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So, let's talk about Star Wars Galaxies
Original Rufus
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Registered User regular
Remember that game? The one that had Star Wars fans hot and bothered for a while a few years back in the pre-WoW era of MMOGs?
Well, in any case, this is neither a hate thread nor a love thread, though I'm guessing these days we have more of the former than the latter. I'm principally just curious if any of you still play, and if so, what the climate of the game is like.
I first played in the early stages of its beta, and participated in its very first firefight, so I do have some sense of nostalgia and attachment to the game. I know many other PA'ers do too, but it remains to be seen if we have any such people left.
God knows SOE did plenty to ensure there aren't.
What kills me is the sea of potential this game set out on, squandered by bending over each time the fans cried out "more Jedi!"
Well, in any case, this is neither a hate thread nor a love thread, though I'm guessing these days we have more of the former than the latter. I'm principally just curious if any of you still play, and if so, what the climate of the game is like.
I first played in the early stages of its beta, and participated in its very first firefight, so I do have some sense of nostalgia and attachment to the game. I know many other PA'ers do too, but it remains to be seen if we have any such people left.
God knows SOE did plenty to ensure there aren't.
What kills me is the sea of potential this game set out on, squandered by bending over each time the fans cried out "more Jedi!"
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It's really very sad, but tracking the history of this game's life has been one poor decision after another.
I had my most fun rping in a player city based around roleplay, but seeing as that wasn't the main aim for the majority of players on the server... it still fizzled for me. And screw the whole jedi bullshit.
Man, player cities seemed like such a good idea...but then they turned out to be massive eyesores which caused all the lovingly constructed NPC cities to be barren wastelands.
I would have loved to buy an apartment in one of those big empty buildings on Corellia.
The developers misread these people as "smart" and actually listened to their ideas about crafting, economy, classes... professions, quests... the list goes on.
I could see where it all was going.... then retail hit and all those people went crazy until they got bored long after the casual playerbase left because the whole thing was too intimidating... and then SOE decided to pull off a "too much too late" save and ruin anything that the players had salvaged from the disaster.
I almost feel bad about the state it is in now because most of my "complaints" when I was contacted for an extensive survey actually got dealt with but in dramatic fashion. As a casual player I wanted a bit of hand-holding and a little direction... not just a sandbox clusterfuck of intimidation. Oh well... they sent me a free Lightspeed expansion for my troubles.
Don't get me started on Lightspeed. They added the space expansion which was the closest thing to the old Lucasarts flight sims that we're likely ever to get, and they fucked it all up with really shitty balancing issues.
Want to fly a ship that wont get raped by a small handful of TIEs? Hope you have a week to spend doing tedious, repetitious shit in which you're still somewhat likely to get smoked by low level enemies.
The biggest problem was that unlike the ground game where you could choose the branches you climb, Space forced you to progress in sequential order, rather than focus simply of getting all of the ship certifications.
Did they change it because I remember getting access to the non-crappy ships being fairly easy.
And everytime someone mentions lightspeed, I need to post this picture.
The graphical changes the different parts made was pretty damned neat.
I played lightspeed fairly early on, and I hated having to progress in the skill branches exactly as the game required, because getting above Y-Wing status meant a long, painful grind.
I mean, I already own both KOTORs, both Battlefronts, and Jedi Knight 2 (which I hate; academy would've been a much better choice). But, hey. Empire at War, Republic Commando, Galaxies, and extra copies of those first few may be worth it.
I played SWG for about a year and a half, which was "enough." The community and role playing element of the game was really what kept me playing, since my class was about as broken as the worst out there. It did some things rather well, but the gaming itself from tedious quests that weren't part of a larger park of adventure really took the fun outa the game. Space was alright, if only for the interesting series of streamlined quests to make you level up through the first few ones. Some of those flying missions were just insanely fun.
A pity it all died in a blaze of shit.
I do agree; it certainly did suck what little population there was out of the cities. That certainly would've been the best solution: offering homes and shopfronts within already established cities. Gah, still makes me disappointed to think about the potential that game had.
The game was great the first few months when people were just running from town to town trying to kill each other. Plus you could go off and explore and level your toon. I loved the idea of the skill system and the idea of being a Wookiee! The fun of Leading groups to fight Tuskens, raiding other cities for wild PVP, or decorating your own little house outside town was great. The bar/cantena as a place to talk to people and RP a bit was also a great idea. I was so excited.
The balance issues of the professions started to creep in pretty early though after everybody got their feet. Balance was barely attempted for the first year of the game and only certain skill trees and professions were worth using because of certain OP weapon combos/skills. Unless you count the total slaughter of some classes like creature handler. It went from a very amazingly fun class that let you run around the galaxy looking for rare pets to fight with to a joke class in a matter of months. I blame poor planning, but I really blame idiots who had no idea how to balance. Nerf was all they knew.
The Jedi system ruined the game though and was the beginning of the end. The girl I played with all the time went 24/7 Jedi unlocker and we stopped playing together as much. Then she got it, and it sucked, and she quit. Entire legions of people just STOPPED playing the game to level professions full time so that they might unlock Jedi. PvP died, the economy exploded (buying mass amounts of goods to macro a profession AFK) and the game begin to die. You know an RPG sucks when you're forced to play a fucking flute in a bar to get where you want to be.
I threw myself into the PvP and ignored the Jedi craze, but sadly it threw me back out. It was bugged, unreliable, and really frustrating. It was impossible to kill another guilds base because of all the exploits and cheats. The stupidity of organizing 40 people to attack a base, spending hours fighting, and then being ripped off ruins the game. People just got fed up with it.
Then the Jedi system got even worse! If you can imagine that. There were so many Jedi around you had to have one to PvP. They were impossible to kill and were everywhere. The “realism†of the game went to pot.
Balance never got any better either. There were "fads" of imbalance like rifles that zapped your mind bar in one hit, pistols that killed you from rifle distance, TK masters that were impossible to kill, and the worst of all COMBAT MEDIC! Yes a combat medic could wipe out entire groups by using poisons that raped your mind bar in seconds. There was no way to protect against it and soon everybody was a CM. How stupid is that? They tried to fix these issues with putting in “mind foods†that let you heal your mind. It was just a complicating factor and like putting a band aid on cancer.
Oh, and I also played a Wookiee which went without armor (because we had a bit extra health ROFL!) for over a year. That was complete frustration. When one race is clearly better than all others there are some real base line design problems evident. The sad thing was that everybody rolled human because they could wear the best armour. Even worse was the abuse from the community and the SOE team toward wookiees because they dared complain. There were even server wide protests that shut down some servers.
The other real sticking point for me were player cities. It ruined the sense that one was in a vast unexplored world in an unexplored galaxy. There was urban sprawl and player cities all over every planet. It was ugly and there was no reason use the major cities anymore.
Lets also talk about a poorly thought out crafting system/professions that negatively impacted PVP (90 percent resist armours, uber blasters, ect). The economy of the game was beyond the designers control and they made little effort to control it. Shop keepers charged millions of credits for pistols that woudl fall apart and then sold that on ebay.
They also added harder "instance" like dungeons because of all the camping/griefing. Sadly it was just a confused unfair mess that wasn't any more fun than the camping. Most of the dungeons were insanely easy and required no skill.
Horrible game, with poor support, and a poor vision. I will admit, at first, it was amazing. Being my first MMO I was lost in all the fun. But sony never even picked up the ball to drop it and abused all its customers. This game had a huge scope and lots of great ideas. Sadly, every single one was poorly executed.
I quit and deleted my loved Wookiee and never looked back.
I did try the NGE one night when I was bored and quit after about 20 minutes completely deleting the game.
Honestly though, if they produced a sequel that, say, took place during the Clone Wars, with even the hint that some of the issues of the first game would be addressed, I would sign up.
It's a rich universe, and a big fat-ass pile of gold for any development team willing to eke out the true, wasted potential.
its' a richer universe.
If they did make a SWG mmo again they should stick with the classic trilogy. I have no interest in the clone wars.
Might aswell post my favorite ships:
I had a Y-wing and though it was sweet, it was slow as molasses.
Early months.
The game was already dead by the end of the first year when I quit, for all the reasons I listed above.
Get the fuck out, the game is horrible and become more horrible with every major update. The big revamp they did last year? wow.
Everything about the game sucks, save your money.
After a few weeks of playing I had formed a sorta of "Hunter Lodge" with several other citizens of Coronet. There was about 8 of us and we decided to pool our money together and start a hunting community of sorts near some crystal swamp on Corellia.
Our buildings were few and built on a plateau overlooking the swamp. On the other side of us was the rolling hills of Corellia. It was a pristine and beautiful place. Full of exotic wildlife and breath taking sunsets.
Then one day we awoke to find that the hills we so loved were overrun with the twisted steal of industry. The landmarks of "progress" destroyed the natural beauty of our land. Needless to say we were most displeased at this turn of events.
My fellows and I, now numbering in the dozens, decided to leave our once peacful land and start anew on the river banks. I opened a pawn shop and to my surprise received a steady flow of customers. My good friend and co-founder of our settlement was the local slicer and enjoyed many perks of the lifestyle.
Unfortunately the hustle and bustle of urban living caught up with us again and we soon found our village surrounded with luxurious homes and ever busy factories for as far as the eye can see.
The lessoned learned is that you can never escape urban sprawl no matter how far you run.
Ya, I suppose it's lifeline of being good wasn't all that long, but I still felt the Combat Upgrade was all right.
Also found a pick of my giant brick of a Y-wing:
-Actual balance between classes!
-made ridiculous class stacking obsolete (IE: Teras Kasi + fencer = almost literally unhittable)
-made the less useful professions... useful. Bounty Hunter no longer had that problem of having the most pre-requisites for the least return, Squad Leader actually worked. Carbineers were no longer a complete joke.
-Professions were streamlined. No more of this crap like bounty-hunter requiring one to be Master in two whole starter professions just to be able to become one. Upon reaching master-level, you were pretty much left with a small handfull of points, compared to the other hybrid professions, which had enough to master another elite profession.
Things I didn't like.
-Introduced the CL system. Granted, they had something similar before the CU, but putting everything into numbers seemed wrong.
-Completely removed the HAM system. I thought this was one of the more interesting concepts SWG produced.
Granted, the HAM system was full of exploits, such as the one-time be-all-end-all of professions, the rifleman/combat-medic, which would use diseases (untreatable save by master-level doctors) to drain a whole group's mind, and then use rifleman abilities to finish them off (riflemen exclusively targetted the mind pool). As well, streamlining everything to only damage the health pool did wonders to make the combat understandable, the fact that we were back to the base mechanics of a newbie having 100 health and a veteran having 10,000 health changed the game for the worse, as before everyone's HAM bar was made up of a finite number of points (not counting doctor buffs), which never changed, but was customizable.
-Doctor and Dancer buffs became incredibly useless. Granted, before the CU they were somewhat insane in the terms of boosting one's HAM stat by several hundred-fold, after the CU they became nigh-useless because the boost was barely noticable considering the nature of the combat.
-Poor smugglers... so neglected.
Why? It was tried and failed horribly at keeping things in the right 'time'. A few years after the classic trilogy would have been near perfect for how things were in the game. If they made it feel like the classic trilogy I would be all over that, especially if it meant no Jedi.
why not just work on 2 and fix it from the ground up?
I guess there are enough fans to make it profitable.
sad, really.
no jedi, balanced PVP, rebs vs IMps!
it didn't work out that way did it?
They should remake it and throw in a smuggler faction like the hutts. that would be great.
I always thought that if they were really hell-bent on implementing Jedi, they ought to have had a randomized system in which one account per every thousand produced a character with force sensitivity. You could either leave it dormant, fearing Imperial intervention, or you could try to see just how much of a Jedi you can become in an Imperial dominated Galaxy.
Basically what I'm saying is that it should have been a unique novelty, not a major construct of the game.
I doubt there is any good way to handle an alpha class in a mmo. If they did somemthing like that people would bitch even more than normal(they bitched about everything). I would have been happy if they just left Jedi out of the player's reach; maybe have some events with dev-controlled jedi along with the main npc jedi and thats all we see of them.
If you want Jedi that are faithful to the movies, you need a game set an era which allows it. IE, before or after the Empire.
Personally, I'd love to see an MMOG centered around the Clone Wars.
I agree with pretty much everything there. Jedi were an awful idea, you can't limit classes in an mmo, all subscribers have to be treated equally. Especially in a pvp style game, which SWG was supposed to be. Judging players on opinions of staff would be a horrible way to select an alpha class player.
What they did was dangle a carrot in front of people and then made you grind like hell to get it. Honestly they underestimated how many people actually want to be a Jedi and the game got hurt because of it.
I loved the game around launch time. i can remember thinking about how cool it would be to get my Bounty Hunter up and running, hunting down the scum of the universe and getting the fame and glory that goes with it. Instead I got a crap fest of people grinding out for their Jedi and not really playing the game.
I mean, the holocron grind was retarded, but at least it acted as a barrier keeping the rabble from the class.
Jedi would have been flippin cool had they become a "secret class" where there were harsh consequences if you revealed your jedi status in public. given the time frame.
I played in beta, was active in the boards, but decided not to play when the game went live. When the NGE was a go. I'll admit it, I'm a Jedi whore, and I wanted to see the Jedi content, but once the thrill of waving my lightstick around got dull, I quit pretty quickly. (ugh...Jedi robes are so fucking stupid in the original trilogy time frame. Yes, lets wear clothing unique to the order of people that were wiped out and hunted like dogs. not to mention they were all the same, no uniqueness to it at all.)
Enlist in Star Citizen! Citizenship must be earned!
It really looked as though each planet had an occupying force whose armor of choice was composite. Everyone looked utterly identical.
I really wished there could have been some degree of cosmetic customization with the armor, beyond the simple color-swapping.
the point of PVP is to be the best, thus jedi are the best with which to Pwnn.
if you cant' balance them, leave them out.
I remember when I was in Beta. I told a couple friends about it, and the first question asked, before any other, was "OMG CAN U B A JEDI?"
I think the mass appeal factor is always going to topple the "is this game a pile of shit?" factor.
Originally however, the proposed permadeath for Jedi characters was a step towards balance, as your Jedi status would be precarious at best should you choose to flex your muscle in front of the wrong crowd.
like you said the people who want to "omg be a jedi!" would ruin the game anyway.
having a balanced fun experince > jedi l337z.
and that perma death thing just pissed everybody off.
But yes, in conclusion, Jedi were and remain a stupid idea.
chair to Creation and then suplex the Void.