Last I checked, all of those are aspects of scifi... There are billions of planets in a galaxy, so why not spice it up? Hell WoW did it just fine in ONE world(well if you want to get all technical and count outlands, then w/e). The "tunnels and hallways" syndrome is referring to being out in the open world; in which case, is far from a problem in WoW. In TOR, you are constantly channeled between valleys and have little to no vertical travel possible. There is no "hey let's climb over that hill and flank this quest from back here!" Some times you get lucky and can dodge a couple of packs while closely hugging a canyon wall. Once again, in terms of leveling choices, having options is what makes or breaks a game these days. I don't think any form of magic is involved with it when a game has 11 million subscribers. That's after they lost around 10% of their player base due to the expansion having ran it's cycle and because if a fiasco in china, but they will all be back soon for the next expansion. This means that WoW did something right, where all the others have failed. There is no sugar-coating it or coming up with magical reasons as to why they are so successful; they made a great game with a small fraction of the budget and staff that this game had. 200 million was spent on TOR... Let that number soak in for a minute and think about it all. We deserve better than this. Statistics speak for themselves: http://users.telenet.be/mmodata/Charts/Subs-1.png

It's called a change of atmosphere. It's something that BW should have definitely factored into their development. Trust me, after you level 2 toons to 50, you will probably be wishing there were other options. In Tor, yeah, you get a different story for each class in the game, but those quests only make up like maybe 25% of the game. Repeating all the other bland missions is what I am talking about. They make up the core EXP in your leveling process. I know that plenty of the missions incorporate them into bonus missions, but 9/10 you end up having to kill all those anyways getting to your primary objectives and back out of the camp. Prime example of a quest like that yeti one: Tatooine. That quest where you have to run around the town 500 times to get 5 or 6 items off the infiltrators. Keep in mind, there are only about 5 or 6 of them total in all the huts scattered around town... I think I killed at least 35 or 40 of them over the course of an hour and a half to get them all. Also, they eventually patched that and fixed the drop rate on that yeti quest. I am one of those people that does every quest in the zone even if they turn green for me. I do enjoy the satisfaction of knowing the whole story behind an area. I usually avoid all those as well. But it's hard not to get exp too fast when you have to constantly kill unnecessarily large amounts of trash to get anywhere. EDIT: I should mention that I am lvl 47 now. I don't know about you guys, but it started to hit me really hard when I was on hoth. From then on, is when it feels like it's been a real drag. Just finished Voss and that was damn near intolerable on some missions(Though I loved the mystics quests).

In WoW, for instance, I could spend HOURS roaming around doing absolutely NOTHING but sight seeing and still have fun. Why? Because the game had an awesome atmosphere and ambiance to it. You weren't constricted by the linear "tunnels" everywhere. Sure, it's awesome to go from planet to planet and some of the zones are HUGE, but damn near lifeless and empty. After the leveling charm wears off for people, what incentive is there going to be to level an alt without spacebaring through everything? You don't even get to chose a different planet flow for leveling. In wow, you could chose to level through several different zones per level bracket. That option was there from day ONE! My big problem is that I love hardcore stuff like raiding and getting in top ranks worldwide, but at the same time, I love just running around and killing time when I'm not busy with anything. There isn't much to see in this game after you do the quests. I don't even want to bother exploring because there is nothing to see and i dread having to kill umpteen mobs to get there. This game should have been marketed more as a GW competitor than a WoW competitor. I feel like I fell for the hype machine and am now 60 bucks short of where I was before.

What detail? Other than conversational detail, the world is unnaturally stale and lifeless. There is next to no ambiance in this game. Any of the cool cut scenes are quickly forgotten thanks to spending forever and a day getting to and from the objectives. As for the quick travel comment, it can only be used every 30 minutes and half the time, the turn in area is nowhere near the closest travel point. Let's not forget that the hub always turns out to not have a flight point for some reason as well...

I should have mentioned that I love MMOs and am usually a hardcore player. I tend to be in around the top 1% of players in PVE and PVP content. Grinding does not bother me too much. However, excessive grinding and poor questflows usually mean that the game developer did not think things through all the way. Basically what I was getting at with my post is that the pacing is terrible in this game. I don't care how long it takes to get to the level cap as long as I am having fun doing so; and this feels more like a chore. Of course this could be intentional on BW's part. Makes perfect sense in terms of money. The longer they can stretch content out, the longer it will take players to complete and the more money they make in the mean time. So rather than completing all of the quests in an optimized zone in 10 hours (pulling numbers out of the rear), it will take you 20 instead. EDIT: oh and also, about the "making 100000s of quests" crap, estimates peg them at spending around 200 million on this game. I would expect better than this.

Sure, questing in this game is supposedly "more engaging" than WoW; I can definitely say that for sure. People like to flame and rag on WoW for having so many "Go kill X, go loot Y" quests, but I honestly don't see a difference between these games. In fact, I think quests in this game tend to have about double the kill requirements; even though they aren't listed as an objective. Let's say you have a mission to go kill some leader who is hiding in a cave that is all the way across the map. So after the long, linear, ride there of trying to dodge the clusterfudge of poorly placed enemy spawn points along the road and trying to take non-existent shortcuts when you can; you finally reach the "gate" of the camp that is guarding the cave, that is guarding the boss. Now you have to kill like 10+ packs of mobs to enter the cave. Followed by clearing 10+ packs of mobs to enter the instance. You'll never guess it, followed by clearing the instance and a boss; only for a 2 minute "game-breaking" cut-scene that supposedly sets this game above the competition. Now comes the fun part! You run all the way back through the instance that that you just cleared out. No quick ways out, no ledges to jump off, no tunnel passage way to the start, etc etc. Guess what, that cave you just cleared 10 minutes ago is completely re-spawned. So now you clear that all out AGAIN and go outside. Then re-clear a path to the road AGAIN. Then ride all the way across the map AGAIN. Oh and then to polish it all of with a glass of pain in the ***, you get some follow up or optional mission to go back over there and do it all again because you were trying to mission pool and knock out a bunch in the same area at once. Shame on me for trying to follow a natural questflow right? I'm sorry, I think I'd take the old "Kill 10 of these mobs and the boss" WoW quests over the "Kill one guy!(in invisible ink: and kill 100 of these guys to getting to him and back out) TOR missions. At least you know what you are getting into with a WoW quest. Even missions in Eve Online don't frustrate me to this extent. I would rather there be mostly silver and gold mobs than to have to deal with packs of 4-5 over and over and over and over again. Before anyone attacks my credibility, I have played many MMO's, including WoW for 7 years and Eve Online for around 4; both on and off.