I’m not looking to be sold on this game - I’ve bought it, and opened it, and when my PC arrives, I’m playing it. But reading the reviews on Amazon.com and some of the comments on the Star Wars Galaxies forums is quite an experience. For those who have experience with the game, is it worth playing?
George
I’ve asked the same question several times, and generally the answer is, “It’s really fun for the first month or so, then it becomes numbingly repetitive.”
I really wanted it to be cool, but it seems like it ain’t. I’ve heard far better reviews for City of Heroes than for SWG.
Everyone I know who’s played it says its just like EverQuest, but with blasters.
So yes, it really is that bad.
It’s not that it’s BAD. It’s just boring, unfun, repetitive, a ripoff, lacking in anything interesting, devoid of any sort of play value, will probably make you want to murder someone, and to top it all off, it’s bad.
That’s what I thought the minute I read the review. Everquest…the game I played for 2 weeks straight with little attention to anything else, then got bored and erased it from my hard drive.
SWG had some concepts that sounded really cool (like the skill trees, and the player-run economy, and the very open-ended world), but turned out to be pretty lame. I played it a couple of months, and would have only lasted a week or two if all my co-workers hadn’t been into it (mostly just because it was “Star Wars”)–gotta have something to talk about at lunch, I guess.
Try and return the game, if it’s not to late. There are much better ways to spend your money (wiping your ass with it, for example).
Eh, I don’t know that it was all THAT bad. I played it - and enjoyed it - for about three or four months before I realized I hadn’t logged on in a couple of weeks and didn’t really feel like doing so again.
I watched my brother play Galaxies.
Every time I saw him playing, he was killing, oh, giant spiders, and giant birds. And giant other animals.
I… I like to think I’m a pretty big Star Wars fan, and I… y’know, it’s funny, and strange, and even a little peculiar… but I don’t really remember Luke or Han fighting any giant fucking spiders. Or birds.
Well, SW:G isn’t bad but it does need help…
I’ve been playing for over a year now and still play from time to time (though I’ve been spending most of my time in CoH lately). There are a lot of good things about the game. The character classes and skill trees are done very well, the crafting system is good as is the whole player economy system. Plus, it’s Star Wars dammit!
Except, it isn’t. And therein lies the problem. The whole thing feels not so much like a game as a giant Star Wars themed chat room. There just isn’t a whole lot of a game there; it is seriously lacking in content.
I know someone who was in the beta and he tells me that the problem was that Raph Kosner (sp?) (creative director at the time) had this grand vision that “the players will provide the content”. He envisioned Rebel and Imperial guilds fighting each other, groups organizing huge hunts and the like so he didn’t think they needed a whole lot of “canned” missions.
So, unless you are into PvP, there isn’t a whole lot to do. Yeah, they have mission terminals that anyone can use but they tend to send you out to kill spiders or whatever. You can get missions that send you after stormtroopers or rebels but you have to be Imperial or Rebel aligned to do so and when you do you get a “TEF” (Temporary Enemy Flag) which lets players of the opposite faction attack you so, again, unless you are into PvP you probably don’t want to do that.
Not that PvP works that well either…
The combat system is broken. Some classes are insanely powerful while others are useless. They have been promising to “fix” the combat system for close to a year now with no progress. Actually, a lot of systems in the game are broken and entire parts of the game have been rewritten since it started (much to the annoyance of many of the players).
There are what they call “theme parks” where you can run a series of missions for characters like Jabba the Hutt or Princess Leia, but most of them are beyond the capabilities of the average player. I am turning my character into a Commando just so he will have enough skills to be able to survive long enough to do some of the theme parks. Right now he can’t get more than two or three missions into one of them before getting outclassed.
(My character is a Smuggler right now which, given that there is nothing to “smuggle” in the game, means he is a drug dealer. Yeah, I bet that’s what came to mind when you thought of a Star Wars Smuggler too… :rolleyes: )
We won’t even mention the “how to become a Jedi” system they started with which was probably the single stupidest system ever in the history of computer gaming!
They are slowly adding more content though most of their effort of late has been towards getting Jump to Lightspeed (the space combat expansion) out. I’m sticking with it simply because I hope that at some point it turns into a good game.
So, my opinion? Some good core systems and background but seriously lacking in the “game” department.
I’m with tanstaafl. It’s got a lot of good points (the crafting system is downright awesome), but there’s not a whole lot going on in the world. There are theme parks to do, which are either too easy to really feel like you’ve accomplished anything, or too hard to do unless you’re a “templater” (someone who mixes-and-matches skills to get the most combat benefits) with top-level weapons and armor.
That being said, I have continued playing since launch and renewed for another year. There are a lot of changes being done right now to Jedi, combat, and there’s the upcoming Jump to Lightspeed space expansion.
Heh, I have friends who left EverQuest for SWG, got sick of that game within a couple months with complaints of nothing to do, and some of those friends then returned to EQ.
Oh, now I must know!
Luke did blast the hell out of womp rats, though. Do you get to kill womp rats?
If you do, I bet they’re thirty feet long… :rolleyes:
And Han shot at a few mynocks. They’re almost like birds…
When I was playing, it revolved around holocrons, which were incredibly rare items dropped occasionally by powerful force-sensitive characters. At least, they were rare until the powers that be gave one to every character as a Christmas present, at which point they were a dime a dozen. Anyhoo…
When you used a holocron, it would give you the name of a profession. You would then go and master that profession, which could take a day or two if you’re a hard-core gamer type, or, if you’re like me, a month or so. Once you mastered that profession, your next holocron gave you another profession, and you repeated the process. You had to do this 4-5 times. Finally, the last holocron was silent, which meant you’d just been given a “mystery” profession. That meant you got to basically go down the line, mastering every profession there was until you hit the secret one you’d been given. Once you mastered the secret one, you’d be given a Jedi character. I ran into people regularly who’d mastered over 20 professions trying to unlock the damn thing.
But besides being annoying, it also screwed up the player economy and society. Nobody was mastering professions because they wanted to actually DO that profession and provide needed services to the community at large. They were just “holo-grinding”. Master one profession, then immediately drop it so you have enough skill points to master your next profession. So, if you needed, for instance, a master armorsmith to make you a really kick-ass suit of armor, you were pretty much SOL, because 90% of the master armorsmiths dropped the ability 10 seconds later.
Yeah, what Smeghead said except the holocrons really weren’t neccessary; they just made it “easier” to find what professions you needed to master.
When a character was created it was randomly assigned five professions. When it mastered those five professions it opened your “Force Sensitive Slot”. This let you create a second character which would then become a Jedi. The original character got nothing.
Can you imagine this line in Star Wars?
I also agree that this nearly ruined what little play experience there was. A large percentage of the player base weren’t playing the types of characters they wanted to play; they were playing the types of characters they were told to play. Those of us who ignored the hologrind (as it was called) couldn’t have a satisfactory play experience. Artisans weren’t actually producing goods; they were just grinding (SW:G crafting has a “practice” mode in which you get more experience but don’t actually produce an item). The cantinas were full of characters whos players weren’t even at their keyboards, all running unattended macros for dancing or musician. And half the players you did meet weren’t interested in RPing, teaming or much else except finishing the profession they were on and going on to the next. The game quit being a game and became an exercise in hitting the same key combinations over… and over… and over…
The biggest complaint had already been the lack of content. Add in hologrinding and its amazing that half the players didn’t die of boredom. And SOE wonders why they’ve lost over half their players since launch…
[hijack]Something I’ve always wondered about–what is a falcon in the SW universe?
We never (or very very rarely) see any wildlife in the SW universe that would be an identical match to wildlife we have in ours. And the names of wildlife species are different than ours, too (though there may be some similar word roots).
So what the heck is a falcon? Why would the Millenium Falcon be called what it is unless the word “falcon” means something? But if it did, is that the only example of a SW animal being called the same thing as a RW (real world) animal?
Also, falcon’s not mentioned in The Wildlife of Star Wars: A Field Guide. So what the heck is it?[/hijack]
:eek:
Now I’m almost sorry I asked!
Some friends of mine were pretty heavily into SWG, but they switched over to City of Heroes when it came out. One of them summarized: Sure, I could play SWG, and I keep thinking I should log in, but then I think, I’m gonna have to start the game, log in, run around, find people, and get buffed up before I can go out in search of adventure. If I log into City of Heroes, there’s going to be a bad guy right there for me to fight.