it was just very sandboxy. Beyond what you could do with your character, players could claim territory and construct towns. The towns were assembled of various building including player homes and shops. In the shops, you could place droids that would sell various stuff members of the village crafted or found, etc. There was a scripting language that players could use to make their droids, villages, and even their actual characters interactive while they were offline. This of course led on to some pretty strange automated dance parties full of emotes and special disco moves, a whole cantina full of bots dancing and emoting at each other fully automated while the players were offline. It was weird for sure, but the rest of it was pretty cool.
As I said before, the dumbest thing about the game was Jedis and also how it was incomplete. Such as the Droid Engineer class was pretty much nothing useful until later and that was after the "Dumbing Down" so it was never realized as it had been planned. I know because I played one for a while until i just dropped it.
The character skill and class system was my favorite. You gained experience in a skill by doing it, so if you wanted to be good at rifles, you shot rifles. If you wanted to be good at crafting, you crafted. You had a cap on how many skills you could have, so you could never do it all, but if you wanted to play a different class you simply stated doing those skills and eventually the other skills of your old class would drop off. Want to go from rifles to unarmed? Just start fighting unarmed and dont use your rifle as much.