Okay, so Kitty and I had played this for about a week, or so, before his motherboard took a long run off a short pier, but I figured I'd post an update to this thread, in case anyone was interested
So far my impression of the game is...
World of Warcraft: Star Wars Edition.
Game play is pretty much identical to WoW, which I will say is a good thing. The controls are intuitive, the game was easy to pick up, and the layouts of maps, quest clusters, dungeons and "elite" mobs are all basically taken from WoW. I enjoyed all of those features in WoW, however, so I don't mind it at all.
Having played FF14 for the better part of a year, however, the graphics do make me sad. FF14 is a pretty game. It may be copy/pasted to all hell, but it was pretty. Star Wars lacks a lot of this. Again, sort of like WoW. It doesn't have the cartoony feel, but it just doesn't have the awesome graphics 14 has. I still love sprite-based video games, however, so that doesn't really make or break it for me. I heard that they disabled the highest graphic settings at release, because they hadn't worked out all the FPS issues they were encountering. So the graphics may get cleaned up more later on. Either way, whatever.
The storyline, however, is truly epic. The voice acting is good, I feel really attached to my character (unlike 14), and you get to make choices during cutscenes that affect your character's pull towards the light/dark side. And you get access to certain gear depending on your light/dark levels. Yes, you can be a... nice-ish... sith, or a douche-bag jdei, if you really wanted to.
Then there's the whole issue of the game being based around Star Wars. This is really cool if you're a huge Star Wars nut (I'm not). If you're more of just an RPG player (like me), then your results may vary.
Enjoy playing mage jobs in MMOs? Well, I hope you like lightning bolts, 'cause I don't remember any jedi/sith fire/ice/super-spiffy-awesome spells in the movies, do you? I'm a level 19 sith sorcerer, and I basically have like 5 different lightning related spells. There's some force push back, snare, DoT stuff, but whatever.
So while it's cool that you're kind of in the Star Wars universe, you're playing the game hundreds, or thousands (Sadly, I'll admit I'm not really sure what time frame this all is. I'm not huge into star wars lore), before any characters you really know. So it's not like you're gonna be seeing Yoda around, or anything.
So yah... The game, to me, is better than FF14, but I do think basing it on Star Wars will make the game very limiting for designers. You get a light saber at level 10, or whatever. Awesome. So now I'll be looking at the same lightsaber graphic (Different colors, sure), for the rest of my gaming career in this game. No epic weapons to collect based upon looks (like the ifrit weapons), no lobbing giant ice boulders, at people, no chance of summons, no riding around on a neat cat mount you got as a drop from some raid.
Maybe that sounds more negative than it should, I dunno.
Basically the game is fun to play, the spent a lot of time making the world feel like star wars, and if you love star wars, you'll probably love this game. If you're worried about how limiting keeping everything in the star wars universe is, then you'll probably eventually get bored with the game. I am kinda sad I'll never have a neat-looking weapon than a light saber. All they can really make look epic on it is the hilt. And unless they really screw with lore, I don't expect to be seeing any non-lightning based spells and such for the mage classes. I'm sure bounty hunters can shoot fire, or something, but that's not the same. So I guess getting fancy armor will probably be the name of the game.
I think I'll get my money's worth for the game, to be sure. I mean it's not hard to squeeze 60 bucks of entertainment from a game. I bought two collector's editions of FF14, and I still think I got my money's worth. But since I'm not a huge star wars nut, I think I'll ultimately get a bit bored having to live restrained within that universe. I want fancy cat mounts, fire spells, and neat-looking weapons.
If anything, this kinda just makes me wish I had started back up on WoW again :P
_________________ 
|