MMORPG.com Star Wars Galaxies Correspondent Brian Turner writes this look at the recent addition of the ice planet Hoth to SOE's Star Wars Galaxies.

Chapter 11 entitled "The Battle of Echo Base" was released recently on the Star Wars Galaxies (SWG) live servers. This new heroic encounter thus far has been met with mixed reviews by the SWG community. Most problematic is the seemingly premature release of this latest chapter. Several parts of the game have been broken with no insight as to when they will be fixed, and lag hits the servers rampantly. Luckily, on their second try to fix delayed transport times; Sony Online Entertainment (SOE) has succeeded with the 11.2 release. Unfortunately, other aspects of the game are still under strict scrutiny.

The heroic encounter itself suffers from extreme lag issues and frame rate drops even on high end computers. Realizing that SWG is over five years old now and has seen no major upgrades to the MMO's engine, many have speculated that the Hoth heroic encounter is just too much for this outdated engine. Whether or not we will see a fix to these problems is yet to be seen. It is a reasonable theory to say that marketing drove the release prematurely to align with SOE's free month for veterans.

Read Hoth Hubbub

Interesting. Good to see that they decided to bring at-st's and snowspeeders into the mix as player vehicles.

Development cycle driven by veteran free month...that seems implausible.  Most of everything SWG has released has been buggy so I fail to see why this would be any different.  Your theory is just rationalization for a subpar dev team.

Now, get rid of the level based game play with tacked on skill trees and give us the old skill based game system with the classes that were deleted and the game would improve.  You could keep the pseudo twitchy combat they are so inlove with and even this one game mechanic change would improve the playability.

I don't think the problem lies  with an outdated engine.  The problem has always been with the heavily intertwined code base.   NGE made the problems even worse because they just put the code changes on top of everything.   Problem is the current team has no clue how changes will effect the game, there is too much underlying code that is not understood and how changing something effects other things.

I think it is one of the reasons we have never seen a classic version of the game offered on a server, the existing team has no confidence they can maintain it. 

Playing this game is like playing russian roulette.  You never know what is going to break next.  They still have not fixed some major bugs left over from NGE, because they fear if they change something it will break something else.

This is not going to get better it is going to get much worse unfortunately.  SOE is not going to spend money fixing things in this game unless it is gamebreaking.

Cracks me up when people wonder why SOE was left off the list for best developer this year.  This is a prime example.

Here you go Mr Smed. Just what SWG really needs.

what's weird about SWG is the lag...sometimes you got it, sometimes you don't. So far, I 've been lucky with zero Hoth lag

Returned Vet here....ok so SWG gets under your skin. For me the game broke back with the CU and then the NGE did it for me. Can't do anything about that, SOE messed up big time. Got tired of ragging endlessly and finally realized there is no going back. So, I came back. I had some fun, met some old friends and tried some new stuff. That was a few months ago now and the luster has worn off . Now theres a game with hundreds of collections, some seemingly endless (the slaughter stuff). GCW has become a an AFK heaven and totally meaningless. How a DEV team can unbalance only nine character lines is head scratching.  Has anyone told them that doing those Heroic instances repeatly for jewels or whatever is boring after awhile? They should ask those that do the Jedi collection for halos about frustration and boredom. I know in MMOs anything and everything gets boring after awhile but, this setup is asking for people to go elsewhere.

And now they add Hoth. Wow, ok so its new and different. But, do not tell me it somehow fits into the games supposed timeline, thats just taking it too far. They could have done Bespin with content coming in the form of keeping the Imperials away from all the mining cities or helping Lando with Tibana gas bandits or something that would fit. But, i guess that doesn't matter after all isn't Luke looking for that one last piece to his collection?

We're getting more content from the silly card game then anything. Wait the cards are important for that nifty loot you can get. So we go along and think this is Star Warsy. I came back with an open mind, had some fun and relived alot of good memories. Now its old and boring and not for real gamers so I'll be moving on again.

Maybe, the new release will be end of SWG. If so it will be both a sad and happy day. Sad for what could have been and happy to see what its become finally end. For now I'll walk around Mos Eisley listening to children curse and duel each other as if its proving something. I will refuse to do anymore collection stuff since it no longer makes sense to. I'll not get sucked in to buying endless packs of cards to get this item or that to show off. Till I decide to finally close the door on SWG, I'll try to recapture the old fun of hunting, hang out with those friends that refuse to leave and slowly forget the constant hype from SOE on how much they have done and will do for the game.

Sorry Hoth just doesn't hit it.

Massive Lag. Bugged Spawns. Too Easy for Imperials, Overhard for Rebels.

Tatooine Spraypainted white. Other layouts painted white. Grauls painted white.

More fresh paint on the sinking ship.

Typical NGE quality from the company that has brought so much to the players....

/Fail SOE

---

Originally posted by Burntvet
Massive Lag. Bugged Spawns. Too Easy for Imperials, Overhard for Rebels.
Tatooine Spraypainted white. Other layouts painted white. Grauls painted white.
More fresh paint on the sinking ship.
Typical NGE quality from the company that has brought so much to the players....
/Fail SOE

---

I couldn't explain it any better.

Though I'm sure even the player base knew they would get these results but just want something different to do. It's sad that a player base so dedicated to a company that doesn't give a rat's ass gets treat this way.

Originally posted by Ozmodan

I don't think the problem lies  with an outdated engine.  The problem has always been with the heavily intertwined code base.   NGE made the problems even worse because they just put the code changes on top of everything.   Problem is the current team has no clue how changes will effect the game, there is too much underlying code that is not understood and how changing something effects other things.

I think it is one of the reasons we have never seen a classic version of the game offered on a server, the existing team has no confidence they can maintain it. 

Playing this game is like playing russian roulette.  You never know what is going to break next.  They still have not fixed some major bugs left over from NGE, because they fear if they change something it will break something else.

This is not going to get better it is going to get much worse unfortunately.  SOE is not going to spend money fixing things in this game unless it is gamebreaking.

Cracks me up when people wonder why SOE was left off the list for best developer this year.  This is a prime example.

You are right to a sertain point.

But the engine SWG uses is basically the same engine EverQuest2 uses.

It's a very CPU intensive game engine. Most graphic tasks run on your CPU.

Add to that, that in that time there were no multi-core CPU's and people thought CPU clock speeds would go to record heights... and you got a major problem today with the engines of SWG and EQ2.

The CPU speeds have been cut off, lowered a bit even and instead performance improvement is now done by mutliple CPU cores within one physical CPU.

So you can have the latest super home computer with the latest 8-core CPU and a crazy expensive latest edition Graphics card and 10 times more RAM cranked into your computer.

in the end... the game will just run the same as on your system you had 5 years ago.

At least SOE spends more money on EQ2 and hired a new Graphical Engineer before the summer. So they recently added multi-core support to the EQ2 client as start. After that they want to transfer more graphical tasks that are intensive on the CPU back to the graphics GPU.

But all this you will never see happening for SWG. As SWG has only a fraction of the subs that EverQuest 2 has still today. Add to that, that Lucas Arts has turned their back towards SOE and moved on with Bioware... then you can imagine SOE is seriously not going to put an extra cent into SWG.

And that my friends... is the reality and sadness in all this.

Cheers.

Originally posted by Inat_mivea

what's weird about SWG is the lag...sometimes you got it, sometimes you don't. So far, I 've been lucky with zero Hoth lag

I've never experienced any lag, must be people's ISP making them lag out.

And another thing, I haven't encountered any bugs at Hoth.

Originally posted by RainStar

Originally posted by Inat_mivea

what's weird about SWG is the lag...sometimes you got it, sometimes you don't. So far, I 've been lucky with zero Hoth lag

 

I've never experienced any lag, must be people's ISP making them lag out.

And another thing, I haven't encountered any bugs at Hoth.

  Ahh , Fanboi 587 - Reporting

Well with Sony laying off all those employees, it is not a great leap to see SOE taking a hit too.  They don't have much that is profitable currently and I don't think any of the games in development are that close to release yet.  Going one step farther, since NCsoft axed Tabula which probably had as least as many subs as SWG it is not a big stretch to see cuts at SOE pretty much eliminating some of their poorer preformers like SWG.

Only time will tell, but you have to wonder how long Sony will put up with poor performance on SOE's end.

Originally posted by Aked_elBosse

Returned Vet here....ok so SWG gets under your skin. For me the game broke back with the CU and then the NGE did it for me. Can't do anything about that, SOE messed up big time. Got tired of ragging endlessly and finally realized there is no going back. So, I came back. I had some fun, met some old friends and tried some new stuff. That was a few months ago now and the luster has worn off . Now theres a game with hundreds of collections, some seemingly endless (the slaughter stuff). GCW has become a an AFK heaven and totally meaningless. How a DEV team can unbalance only nine character lines is head scratching.  Has anyone told them that doing those Heroic instances repeatly for jewels or whatever is boring after awhile? They should ask those that do the Jedi collection for halos about frustration and boredom. I know in MMOs anything and everything gets boring after awhile but, this setup is asking for people to go elsewhere.

And now they add Hoth. Wow, ok so its new and different. But, do not tell me it somehow fits into the games supposed timeline, thats just taking it too far. They could have done Bespin with content coming in the form of keeping the Imperials away from all the mining cities or helping Lando with Tibana gas bandits or something that would fit. But, i guess that doesn't matter after all isn't Luke looking for that one last piece to his collection?

We're getting more content from the silly card game then anything. Wait the cards are important for that nifty loot you can get. So we go along and think this is Star Warsy. I came back with an open mind, had some fun and relived alot of good memories. Now its old and boring and not for real gamers so I'll be moving on again.

Maybe, the new release will be end of SWG. If so it will be both a sad and happy day. Sad for what could have been and happy to see what its become finally end. For now I'll walk around Mos Eisley listening to children curse and duel each other as if its proving something. I will refuse to do anymore collection stuff since it no longer makes sense to. I'll not get sucked in to buying endless packs of cards to get this item or that to show off. Till I decide to finally close the door on SWG, I'll try to recapture the old fun of hunting, hang out with those friends that refuse to leave and slowly forget the constant hype from SOE on how much they have done and will do for the game.

Sorry Hoth just doesn't hit it.

 

 

this post and others like it is just the same old stuff. post NGE.  lag, buggy patchs, stupid DEV's , what else is new. what can we say people its a SOE run game. nuf said.................
 

Thanks for all the great comments. Everyone has made excellent and valid points. Thanks for reading!

Originally posted by JestorRodo

Originally posted by RainStar

Originally posted by Inat_mivea

what's weird about SWG is the lag...sometimes you got it, sometimes you don't. So far, I 've been lucky with zero Hoth lag

 

I've never experienced any lag, must be people's ISP making them lag out.

And another thing, I haven't encountered any bugs at Hoth.

 

  Ahh , Fanboi 587 - Reporting

Yeah, another player  in "Obraik's SWG (TM)", where the sun is always shining and servers are always full. There are no bugs to speak of, and never a bit of lag. Everyone has plenty of content, especially crafters, and the Devs have never made a wrong decision or bad choice for the game.

Yeah, that SWG.