You know, I could forgive most things about the game, but where they unquestionably screwed the pooch imo is world design. Everything boils down to linearity:
- 17 planets - unavoidable, but cordoning off some planets and making some of the same planets different depending on faction /headwall
- Instanced zones (the least of the game's problems, but not minor in the grand scheme of things)
- Literally linear design (Coruscant being a fine example, being not only linear but divided into a pile of zones only accessible via taxis)
- Invisible walls via exhaustion zones - and not just around the planets and such, but in places where you can stand at point A, see point B with nothing in the way and run into an exhaustion zone if you try to cross it rather than taking a taxi. This is on Tattooine no less, their "completely open world" zone
- Making slightly steep hills unscalable, forcing you to go around them
- No 3D movement like swimming/flying, the former being far less forgivable in my book
Someone really oughtta teach their world designers what an open world means, because they're acting like we just stepped out of the 2,5D age.
Most of the other stuff I'm fine with, story's ok, VA/dialogue is great, combat is quite fun for a hotkey MMO (I genuinely enjoyed it, it's not just a "meh, ok for MMO").
The game's fun to play, but doesn't have any lasting appeal because there's no real world to it. Every planet feels like just another tool for leveling and not something you ever want to go back to. Even with stuff like holocron hunting, they don't have the exploration aspect anywhere close to being decent, I've done more exploration in WoW where it was not awarded at all, just for the fact I COULD explore everything I wanted.
It also feels like an INCREDIBLY sterile experience. You can see the amazing care that was taken to make sure you can go through your story uninterrupted by things like world events, world bosses and world PvP. Thing is, even though those things can be annoying at times, the fact is they're a part of an MMO.
It's like listening to music - you can lie back in your comfy chair, choose your songs, the order they come in, listen to them at production quality and enjoy it on your own. But analogous to gaming, that's a singleplayer experience. The multiplayer experience is doing the same with a few friends and that's pretty much where TOR ends up.
Here's the thing though - an MMO is a concert. It's that stand/dance/headbang-for 4 hours, blow-your-eardrums loud, packed full of people so you can barely breathe experience, where the band has to improvise a bit and get it right the first time (which they likely won't always do). It's the place where you're gonna have a dude puke two feet away from you, where a jackass is gonna think it's funny to throw a half full cup across the audience, dousing you with beer and where a group of people is gonna start moshing in the middle of the crowd. But it's all a part of that experience. If you sterilize it completely, it loses all of it's charm and stops being what it is. And that's exactly what BioWare did with TOR.
