What annoys me somewhat is that the class-quests feels like "just another quest".

It would also be cool if quests were longer and bigger and took place on more than one planet occasionally.

Also, the planets don't feel as ambient when it's basically a narrow path.

Am_Confucius

Regarding the planet points, yes, I was also really bummed out by the constrained feel of them. It gets a lot better on some of the later planets like Tatooine and Hoth. In my opinion the feeling of claustrophobia is also made worse by having mobs within aggro range near or on the main roads on many planets. It is incredibly annoying that you can't travel down the main pathways of the planets without getting attacked all the time.

Again, this also just seems like something that is intended to steal more of your time, as you'll constantly be dismounting and fighting off small groups of enemies in order to make your way to the questing areas.

Well, I'm glad to hear that I'm not the only one feeling like this.

As to the argument about the pacing issues can also be found in single player RPG's I'd say yes, but to a completely different degree. I completed Mass Effect and Dragon Age in 20-30 hours or so. After playing SWTOR for 30 hours I was level 30 and hadn't even finished chapter 1 of my story. This is not due to the incredibly amount of great story content, but due to the incredible amount of grindy filler stuff that is thrown in to drag out my story.

Again, I fully appreciate why BioWare felt the need to handle the story in this way, namely that it's a MMO and you have to keep the player engaged for a much longer time than in a single player game, but I still think the story experience really suffers as a result.

I've been playing SWTOR since the first day of early access and I was initially quite impressed by the way that BioWare managed to integrate story into an MMO.

But the more I play of the game the more I'm starting to feel that there are some severe limitations to the storytelling experience that are detracting from the experience.

Because SWTOR is an MMO it has to give up some of the usual tricks of telling a good story, such as letting you meaningfully change the world or making you feel like you're unique and special in the world.

At level 39 I'm also feeling that there is a real pacing issue with the main class story, as I'm spending several hours on side quests before I get to advance my main quest line. I suppose that this is both a limitation on the amount of content that BioWare could create and also to try to encourage you to go try other things, but as a big story fan it just really annoys the heck out of me.

I've also made a more detailed post about my issues with the storytelling over on my blog that you're welcome to check out.

Am I the only one that is almost wishing for a "single player mode" so they could just focus on playing through the story?

I think it's worth a negative amount of money. You'd have to pay me money to sit through that awful pile of game developer vomit.

Honestly, it's pretty bad, even if the game had come out 10 years ago it would have been a crappy game.

It does feel rather weak, especially at first, but once you get the "double spell" unlocked and after you get some good gear (do the Winterhold College quest line), then you start to feel a lot more powerful.

You still rely a bit on summoned and hired companions, but I definitely ended up feeling pretty good about my choice to go full magic.

It's really hard to compare those three games.

Perhaps you can sorta compare Shogun 2 against Anno 2070, but Skyrim is a completely different style of game.

If you're looking at both Shogun 2 and Anno 2070 I'm going to assume you're a little more interested in strategy games than RPG's, and for sheer number of hours of entertainment then I would guess that Shogun 2 is probably going to be better value for money.

Star Wars: The Old Republic is definitely the only credible WoW contender at the moment and right now the only other game in development that looks to have similar potential is Guild Wars 2.

I think a lot of developers have given up trying to go head on against WoW and are instead making smaller niche products that appeal to a different kind of audience.

That's all fine and well. I'm not saying this is how you should play the game.

I've just seen a lot of people **** about how they're always broke and can't get any money together and thought I'd share my experiences.

Well:

1) As I mention in my article you'll have perfectly adequate gear from just quest rewards and the greens you find along the way. As long as you're leveling you should spend as little money as at all possible on gear, since you're going to be discarding it anyway within a few levels. This is espcially true at lower levels, where gear becomes obsolete in a matter of hours.

2) Picking 3 gathering skills does not scew you over in any way. You can always respec one of your gathering skills once you're max level and want to start focusing on crafting. That way you'll already have maxed out gathering skills to support your crafting and a big pile of money that you can buy low level materials with.

As an added benefit this also means that you'll avoid paying the high prices for rarer crafting materials that is always apparent in any new MMO