In light of recent penny-arcade-and-customer vs oceanmarketting [sic] drama, I was catching up on Penny-Arcade entries and came across one for >Star Wars: The Old Republic (SWTOR) which sums it all up [emphasis mine]:

While playing last night with Scott he explained that his bounty hunter was all about completing her contracts and getting credits. She didn’t let her feelings get in the way of the job. He was thinking about this before his character was even level 10. I’d be very surprised if he had any idea what sort of “person” his Troll Shaman was in WOW.

I went from 6ish years of WoW (wow!) over to Skyrim a month or two ago, which is a single-player story-driven game that is excellence. And then over to SWTOR. So the change was a slightly phased one for me, but I absolutely felt this same presence in SWTOR that Gabe/Mike mentioned above: you feel your character. And this is entirely because of the choices you make. And unlike other games where there is one “correct” answer and one “lesser” answer so you always want to make the “correct” answer, or even other games that waffle on the idea of irrecoverable choices, SWTOR gives players roughly equal, permanent choices, and they do so in a way that eventually becomes less agonizing and more beautiful. Thankfully I came into SWTOR from Skyrim, so it was Skyrim that started conditioning me to play the character because none of my choices are ever “wrong” (ok, so I still abuse the Quicksaves…).

Anyway, for those curious, I’m only a level 15 Sith Sorceror (heal/dps), but only because I enjoy the game so much and still agonize over some of the choices such that I’ve played 4 classes up to level 11 so far, just to experience the characters, storyline beginnings, and playstyles of the classes. That game may not be “better” than WoW, but it is a very, very welcome change from the same old MO in “that other MMO.”