Swtor= dog on a chain?

You ARE missing the point. OP was asking if the world was going to open up like WoW's or if it was going to stay on the same 1-track road the whole way. WoW has tracks, it's not "freedom" nor do I think many people are saying it is. The point that you are most definitely missing is that WoW has . . . let's say, 8 different tracks while SWTOR has 1.

You must've missed a lot in your time there. Some people join nullsec corps right away and move out there for corp ops immediately. They can mine immediately, and PVP in groups immediately too. Will they be more effective as they get their fitting skills maxed? Of course. But really... to claim it's an illusion of a sandbox... by that standard, real life isn't a sandbox because you have some measure of progression even if you jump from place to place. Honestly...

The difference is that when I play TOR I have the feeling that I'm playing a single player game with co-op capability. The linear progression is so blatant I might as well be playing KoTOR. 90% of all content is developer driven as opposed to Eve's player driven. I compare Eve and galaxies to TOR because those are my most recent MMO experiences. I've never played wow so I can't really use that as a comparison. When I think of Sandbox, I think of player involvement/interaction. I've made peace with the fact that TOR isn't sandbox, but I didn't really expect it to be so in-your-face about it.

I've never experienced that in this or any other video game I've ever played. That's a very strange, and I would think, creepy feeling. It would really unnerve me.

I love that balloon. I can't count how many Republic players have accepted duels with me just to get stunned then knocked off the thing lol.

Outlaws Den, The Dune Sea and Anchorhead come to mind. Oh and the Sarlac Pit.

It will also be like this for every character you create. Even if you go with a totally different class, the zones and NPC's you will talk to and the areas you'll go to are nearly identical besides voiceover. Even some of the quests are pretty much the same. It makes you wonder where the hell they spent all that money because if you take away 'star wars' and voice acting, you're left with a game that wouldn't even succeed if it was F2P.

Again, you may not have bothered, but there was content there.

Except for Azshara; release Azshara felt like so many SWTOR zones do.

For example, I'm a Night Elf; I can follow an all-elf quest line up and down Kalimdor. Or, if I rolled undead, it's all over northern eastern kingdoms. Humans? Southern eastern kingdoms, crossing over with some of that undead content in northern eastern kingdoms. Dwarves? Mostly along the eastern side of eastern kingdoms. Orcs and Tauren got lumped in somewhat, but Barrens was absolutely massive, plus it had Tanaris, which most alliance would skip.

Each of these had five plus zones, most of which you probably overlook because you probably took a fairly consistent path through the game as soon as you felt you could. You can say that SWTOR zones are bigger, but these zones had so many more quests, so many more interesting camps to clear through, and was far less punishing on explorers for having far fewer dead-ends (really it had practically no dead ends, but w/e).

Like I said, it wasn't until my fourth and fifth 60s that I even bothered to explore all this content that I had left ignored, that had been sitting there since release.

You might have to turn the monitor back on while exploring then.

And that is what moving goal posts looks like. Crush a point being made and suddenly they're off to make another, irrelevant point.

/golfclap