Well I found the start of my beta experience to be pretty meh, but it picked up levels 8-11 and then the quest design started to make things boring. I played a Jedi Consular and went Shadow. (For some reason, I was the only shadow Jedi I saw.)
Things I liked:
-Taking on more than one enemy at once
-Giant cities with the KOTOR layout of being not just a safety crib full of NPCs. A lot of MMOs have their city and its a safehouse and everything else combat and quest wise is done outside the city. The city here is sprawling and full of quests that are accomplished within the various areas of the city.
-Companion utility: Makes soloing easier and works like a hero from Guild Wars, but ToR's companions are also your fetchmen and errand runners. If you are going to do some solo stuff where they are unneccessary, you can send them out to do some Crew Skill quests, which are crafting and gathering missions that basically take up a set amount of time. Your companion goes off for five minutes and then when he returns you get your reward described in the Crew skill tab.
Meh things:
-Combat. Consular's knockbacks and stuns made Jedi-ing it up in a mess of people a bit more heroic, and I liked just flinging rocks at people and force-knocking them back. It is still very hotbar based though and I didn't find much depth to be had.
-Visual Style: Not sure how I feel about it. A cross between KOTOR and the CG Clone Wars show. Things looked flat and the world felt sterile. Even going up some stairs it looked like your character was going up a ramp. You're a Jedi and you can't jump up a little rock hill one rock at a time.
Dislikes:
-Too much dialogue. I don't need three dialogue options to accept a minor quest. Then you hand it in and there's three to five more options. The dialogue options don't match the exact wording of what your character ends up saying and you can't rely on the choice you make creating the sentiment you seek. There's a healthy amount of dialogue, and then there's an obnoxious amount of talking that begins to annoy you and add extra time to a game that already is designed to eat up time. ToR is firmly on the obnoxious side.
-It is just a wow/diku derivative with Star Wars paint. Whatever new things are brought to the genre in this game, they exist with the companion or city structure.
-Quest design is so unimaginative. Everything is a fetch quest or some variety of it (find these things and click on them) with kill ten rats as bonus missions.
-Story driven game that constantly breaks any immersion by everyone running around with the same companion. One day someone will get clever and create their MMO story structure based upon the reality of a MMO game: everyone doing everything together and slowly realizing you're all doing the same thing
I was in the Rift beta and the Rift beta was far more interesting. Zone Events were something fresh and addicting. While the story elements of ToR are nice, they feel like a cosmetic element overcompensating for a very run of the mill game. I think Bioware's best choice is to streamline dialogue and move away from a story structure that clashes with the game's structure. Instead, look at juicing up the crew stuff since that felt like the part of the game with the greatest potential.
