*Not counting the whole Star Wars universe thing

I already wrote up some impressions of the Star Wars: The Old Republic MMO based on watching a live demo, but on my last day at Gamescom I got a chance to actually play it myself. After 15 minutes spent steering a Sith Warrior through the demo area, I picked up a few small bits of new info, and discovered some interesting ways that SWTOR differs from the king of MMOs, World of WarCraft.

No Auto-Attack
"If you don't press any buttons you'll just stand there," said the BioWare rep hovering around my shoulder. My low-ish level Sith had six attacks; the first couple were fairly standard light saber slashes, but one generated action points with each use (more on that in a second), while the other costs action points. I think each of these were on a 1.5 second cooldown.

Next up, a charge maneuver that I used to open each battle. The cooldown on this wasn't terribly long, maybe eight seconds, so it was easy to zip around all over the place. Ranged classes may have trouble staying at range against one of these guys in PVP.

The Warrior also has an area of effect stun on a longer cooldown, and a channeled force choke move that immobilizes your enemy and also earns action points. Which brings me to….

The Action Point System
The Warrior's not the only class that uses a couple attacks to generate action points, which then fuel the rest of its abilities. All classes are built around the action point system, according to the BioWare guy.

I'm not sure if this is a good thing or not. On one hand, I'm worried that if every class shares the same basic mechanic, they might all feel pretty similar to play. Part of World of WarCraft's appeal is that if you don't like, say, the rage system that Warriors use, maybe you'll like a mana-based caster class. And each of the mana-using classes in WoW still feel different due to individual regen mechanics, spell combos, and other idosyncracies.

On the other hand, World of WarCraft is basically impossible to balance for 1v1 PVP (or even 2v2 arenas); Blizzard has said as much. Having a unified mechanic like action points should make it way easier to balance classes, both for PVP and PVE.

Playable Jar Jars
Maybe. Actually, I hope not, but I forgot to ask this very important question when I had the chance. It seems likely that Wookies, Twi'leks, and possibly other well-known Star Wars universe races will be playable, and maybe even droids, too. Although the BioWare rep did mention that you could have an AI partner, so maybe the walking tin cans will be relegated to pet status.

OK, so maybe that third category was pretty lame, but "Two Ways Star Wars: The Old Republic isn't Like WoW" just doesn't have much of a ring to it.