Better? Yes. Good? No.
Fascinating trappings and genuine genre improvements don't save Star Wars: The Old Republic from being the next in a long line of MMORPG's that fail to live up to the promise of the genre. The game is, at best, a completely conventional MMORPG with some improvements in a vaguely Knights of the Old Republic (the preceding single-player games) wrapper. That is until it comes to the actual gameplay. Which is pointlessly complex and lacks polish.
I love the potential of this genre and I've been playing these games since they were called MUD's. Though in my mind the great untapped potential of the genre lies in the concept of indirect interaction with other players. I long for an MMORPG where a player has an impact on the world which impacts other players and story is an emergent element. This game is the exact opposite of that. There are 8 canned experiences in the form of the game's classes that could easily have been single-player experiences.
It should be no surprise that these stories are engaging. I found myself genuinely interested in pursuing the Trooper's antagonists, proving myself as a Bounty Hunter, and confronting evil as a Jedi Knight. I actually like Star Wars. In particular the Old Republic content is very interesting to me. I could have easily looked past my own genre expectations and enjoyed this game if not for the gameplay itself.
For me this is where the game completely falls flat. Combat is not fun. Each class has a plethora of combat abilities available. It's never clear why this is necessary. Many of the abilities seem to serve a redundant purpose, if any purpose at all is evident. At first I tried to use each of these abilities for their seemingly intended purpose. One for when you are in close quarters with a single opponent, another for close quarters with multiple opponents, another for close quarters with a single strong opponent, another for all those scenarios when grouping instead of solo. I was quickly overwhelmed. I don't have enough keys near WSAD or enough of an attention span (maybe I'm just too old, remember I played MUD's.) to do the "right" thing in every situation. So instead I found a few abilities that I liked and stuck to those. The strange thing is I found this method to be far more effective. I even found myself taking out a few "elite" enemies (enemies intended for multiple players) on my own. At least that is the case with the Trooper class, which is the one I finally settled on after dabbling in them all.
Which brings me to the reason I settled on the Trooper. I found the melee combat to be a disjointed mess. Perhaps that's just because there are so many abilities to concern yourself with while also trying to position yourself appropriately. Frankly, it looks silly. Nothing "lines up." Lightsabers rarely look like they actually connect with anything, for example. You don't have to be directly facing your opponent though, or even within reasonable striking distance for your weapon. For a style of combat so dependent on visual flair that the weapons actually glow, the mess that appears on-screen is unimpressive. I realize that there are genre limitations here, but I can't help but look at Knights of the Old Republic and wonder why they discarded those combat mechanics.
Not that I spent a lot of time actually looking at the combat. With all of the combat abilities to concern yourself with you might find yourself staring at the action bar as you play. That is what I found myself doing before I abandoned that approach. Which is only viable because most of the combat situations are fairly easily overcome. I found group situations much more difficult though, as the use of other abilities becomes more important.
The combat isn't the only rough element of gameplay. I frequently found actions lagging behind button presses. The on-screen timer never seemed to correspond to the actual amount of time I had to wait when using quick-travel. I found myself unable to move on a few occasions, for no obvious reason. Quests are sometimes buggy, have unclear objectives, or the journal/subtitle text doesn't match what the well-voiced characters are actually saying. A particularly memorable quest had you enlist a turret to your cause and face 3 waves of enemies. The general chat was full of people wondering just how to complete this objective. Was the objective to let the turret kill the enemies? Face the enemies yourself? Would you fail if you let the enemies attack the turret? It took me two attempts to complete the quest, and I'm still not sure how. Another player told me it was his 14th attempt at the quest. Others told me they simply gave up. I'm still not sure what the objective was or if this was a bug because the objective was never made clear. While this specific quest was particularly bad there were many points of confusion caused by the general lack of clarity in the game. Map indicators don't always lead to the optimal path for a quest. Quest objectives are arbitrarily restrictive, like when I was asked to kill a specific type of enemy but not told it meant that specific type of enemy in a specific area nor would there be any logical difference between the two areas. On one side of an invisible line they count, on the other they don't.
I should mention not all of the voice work is done well. You'll find the typical mispronunciations and cases of misplaced emphasis that plague video games in general here. The majority of the voice work is good though, so it's easy enough to look past the occasional issue.
The crafting system suffers from the same problems. Every developer of MMORPG's should take note of the improvements made by this game, but the lack of clarity and polish makes crafting less fun than it could be.
I'll probably continue to play to see if they can clean up the technical and design problems, but I love the genre and the material. Even if it wasn't for my own high expectations for the genre Star Wars: The Old Republic isn't something I would be able to recommend to others. It simply lacks focus and polish, and therefore fun. Engaging stories, interesting trappings, and a few tweaks to the MMORPG formula can't make up for that for most people.
