Totally agree. It really does bug me... Enough that I'm making an expansion pack where not only do your choices count, but the various class stories interact with each other. So while characters stay intheir cannon alignment for game purposes minor things, like do you romance the undercover Jedi on Korriban, or even some larger ones that don't completely change the story such as how did you capture planet X, effect your other stories.

This would be great. I would love for them to conclude the whole Emperor story by making a united class quest, where you could play as all your Legacy characters, and make the situation end in several different situations.

Then perhaps you’re choices during the class quests can have some effect on that last quest?

Well, I know that the smuggler story changes based on your choices.

And I know that in the Jedi Knight storyline making some choices actually changes the objectives and layout of a later mission, making that instance easier or harder to deal with.

And I only know about that one because it was explicitly mentioned, so I sought out what would happen if I took the other choice. It was not apparent in game at all that THOSE where the things changed due to my choices.

So that makes me wonder what else I missed on my characters that I thought would be always the same but where actually influenced by my choices. I'm guessing that some effects can in fact be very drastic, but the notion they are there because of what you did (or not) or said can be very subtle.

For the Knight, there is definitely a "cumulative change" based on your Dark/Light choices that will become obvious if you are Dark-side when you view the cutscene at the end of Act 3. However, as with any scripted system there is only so much wiggle-room the game's plot can give you.

The vast majority of the choices you make throughout the game have only a localised effect, as you have noticed - spare this person, you get one post-mission follow-up email; Kill them, you get a different one. The difficulty of providing a coherent storyline when faced with a richer choice/consequence system would have made the full voice-over system that SWTOR uses virtually impossible or economically unviable.

Plus, if you look at the player reaction to the range of endings for Mass Effect 3, you can see that Bioware's other main choice/consequence-based game series also has predominantly localised or cosmetic consequences.

There was never a single moment in my JK story that I said "oh, thank god I did not do that because that could have changed everything"

I do remember hearing many devs saying how we would have plenty of those kinds of decisions and we never did.

Let's put it this way:

 

Why should a player be punished for role-playing?

 

After all, most players would opt to keep a companion rather than kill them, if they went without them permanently, as there is no gain to killing them, other than if you are a hardcore RPer and would happily cut off your own nose to spite your face.

 

Having generic companions is something that I'd like to see in the game anyway, to be honest. After all, I believe you should be able to recruit whoever you want to your own ship. If they're generic, you could then choose the species and archetype, too.

One of my personal disappointments is that storyline and quest choices don't seem to have much impact on companions beyond adding or subtracting from affection rating. I don't think a player needs to be punished for role-playing, but I guess I was expecting a bit more from storyline and quest choices and how they affect your companions.

I'll use Vette as an example. I play a darkside SW married to Vette. While I was given a chance in the storyline to turn Jaesa to the darkside (which I did, of course), at no point did I feel like my game decisions were having any impact on Vette's demeanor. You'd think being in love with a guy who commits atrocities on a daily basis would start to erode your morals after some time. I know Vette is presented as "very willful" but this isn't a matter of finding a way to break someone's will. Its more of a slow slide of becoming desensitized to the evil around you. Not seeing that kind of effect just makes it feel more obvious I'm following a script with very little option as to the outcome.

Your choices do matter vaguely. I didn't join the beta until they took out most of the big decisions (ie killing off companions). However your alignment does change the type of responses that come from your character when selecting on the dialogue wheel. They're subtle differences, but the darker you are the more sinister and less cheesy the "dark side" conversation options start to become. Also as you improve each companions affection rating you'll notice that they won't follow their "Likes" and "Dislikes" as strongly.

For example in the Sith Inquisitor, I have Ashara close to 5k affection and I've begun to notice, that even though the conversation choices I'm making are not always the most logical ones (some are just plain dark side), that I'll get affection points, or that I won't lose points at all. It also depends on how far along you are in your companion's story line as well. They'll slowly start to be less questioning of your motives, and your alignment will bother them less and less.

Now if I were to say lets kill all the women and children on that transport, Ashara would still lose affection points obviously. However I find that certain lines like "I will make examples of anyone who stands in my way" whether referencing Jedi or not, will actually win affection from Ashara now, when it use to either lose, or just be a neutral point for her.

Again everything is really subtle unless you make a point of actually trying to notice the changes that happen in conjunction with your alignment, your companions, and the various choices you make during the major class quests.

A lot of the choices you make outside of class quests will have no real impact at all though other than that simple in game mail.

I do have to ask a question of some of the beta testers who played for a longer period of time... the affection bars with the companions... did it work like the ones in Dragon Age, where the companion would leave you if it went low enough after awhile?

I also think they should've kept the ability to kill off companions though. There are definitely times that I look at Talos, or Andronikos and wonder to myself, "I never use you, and I never plan on using you... what's stopping me from pushing you out the airlock?"

If the companions don't die, then they should add characters in the story that you get attached to and have complicated options, like choosing between two characters, which one lives, which one dies and actually have it make an impact on who you choose.

[spoilers] Maybe for an expansion they should do what Mass Effect did only with companions, just like the choice of Kaiden or Ashley, that would make things really interesting