STAR WARS™: The Old Republic™

Free until level 60, You can complete all Vanilla Class Quest for EACH class (8) without paying a dime.
Subscription is $15/mo, If you sub once you unlock all content up to that date plus additional benefits.
A few benefits are Fast travel to your ship, shuttle to imperial fleet, more space, You can equip higher tier gear, and so on.
No pay to win, All shop items are cosmetic or Race/Content unlocks. You can technically buy all subscription benefits with cartel coins so you don't really have to sub again.
TLDR; Play vanilla, If you like it then Sub and keep playing. I cannot speak for the future of the game to be honest, but the existing content is worth your time. I miss old BioWare so much it hurts.

Easily the best sci-fi mmo on the market currently, and a real treat for OG Star Wars Fans.
It's Bioware at the former height of their storytelling capability and Star Wars at the former height of it's world-building prior to Disney.
It allows us to pretend that modern-day Bioware and Disney Star Wars never existed, and there's a lot to love about that.

Very good Star Wars game, 8 different, well-written class stories + all the numerous side quests and planet quests. A ton of content for free, and after you've finished everything (which will take you a long time) you can pay once for the subscription to unlock lifetime access to DLC. Go for it if you love Star Wars !

I played the game at launch for 6 months back in 2011 and stopped as the there was little endgame and content was low. Fast forward 14 years and there is now an insane amount of story content in this game.

If you are a STAR WARS fan and love a good, well written story then this is the game to play, this game is part of a dying collective of well written story led games that no longer exist.

First of all, I got way more hours into this game than it shows here, I played on-and-off from 2012 up to this very day, I skip years, then come back and play for a year or two and drop it again, on the EA launcher, and only recently I installed it via Steam, I think I have at least 1000 hours or more.
The base game is a letter of love to Star Wars fans, more specifically, Star Wars The Old Republic fans.
The worldbuilding is beautiful, the lore is consistent, you have fully voiced storylines and even sidequests and planet quests, all the way to level 50 or so, there is a lot of content to unpack and explore. If you really love Star Wars, you will be immersed in the story and the characters.
The bad thing is the gameplay itself.
Being a MMO it is very dated and grindy by default: Full of boring quests, mundane activities and backtracking. It is not engaging, specially if you are playing by yourself. Updates made the game a LOT easier than what it was when I started playing. I bet you, you can be very casual about it, and you won't struggle to kill any bosses or progress. You can play clicking with your mouse instead of using keyboard biding and macros.
The endgame and current state of the game, is where things get scuffed even if you love Star Wars.
You will be playing space barbie and collecting fancy things for your character to use, or for your in-game house.
Devs make dodgy decisions to say the least, at times repressing negative comments.
All expansions/post-vanilla content stray further and further from the original storylines that made this game so great, and don't get me wrong, I like them but we had 16 different unique storylines that got somehow merged into one. There is no possible way you could retain the quality of them all.
PvP can be fun, but it is broken. Also no servers outside US/Europe, so if you live in SA or Asia you get used to play with high ping.
This game was made by BioWare on its apex, and you can tell by it's great worldbuilding and dialogue, it was incredibly good even if the MMO aspects of it always held it down in my opinion, what really killed this game was EA terrible decisions over the course of many years.
First and foremost, they gave us a amazing storyline, but even at its prime the MMO aspect was always lacking, and this was supposed to be the WoW killer at its peak, but it lacked too much WoW content.
They made the game Free2Play, but they ostracized F2P'ers like they were the plague. Nowadays is not so bad, but back them, F2P could not even equip artifact items, had incredibly low credit cap, couldn't use dyes, received way less XP, could only play 5 matches of PvP per day... Even if you paid money to subscribe for a while or buy Premium currency, you would become Preffered but still be very limited. The game is limited for free players still, but way more lenient nowadays.
This was one of the biggest mistakes. Players, specially in a multiplayer game, are content. This is proof by the fact many games nowadays make themselves free to play to attract as many players as possible, instead of treating their free players like garbage like EA did.
I am a lonely person, but even for me, this game feels way too lonely at times. I remember playing with planets full of people, hanging out in the cantina, doing raids and PvPs in group... you can still have some semblance of that nowadays, if you join a guild or a discord or something like that I guess...
It feels almost wrong to recommend this game because of all these flaws: EA's greed, mediocre devs, bland gameplay, bad endgame... but the original vision for this game by it's original developers were good, they were onto something there, unfortunately, they were victims of EA lack of vision and pettiness, who made a supbar MMO with a great singleplayer story, alienated it's free playerbase and never bothered to expand to SA even though theres lots of Star Wars fans here as well.
This game goes down in my books as one of the most missed potential of all time. The foundation for something great is there, but it devolved over the course of many years and years of bad decisions pilling it up and corroding the integrity of the game.
Ultimately, I think this game is a easy skip if you aren't into Star Wars. Just play some other singleplayer RPG instead like Fallout, Skyrim, Witcher, Elden Ring... but if you LOVE Star Wars, I think you must at least check the original storylines, because the expansions are lame and flanderize the characters, the endgame is boring, the community is kinda dead, the gameplay is boring... However, this game is the only game to this day that truly lets you be a Jedi, a Sith, a Bounty Hunter, a Smuggler, a Stormtrooper or a Imperial Agent.
This game remains to this very day, even with all it's flaws, the ultimate Star Wars experience you can get.

The DEFINITIVE MMO experience.
It has literally everything,
- The best stories in MMOs (Fully voice acted, and not as predictable as other MMOs)
- Great combat (Ancient sure, but it feels great, and looks fantastic.)
- Fantastic graphics (Biggest surprise to me, you have to fiddle with it, and add some FXAA through the NVIDIA control
panel, but once you do, it looks up to par with nearly all other MMOs)
- The BEST OST in MMOs today (WoW has some pretty great music, but nothing beats John Williams' original work)
- You get showered in loot, rewards, housing items, cool cosmetics, boosters and tons more stuff (And it's not there just to
hook you on the store either, it's actually insanely generous.
- A fantastic mount system
- A BRILLIANT housing system with decoration that can be gained through crafting and rewards.
- Lots and LOTS of F2P content
- A wonderful monetization model where once you sub for a single month, you gain and keep access to ALL expansion
content forever. (Looking at you ESO, this is the way to do it correctly)
- A metric TON of content (Truly with 8 class stories to play entirely for free, spanning 100s of hours, this has more content
than most paid games)
- A thriving world (Believe it or not, you will run into other players at nearly every instance of the game, still. Not the
biggest playerbase, but a very consistent one.)
- THE MOST ELABORATE IN UNIVERSE SW STORY THAT ISN'T TAINTED BY DISNEY OUTSIDE OF THE ORIGINAL 6 MOVIES.
(If you despise Disney SW and love the originals, this is for you 100%. It's the best SW story content outside of KOTOR
and the original movies.)
Some possible negatives or things to consider;
- Cash shop (it's F2P, so it's a given, and prices are....all over the place, but there are daily deals to be had that are quite
good, and it's not too predatory when it comes to selling QOL, most of that stuff is available for regular in game credits
too)
- It's old, and feels that way sometimes, but then again, it manages to surprise from time to time with how frsh mechanisms and content is introduced quite regularly. It's also pretty nostalgic if you grew up in the 00's.
- It's entirely playable as a wonderful solo experience. This might be a plus or a minus depending on preference.
Truly, even for F2P players that never want to spend. There are SO many cool adventures here, so much to enjoy for free, without feeling constantly pressured to spend or having to deal with loads of missing QoL. Even the QoL thats missing can be bought in the store (mostly with credits too)
I truly have VERY little negatives to say. This game is absolutely wonderful and a fantastic SW experience.

Everyday I have to agree to terms and verify file integrity to fix the game. Please address this.