Well as I said, SWTOR is not for spoiled impatient players who are after constant “action”. It is a more realistic approach. I can certainly appreciate the vastness of the maps, etc. It adds to the immersion quality. Also, I think the main character story nicely blends with planet-specific side stories.
And SWTOR can be easily considered as KOTOR3 because MMO aspects can be ignored/bypassed almost entirely (I know that for the fact as I did exactly that).
I don’t understand this argument, SWTOR itself tends to be more action than storytelling just because of the MMO model. KotOR 1 and 2 had really great, long, and slow storytelling moments like this
Spoilers for KotOR 2, very late game exposition
or this
Spoilers for KotOR Tatooine, Sand People backstory specifically. Note there are 3 parts.
Yes there were moments when action was placed at the front over storytelling (both KotOR games do this at the end for reasons I will never understand), but even those moments honestly pale in comparison to the sheer amount of detail in storytelling.
There’s really nothing like this in SWTOR (partially because of the MMO scale of the game and partially because of the dialogue wheel which limits player interaction considerably). Yes there are long cutscenes with a lot of exposition, but those cutscenes tend to express very little about the world in comparison to the interactions you’d find in KotOR games.
And there are ways to add immersion without increasing map scale. Adding AI with believable pathing around the maps, increasing player interaction with the world, good storytelling, etc etc. The problem with SWTOR is that immersion was doomed to be fucked from the start, no matter what you do. There’s nothing quite like going on a quest that should be personal only to see a few players that are essentially the exact same person as you walk through a green forcefield limited to your class. Then there’s the lack of interaction in the world (no optional characters to just chat with, extremely limited companion interaction, the horrifying MMO UI, the forcefields I mentioned earlier, seeing other characters go through the same quests as you, the dreadful animations (This is just embarrassing and you see these shit quality animations in most Bioware games now), NPCs being completely stiff and unmoving in stories unless you interact with them (see link just posted too for example of that), and it goes on and on and on. These issues will always hurt immersion more than big maps can even add immersion.