Star Wars Galaxies

Well if you never played SWG pre-cu then everything you have posted is spot on. If you were looking for a real open sandbox world that was set in the SW universe and let you be whatever you wanted to be, then this game fails miserably.

SWG died Nov.15 of '05. What's left now is a turd.

Well, I'm taking a risk of proving myself massively gullible, but here goes.

You do know that the current state of SWG is completely different than the game that existed at launch, right?

Or are you a vet and this is a large charade to stir up another flame thread?

If you've never heard of the CU or the NGE and this was truly your first experience with SWG, then you have walked unknowingly into possibly the most bitter, enduring feud between gamers and developers in MMO history.

If the latter.... as you were.

edit: As a vet myself, it's bitter sweet to hear what the game is now. It sucks beyond description that the only SW MMO has become such a steaming pile. But at the same time, SoE really deserves to have a crappy game no one will play.

First experience of SWG. I don't know what there was 3 years ago. But I know what there is now,  and what there is now is a very horrible game.

I'm just giving my opinion. The dislikes listed I highly doubt were better 3 years ago. But it's a really bad game, and I wouldn't even suggest it to the most hardcore StarWars fans.

Originally posted by Camman321

The dislikes listed I highly doubt were better 3 years ago

As hard as it may be to believe, actually, yea. None of those things were problems 3 years ago.

It was always a big buggy, sure. A lot of games are. If they had just fixed the bugs, the game would have been solid.

But they scrapped the original game almost entirely. There were no levels, there were no pre-built classes chosen at creation. There were several damage and weapon types. The worlds and chat channels were full of life and conversation. Basically, it was the exact opposite of what it is now.

SoE thought they'd get more players if they changed the sandbox-style game into a WoWish level and class based advancement game. The premise itself sucked, but so did the implementation as you've had the pleasure of discovering.

Mass exodus ensued and former players have been waging a PR campaign against SoE ever since. SWG was the only SoE game I ever played, but I've heard they have a track record of sinking games. SWG was just the most drastic overhaul and most dramatic downturn.

Not a single complaint you've listed about the NGE is inaccurate.  With the exception of the 3 features quoted above, SWG as a game used to have everything else listed and so much more when I started playing it in Dec. 2003.  The SWG Pre-CU days would be what so many of the game vets on here and other forums long to have back.  And Im pretty certain that if SOE wasn't hell-bent on seemingly doing the opposite of what its community would like, they could have upgraded the chat server and implemented a guild list in one patch.  But then again, that would leave SOE with roughly enough time for 20-25 patches to not screw up.

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Originally posted by Camman321
Game crashes. They happen all the time, for no apparent reason. My computer is fully capable of running that game client, as it is running AoC.

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And even when it doesn't crash its still laggy as hell. EQ2 had better graphics and didn't lag half as much.

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Combat: So I've got 2 or 3 different abilities and the main one is shooting a very weak gun, that does minor damage. Very boring

MOBS: Hmmm...you've health like every other game. Instead of SWG calling MANA, MANA, they call it Action Points. 80% of mobs I ran into had 2 abilites.

1. Draining Action points

2. Hitting me

That's it. That's the combat layout of SWG. I've found more creativity in the dump I laid in my yard, than I did in the combat system/log of SWG. The only damage it records is hit damage. That's apparenlty the only damage players do as well. Hit Hit Hit.

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Sounds about right.

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Unbalance: Mobs vs players is very unbalanced. Do not expect to be lvl 20, and expect to live through a multiple mob aggro. 2 lvl 18 or 19 mobs will down you quicker than you know. Which is funny, because most of the time you've no choice but to pull multiple mobs.

The strategy there is really try and kill one, then die. Wait 60 seconds, then pull the other one. Doing all this while the mobs are continuously draining your action for mass amounts.

MedicSetup: This has got to be by far the WORST HEALING CLASS IN ALL OF MMORPGS! The main medic heal has roughly a 10 second Cooldown, healing you for 600 HP, while you're sitting at around 4k HP. 0.o So soling, don't expect to heal more than ONCE per encounter!

I couldn't stand more of the game to find further abilites.

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Wow, no offense but you must suck out loud or didn't set yourself up right. This game is easy, even with the increased difficulty they implemented a year ago. I'm guessing you weren't using your abilities right or didn't use the Talent, I mean EXPERTISE, system.

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Social/community: While it seems the forums are booming with activity, ingame, no so much.

There is no region or general chat. The only chat you EVER see is if you're standing next to some one, guildchat, group or a tell. There's no trade chat, general chat, recruit chat, NOTHING! This is very lame and unexceptable for MMORPG.

You join a guild. But the only benefit of a guild is to talk to people. There is NO option fo a guildpage. You have no clue who's in your guild, you'd barely know your own guild name if it wasn't sitting above your head.

You can't check to see who's online. For recruitment, or if you want a group for quests, etc. The only way is ALREADY knowing people's names, and adding them to your friends list. Yes, I was suprised too that this game had a friends list.

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There are other chat channels, the default UI just doesn't display them. You have to create new chat tabs or change your chat options. Not really worth bothering for the most part because people seldom ever use extra chat channels. Some servers use channels and others don't, depends on where you are. You CAN see who is in your guild but you can only do it from the guild management terminal in the guild hall. When this game was designed, EQ1 was still the big thing and a lot of the social tools and options we find in WoW didn't exist back then and these concepts have been long and difficult in porting into the current SWG game.

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Items: Item discription has to be one of the worst features. The information you receive is damage and dps. That's it.

Stats: So the stat layout looks like something you'd find in a browser based game. Considering stats are like the most important feature of your character, you'd think they woulda have put more time into them. All stats either do 1 of 2 things.

Increase your HP regen or or action regen. That's it. Oh my bad, one stat gives you a chance to hit for max on melee or range. There is no character sheet to see what's equipped, etc. You can only tell by seeing what's highlighted in your inventory.

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Right on. Your stats matter little unless you can increase them by at least a 1000 but even then they give 1-5% gains. In the old game items were FAR more complex with several different stats that worked different depending on what you were fighting and what armor it had.

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For a MMO, the game hardly encourages community, grouping, social action. That's probably the worst feature.

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This was my biggest complaint when they changed the game into the living abortion it is today. Use to you gained quite a bit from grouping, now groups only hurt your progression.

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You can't alter the UI without crashes, bugs, errors, etc. While most MMORPGs encourages UI MODs, and it's almost a given to be able to personalize your UI, not in SWG.

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The current devs can't figure out how to do it because the devs who made the current incarnation of the game sucked.

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Altogether. It's a very sloppy game. While it may be a huge game, with more gamespace than you've seen in any other. It doesn't make up for the lack of...well...what I've posted above.

All in All, I think this MMO creation was aimed at attempting to lazily create a StarWars game, and collect money from StarWars fans. Than it was to take a Move Trilogy and a create a high quality MMO out of it.

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This is basically the same thing everyone I got to try out the NGE told me. They all made it about as far as you did. This game was once much better than what you saw, although it still had its problems. It used to deliver a much different experience than the current crop of bandwagon jumping games and shameless WoW-clones.

Originally posted by Gaylen

 

Originally posted by Camman321

The dislikes listed I highly doubt were better 3 years ago

As hard as it may be to believe, actually, yea. None of those things were problems 3 years ago.

 

It was always a big buggy, sure. A lot of games are. If they had just fixed the bugs, the game would have been solid.

But they scrapped the original game almost entirely. There were no levels, there were no pre-built classes chosen at creation. There were several damage and weapon types. The worlds and chat channels were full of life and conversation. Basically, it was the exact opposite of what it is now.

SoE thought they'd get more players if they changed the sandbox-style game into a WoWish level and class based advancement game. The premise itself sucked, but so did the implementation as you've had the pleasure of discovering.

Mass exodus ensued and former players have been waging a PR campaign against SoE ever since. SWG was the only SoE game I ever played, but I've heard they have a track record of sinking games. SWG was just the most drastic overhaul and most dramatic downturn.

Well I really didn't know that. I don't find it anything like WoW. You can compare what WoW has and what SWG to any MMO out there. All MMOs have simular characteristics.  Like I said I don't know what it was three years ago, but it seems like it was a much better game. What it is now, amounts to a game that should be in a free beta mode!