Since I posted this I've played around 75 hours of the game and have a fairly good idea of what it's going to be about. After playing WoW for 5k+ hours I can say that this is the the best MMO I've played since WoW. The house building engine is sick and gives you amazing freedom. The multiple avenues of play and mini-games throughout make side-games (crafting, exploring the map, reading the lore, etc.) actually fun and rewarding. The graphics are beautiful and look like a sci-fi version of WoW (not an accident). The PvP is varied and actually fun rather than oppressive. And the raids/dungeons are the best I've seen since WoW.
Usually when MMOs come out they always feel half finished or missing key areas of development. It makes sense as MMOs are just so insanely large it's impossible to get everything into the game and always somewhere something suffers. Usually it's the end-game content, which ends up in people playing the game, "finishing it", and then quitting since there is nothing to do.
Wildstar has so much end-game content only WoW comes close to the amount of stuff you can do at end-level. And the combat system is awesome, it's a great mix of MMOs in the past with MOBAs of today. I'm actually going to meet some of the devs in two weeks when I go to E3 so I'll get a even better idea of how the game is positioned going forward but it's a lot of fun with tons to do and pretty great story to boot.
I'm going to be on a PvP server (not sure which one yet) but I'll let people know. I was a pretty hard-core raider in the WoW days and will be doing end-game raiding (which is supposed to be crazy-hard, which is just where I like it) in this game if anyone is interested. This is the guild I have joined, they seem to be very organized and mature.
http://gonws.enjin.com/And for you Sim-fans out there, the housing is the best in-game housing I have ever seen. It's basically a mini 3d modeling program, it's pretty awesome. Here is Yogcast fooling around with the housing. There are 3 videos, the 1st is a bit slow but the others are funny and give you a better idea of what you can do: