A shame to the Star Wars name
The new interface and controls are ugly, awkward, and NOT CUSTOMIZABLE except in a few trivial cosmetic ways. Controlling your character is now a chore, and the combination of lag and the poor interface results in more than half of your actions disappearing into the ether instead of showing up on your screen. To have any chance at all in combat, you need to constantly mash both mouse buttons, move the mouse, and hit keyboard buttons all at the same time. This means no more chatting during combat. It also means that if you have any sort of disability or concern about things like carpal tunnel and tendonitis, you're out of luck.
The whole character-building component of SWG has been destroyed. Items that players have earned through time and energy over many months are now completely worthless in the new system. And to make it worse, the items still exist in the game and provide no clue as to their broken status. You pretty much have to read the online forums to find out from other players how to make use of all the items. For example, armor with "Defense Vs. Knockdown +25" does absolutely nothing, and armor with "Ranged Defense +5" increases your armor while WIELDING a ranged weapon (despite the in-game description saying "improves defense AGAINST ranged weapons"). Mounts that I used to ride around all the time now give the error message "You are not qualified to control this pet."
Actually, SWG has changed a few times in this way before... about every 6 months since its inception in 2003. So you can definitely expect all the items you acquire and become accustomed to in the next few months to suddenly disappear at some unexpected time in the near future, and you will need to re-learn a completely new game at that point in time. For example, I spent all my money in-game buying Anti-Decay Kits to make some of my weapons and armor indestructible. But on 11-15-05, these Kits were suddenly removed from the game and replaced with worthless "profession re-start kits" that demote you to LEVEL 1 in a new profession and make you start over completely from scratch. And guess what? There's no warning that you will get demoted to level 1, and no way back, even through customer service.
The sounds used to be awesome, with various clanking sounds for melee weapons and realistic phaser sounds straight out of the movies. But now they're a joke, like they were produced for the Atari 2600 or something. Whenever you strike with a melee weapon, you hear a dull "thud" like someone dropping a box on a carpet. More than half of the lightsaber moves for Jedi were not even implemented, and all you see is large damage numbers appear over your enemy's head as you're standing there holding your saber nice and still.
Last but not least, the game is absolutely full of horrid bugs and crashes. SWG has a long history of failing to address bugs, and it shows no sign of improvement. Basically what this means is that if you buy the game, you will be paying $15/month to ALPHA TEST it for them. It's too much of a mess to even be called a beta. Just a small sample of current bugs: All weapons hit for the same damage now, regardless of stats. You will probably think "Oh, that's silly, they'll be fixing that in a patch in the next day or two." Nope, haven't fixed it in 2 weeks now, and given past history, it's likely not to be fixed at all. Players will probably go on assuming their weapons are actually better when they say "Damage 200-250" instead of "Damage 150-200." But dedicated players have done tests (that apparently didn't occur to the developers) that prove otherwise. This has been the case constantly since 2003, and there is no sign of improvement... rather, there are plenty of signs of further decline. Save your money and please stay far, far away from this game.