skills that can be quite helpful.
If you get a real party going, you can dismiss your companions to go do something (you can’t have more than 4 people in a party and it doesn’t care whether they’re NPCs or humans).
When you launch the game, you are given a snap shot of where you are in your character’s main story arc as if it were a chapter from the Star Wars saga. The game does a good job making you feel like you are singularly important in the game universe.
If you have any specific questions, ask them here. I play on the Kaas City server as Talax if anyone’s interested.
