Figured I'd share some of my experience playing the TOR beta today. If you want the short version: Much, much better than I expected.

First off, and maybe this is redundant, but don't expect this game to reinvent the wheel. It's an MMO as we've come to know them post-WoW, meaning it's a lot like WoW. There's classes, hotkeys, mount vendors, reputation vendors, quest givers, auction houses, all the stuff that's pretty a given. Let me just do a bullet point list because I'm lazy.

• Combat

It's pretty good. Enemies react well to getting hit. As a jedi consular I had an ability that would knock guys back, and they'd do that. As a bounty hunter, you're exploding guys all the time and flying around, which is pretty satisfying. Rolling with 2 bounty hunters we were basically juggling guys up into the air with rockets. The abilities are cool and fun to use. Unlike WoW where you mostly fight one or two mobs at once, you'll be soloing groups of three or more mobs fairly often. There are plenty of abilities in the early game so you aren't just going 1,1,2 for hours on end also. It's solid, if a tad unremarkable.

• Classes

Only tried two, the Bounty hunter and the Jedi Consular. Bounty Hunter is pretty awesome. You've got a blaster, rockets, flamethrowers and a shoryuken-like rocket punch. It's a lot of fun, especially against crowds. Jedi Consular I only played for a few levels. They've got lightsabers and force powers, nothing too fancy early on.

• Quests

This is where the game really shines. Every quest, at least so far, is fully voiced and offers dialogue options, and most of them involved some sort of story development as well, meaning you get to decide on the outcome of the quest. Your character has a voice and if you so choose an actual personality and it makes you that much more attached to your character. You're basically playing your own Shepard. Quests and dialogues are very Mass Effect-y. When playing in a group, both players select a dialogue option and roll is made to determine which character speaks up, which is really cool. I'd ice a guy in a cut scene by shooting him, but when I was rolling with a sith sorceror, she'd zap him with lightning. There are unique dialogue options per class too. It's all really cool. There haven't been any dumb 'collect X of Y' quests yet so far. I did one instance which was also heavily story-driven. Basically you can forget you're playing an MMO if you turn off the chat window, which is possible. But grouping is also a lot of fun because everyone gets to do something in cut scenes. It's kind of the best of both worlds, the storytelling of a Bioware game and the social aspects of an MMO.

Now I've not played that much, this was my first beta weekend, but if I feel like adding anything after some more play tomorrow (if the servers are still up), I will. For now, I need sleep. PEACE