From my perspective as a Trooper Vanguard fan, the situation is thus. The story isn't the most spectacular in the universe, but that's because it's limited by the nature of what the defines the class. You are the very best the Republic military has to offer, and as such you tend to operate and function within more strict guidelines than the Smuggler or even the Jedi classes. Whereas the Jedi's orders are usually somewhat general and leave a lot open to interpretation, as a member of the armed forces the Trooper at the end of the day is required to follow certain orders to the letter, leaving very little wiggle room in how they are to be carried out. Now, the positive aspect of the Trooper story is that once you As for the moral compass as far as the dialogue and story choice options go, it's kind of hit and miss. I for one like it a lot, but still recognize they could have made the choices a little more complicated or motivated. Many times if you try to be the good, patriotic Republic poster-boy and choose the light-side options it feels like you're just constantly spouting tag-lines and propoganda at every opportunity(if I hear my trooper say "For the Republic" one more time I'm going to blow chunks all over my keyboard). Subsequently, the dark side choices are occasionally cool, but often make you seem like just a thug with a rank, and are unecessarily cruel or serve to only inflict as much damage as possible. I chose to try and play my Trooper as a good person, but more concerned with fighting the Empire and the Sith and preparing for war than the personal, help the orphans and change tires and kiss babies type, but sometimes it was difficult to do without being either Captain Perfect or a total douchehammer. There are relief groups and other people who can do clean up and repair, I'm a specialist with high-tech weaponry and advanced training, and I should be using those to take down the Empire and criminals and such, not helping the infrastructure of a local farming town. War is war, it ain't pretty, but its necessary, and Havoc Squad is the nasty, ugly but effective tip of the sword. Now then, as for gameplay, I think the Trooper and especially the Vanguard is brilliant. I play as a tank, and it's a sometimes mid-range, almost always close-range tough-as-nails, heavily armoured specialist who can go toe-to-toe with anyone, anytime, anywhere. I love the idea that in a galaxy of mystical Force powers, ancient alien civilizations, system-spanning criminal cartels and everything in between, I'm someone who through grueling training, the best weaponry and defensive tech in the galaxy, and superior tactics can take down even the people regular hard-asses are scared of, like the Sith. If there's a situation that requires a special strategy or weapon, the Trooper has access to it and has been trained to know how to use it. So yeah, maybe I'm biased, but the gameplay itself is endlessly fun. Just ask anyone how sweet it is to sneak behind a group of enemies all clustered up and then unleash Mortar Volley in the middle of them. It's beautiful.

The thing is, I played WoW and remember the zombie event and all the associated Undead Plague stuff, which felt dumb for the simple reason that there essentially was no cure. It arbitrarily stopped at certain points, but was never cured completely, which made it feel like a half-assed zombiepocalypse plot device. I really like the Rakghoul plague as a world event, because they started off with a fairly small and innocuous idea in KOTOR, ran with it as a bit more threatening and urgent on Taris in the Republic campaign there(haven't played Imperial yet so not sure how it plays into them), and now we see that it's possible for it to spread to other planets if not carefully controlled. Point is, if BioWare keeps this up as a world event and keeps increasing it by little bits and gradually adding to it, it could turn into a fully fleshed-out, very interesting story-driven part of the game, and who knows where it will end up? Maybe there will be a lvl 50 Flashpoint or Operation for both sides to go into some deep, hidden lab/ruins on Taris and try and find a cure once and for all, once both sides realize exactly how dire a threat this has become. Anyways, I give BW 2 thumbs up for this, it's starting off slow but has huge potential to end up as something epic.

You know what I'd love to see though? An actual battlefield simulator using Star Wars units. ANd no not just a real-time strategy game. It's neat because on shows on the History channel and such, they develop simulators that can fairly accurately recreate soldiers armed with the weapons and armour of their time and area, present the battlefield tactics people used in that day and age, etc, and then they get modern generals and strategists to take command of one side or another and try their hand at the scenario to see if they could improve on it or at least do as well as the historical commanders did. I would love for them to use this type of system to get some basic, base-line standards worked out for what energy shields and basic troop armour can and can't defend against, effective range and stopping power of various blasters, plus what kind of offensive and defensive abilities and capabilities special forces on both sides have. This means Jedi, Sith, Commandos, Bounty Hunters, Assassins, etc. If they gave these units and pitched forces and such to a couple of actual commanders or generals I think it would be very, very interesting to see what kind of tactics and plans they came up with that would be effective in a universe where energy weapons and powered armour are common to most if not all soldiers.

Reading this and similar threads, it strikes me that a large chunk of the online community(a generalization, but an accurate one) are complaining about things they want fixed NAO and are unwilling to be patient while Bioware tries to address the issues. Now, granted, a lot of this is legitimate concern about low-pop servers and trying to find groups and such. But I think the game is what you make of it largely as well, and so a lot of the fun you can get out of it relies heavily on how much you actually desire to find the fun to have, as opposed to wanting it to be handed to you. I'm on a light server, where on any given planet in the evening there are usually only maybe 10-20 people, save for peak times when that number goes up by about 50% or so. And admittedly I haven't gotten to 50 yet, so my experience is a tad limited. But I specifically rolled on this server, low-pop or not, so that I could run with friends and enjoy the game for it's best aspects, those being storyline and just sheer fun gameplay. Yes, it's hard to do 4-man heroics sometimes if people aren't on when I need them to be. But there is a lot more to this game that I enjoy, and personally I really love the RPG atmosphere(someone mentioned SWTOR kept the RPG in MMORPG and I agree). To me this game feels a lot like playing an awesome single-player game, but that friends are playing with me, and new content and features are being added to my game. The last thing is to try to say to people to be patient. The game is 3-months old, and while yes, certain features may be expected now after only a short time, you have to consider the following, and I'm only including this because people KEEP making the comparison to WoW. When that game first launched, it was a very revolutionary type of MMO, and offered a lot of new things that others at the time didn't. SO despite the bugs and server crashes and other major issues in WoW's infancy, it was I think a lot easier to stuck with it, mainly because of a lack of similar alternatives. SWTOR is an excellent game, but also in its infancy. It takes time to grow and develop into a fully-fledged, stand-alone MMO. It offers a lot right now, and will continue to offer more. Bioware is learning the Dos and Don'ts of player-feedback and game dynamics. SO give it time, I think the game will still continu8e to get better and be impressive. Just far too easy to be negative and cynical about this. I choose to focus on the positive, and enjoy the fact that this game makes me actually feel important, like a hero, instead of just 'one of the crowd'.

23) It should be noted that while force users are very skilled at reflecting blaster bolts, studies have shown that they have considerable more difficulty deflecting Mortar shells to the face.