Double post, but
first impressions of the actual gameplay have been made.
From the looks of things, dialog is done through a Mass Effect-like system. Now for me, this is both good and bad. Good, because it is awesome to actually
hear your friends' character comment on a situation. Bad, because one thing that irked me about the Mass Effect system was how the small blurbs of text you could chose sometimes hardly resembled what Shepperd would actually say or do.
The good
far outweighs the bad though.
Also, TOR seems to be using something called 'Flashpoints' which I'm not quite sure of what they really are. So far they seem to be like instances, gathering a party and heading into a story driven mission together. I'm not sure what this means for the open world though... but I'm not going to draw conclusions from so little information just yet.