Those redlettermedia Star Wars reviews ring true for SWTOR...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IRUMt9-Oig0&feature=player_detailpage#t=1560s

Pretty much sums up how I feel about SWTOR and Star Wars in general now. I just hate how everything is a cliche from an original bit of Star Wars fiction and how it's all become some standard in the IP now. I knew it was going to be bad from the poor CGI trailers where it was just light saber battle after light saber battle, where the dark side all wore black robes and had red light sabers and the light had green or blue and brown robes. They always go on about playing the iconic character from the Star Wars series............. isn't the whole point that I play my own? I don't want to be a cliche. I really thought it was funny when they announced a "new" HK droid, basically they thought "people liked HK47 right? So why not put him in again?" lol.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IRUMt9-Oig0&feature=player_detailpage#t=796s

Is exactly how I feel about Bioware's poor in game story telling. People have praised them for the past decade and I never understood why, it's been terrible like watching a poor movie, such as the Star Wars prequels... infact did they learn "how to tell a story" from KOTOR? lol. It's always a "cutscene" that takes you out of the game and it's a shot reverse shot with no movement or anything. I mean if you watch the GTA 4 cutscenes at least they're interesting, there is lots of movement , it's not just standing like cardboard with poor facial animation as they say something boring. The writing in GTA 4 is actually really good and they manage to immerse you into the characters with great out of cutscene writing as you're driving somewhere, I couldn't get enough of packie. However in Bioware games they're always mostly silent until you get to another cutscene. This is never more apparent than with SWTOR because there is basically no out of cutscene voice over, the worlds feel lifeless... even WoW had more. 

I put cutscene in quotation marks because you can barely call them that, nothing ever happens! It's basically what that video review link explains to what Bioware always does. I mean why not just do it how EQ2 did it where you stand in real time and can run away and not listen to any of it if you don't want to? Bioware don't justify cinematics because there is no animation, not even in character faces, they all seem so lifeless. When I played Portal 2 which I think is the best story telling of any game so far, they managed to animate a sphere robot and give it more emotion than any Bioware chaarcter ever. 

SWTOR is just such poor story telling for a game, especially for an MMO where I want to be in control of my character at all times and have freedom. How linear they made the worlds too, they're basically staight quest lines right through till you get to the end of the planet. In fact they don't feel like planets, just feel like game maps, you have no reason to ever go back. So everyone just sits on the station fleets and the game turns into a hub based PSO or Diablo type game lol. All the quests are basically kill 10 rats quests or fetch quests when bioware said you'll be doing none of that because it isn't heroic. My friend said no they're not, they have story and are epic.... yet when watching him play he was killing x out of x of these lol :S The story for each quest that isn't your character one always is the same and follows the same format, it gives the illusion of choice but really it's "do it" "do it" or "dont do it" lol... non of the "choices" matter. Though Bioware also said it wouldn't be about gear and it is and it wouldn't be groupds of people hitting on one boss mob as that isn't heroic and yet we're doing that lol.

I really don't understand why we haven't had a sandbox game with story, people seem to always think it needs to be linear. However SWG Pre CU had themeparks scattered about in a non linear fashion and none of it was level based. You could do them in any order so you had new players doing content with older players because it's whenever they decided to get round to it. People didn't do them for more powerful loot, you did them for kool fun items, schematics, credits or a badge. You did them because it was content and it was fun, it wasn't designed like today where it's all made yo get you through the game and you only do it if it gives you a reward or not at all. I mean why has content become so boring you need to be rewarded to do it now? Granted though we did any content we could get in SWG because there was none lol. My point is though why can't story be contained in quest chains, why does there need to be this notion of linear story? You could just have 100s of self contained stories in mini quest chains dotted around the world.

Has to be the worst MMO I've played, it's not an MMO really and it isn't even close to the level of KOTOR and I wasn't even that fond of it.