Each planet has multiple zones but there's no loading, so it's seamless. Basically the starter worlds are fairly small and then they get progressively larger. I made it to the third planet on each side (this is level 16ish) and they were freaking huge in comparison to the starter planets. I haven't played WoW in years, but going on my distant memory of the Vanilla game I would say Taris and Balmorra would compare to the larger WoW zones from the vanilla days. The planets after that supposedly get steadily larger, but I was not high enough level to explore them (you can go there in your ship, but if you get attacked while you're running around you're toast).
I did play the space combat mini game and I actually liked it, to my surprise. I didn't think I would, but I ended up running several missions on both my toons. It was hard. Like...brutally hard. I hear it's been nerfed into oblivion with the latest build, and now it's ridiculously easy, but my guess is they'll swing that pendulum back to a middle ground.
As for what it is, it's exactly what it was billed to be. It's space combat on rails. I ended up enjoying it a lot considering the limitations, but there was still a lot of "it's not open space combat like SWG" crying on the beta weekend forum. I would say give it a shot, and keep an open mind about it. And it looks amazing, artistically-speaking. It's very cinematic and feels star-warsy (as you can see in the few vids they've released, or if you've happened to catch any leaked videos).
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