Scars Unseen said:
As a role-player myself, I've pretty much resolved this by treating the character I play in the story as completely separate from the one I play in all other situations. I just view the story as another evolution of the "theme park".
More worrying for me are the artificial character limitations that the story creates. Reportedly, you can't play, for example, a Pureblood Sith inquisitor. Why? Because in the inquisitor's story, you start out as a slave, and Purebloods aren't slaves. There are Pureblood inquisitors; you just can't play one. This is a pretty annoying limitation for anyone who actually wants to role-play.
Your solution is probably the only feasible one, and I guess it is manageable in an in-game context. Certainly, the same effect occurs in other MMORPGs that have a stringent quest structure as well, but quests there are often forgettable enough to not impact your experience that much if you just don't consider them part of your character's background.
I am not saying that SWTOR is going to be a bad game - by no means. In fact, what I have seen so far looks very promising. I am just worried that the 'game' aspect might overwhelm the 'multiplayer online role-playing' part of the equation. The character limitations you mention are another good point. The player will take a rather pre-determined role and go through a rather pre-determined (albeit probably exciting, gripping and well-designed) story which limits their ability to play the character they want. Add to that the need to filter out a lot of story and consider it as if it never happened, and you get my concerns about this being a good game, but not very immersive on the multiplayer part.
It IS easier to just ignore half-naked night elves running around yelling "LOLOLOLOLOLO" than ignoring something that is actually presented to your character as his or her actual in-universe experience.
Then again, the problem might be systemic. MMORPGs always had this problem, and I know of only four that did not: Ultima Online, Face of Mankind, EVE Online and, interestingly enough, Star Wars Galaxies.
All of these are built on the exact opposite principle to SWTOR - a persistent world. Sure, players can build not very roleplay conforming cities and have names that are kind of non-immersive, but the fact that you are free to act and build your own story already provides a lot of immersion.
As a roleplayer, I always looked at everything as if I was seeing it through sort of a translation lens - the "n00bownzers" guild might be called that, but by simply assuming that they probably have simply an equivalent name within the setting, albeit not the exact same one. It's just a translation thing. (For more elaboration on that, simply read T.H. White's "The Once and Future King" - he essentially tries to explain the story of King Arthur in modern words so as to make it understandable)
Does this work in SWTOR though? I would argue that it could be really hard to do this here. The game seems to try to immerse the player by taking away that translation lens, filtering the experience and making it more streamlined. In the process however, it takes imagination and individual gaming experiences out of the equation, thus possibly hurting the appeal of its multiplayer aspect or long-term motivation.
In conclusion, I do have to re-emphasize one thing: SWTOR is likely going to be a great game. Despite the cost, I will probably play it myself at some point. I am just slightly disappointed by the fact that, instead of developing better ways to procedurally tailor a story to the player character, they went the easy route of providing what is essentially a well-crafted but not very dynamic co-op experience.
tl;dr version: I agree with you, and I am somewhat worried that the linear nature of the game might hurt its long-term motivation.
