Initially turned off by the WoW-like MMO appeal of the game, I think I've quickly turned around and now I genuinely believe it is among the best WoW clones around.

If you've played KoTor 1&2, some aspects of this game and it's world do work as a non-direct KoToR 3. Admittedly not a lot of stuff carries over from those games but it still works well as a standalone game set in that era of Star Wars. The Old Republic style is very distinct and different from the Skywalker saga of Star Wars media and it shows. It does feel like technology is ancient even though practically it looks fancier and newer and that alone brings a lot of charm to this game.

The game has a whopping 8 main class storylines to complete (4 for Republic and 4 for the Sith Empire), plus a few large expansions so you don't have to worry at the lack of stories in this department. Inevitably with this much content, the quality caveat is more apparent than ever as some quests range from tedious filler busy work quests to genuinely well written companion side quests and main quests. I finished the Imperial Agent questline and it is probably the one that's most well received by people as it takes some odd and unexpected twists in the story. On top of that you can shape your character's morality by deciding fates of characters and making important story decisions.
Some of the location specific side quests overlap between characters and are a slog sadly but if anything it does make you flesh out your character with some interesting dialogue choices.

The best part about the game though I think is the fact is that yes it is an MMO but I feel like it is mostly a singleplayer game that you can play with friends. There are some MMO heavy aspects that you can partake in (and sadly in some cases need to partake in) like the PvP, which I never was a huge fan of and the Flashpoints, which you need more people to play with, Galactic Starfighter, Strongholds etc. Some of the equipment as well is pretty MMO-esque as you need to do the aforementioned activities to gain some of them and of course the MMO nature of it's microtransactions. It's an MMO, it's bound to have these and it doesn't really bother me personally. Some of the cosmetics do look out of place, even for this era of Star Wars and you can actually tell which cosmetics came first in the game's life cycle.
On the other end of the microtransactions, the game isn't nearly as bad as it used to be with it's Premium subscription (15 dollars/month but be wary of monthly billing and make sure to cancel when the time is right if you're going to go through with this), as even with the F2P model you get access to all 8 main storylines. Premium gets you all the extra expansions released before the time of your purchase so I'd say it's a pretty good deal.

Even though it isn't that bad in the grand scheme of this game, I still don't like the combat. The WoW-like ability based gameplay is just not for me and with the Imperial Agent, I found a groove of spamming the same abilities and it just got incrementally more tedious, but still something I was willing to put up with to get to more interesting parts of the game. Credit with some bosses though, they do require you to engage in doing other abilities that aren't just mindless spam attacks.

Not a fantastic experience and absolutely very flawed and dated, even with all the updates years later, it still overall feels like an older BioWare game and that's saying something. Under different circumstances it very well could pass as an official KoToR 3. I have omitted lots of stuff as I think you could basically write a whole book about this game, but overall if you can excuse some frankly ugly pastel MMO graphics (not all is bad, the skyboxes and the distant landscapes look stunning) and gameplay, you can find a pretty compelling story based RPG that you can spend dozens, nay hundreds of hours on.