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Star Wars Galaxies: Hoth Hubbub
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no major upgrades to the MMO's engine, many have speculated that the Hoth heroic encounter is just too much for this outdated engine.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.
Hoth has been requested for a long time and in some cases as an entirely new planet. The argument is made however that Hoth is a desolate planet and would not be appropriate as an entire new planet in itself. The idea of creating an instance for The Battle of Echo Base appeals to both sides of that squabble. Regardless of the arguments made, Hoth is an entertaining instance with many collections contained within, and a feel for the true Star Wars canon. Hoth is also the first heroic encounter that can reward multiple or no tokens depending on whether or not you complete the objectives, and how well you complete them. This particular heroic encounter is split to either Rebels or Imperials and each side fights for different objectives. Sticking to Star Wars canon the Rebels will always lose and the Imperials will always win. What determines your success is how well the Rebels lose or how well the Imperials win.
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There have been some arguments as to the time period conflicting with the historic SWG setting (between Episodes IV and V). Luckily, this encounter does fit in well with the time period; in that it does not interfere with iconic character's life, death or portrayal in the original trilogy. This encounter takes a lot of teamwork and strategy to complete flawlessly. Even if you only get a few tokens, the instance is fun and the loot is rewarding. None of the drops are no-trade so setting the loot to random is an excellent way to complete Hoth with everyone benefiting from the drops. The Rebels can fly a snowspeeder and the Imperials can pilot an AT-ST during the first phase. The second phase takes place inside the base itself, and the third phase is the evacuation of transport vessels. Non-player Characters (NPCs) will help you fight throughout the instance, but do not count on them winning it for you.
Some of the collections include brand new killer collections. The probe droid killer collection rewards you with a probe droid holopet, and there are also kill collections for wampas, tauntauns, and Imperial/Rebel sharpshooters (depending on what side you are on). There are also clickable collections inside the instance which disappear once a player clicks on it. Finishing the instance and returning to the wampas seems to be the strategy of choice. The wampa boss (Ukajo) drops some interesting items including a Tauntaun skull backpack and Wampa DNA. Unfortunately this boss is extremely hard and requires some tactics to defeat, but the rewards are worth the victory. Two collections exist outside of the encounter, those being a Tatooine Vista Collection (rewards a painting) and a Tauntaun Holoemitter collection (rewards a Tauntaun holopet and holopet emitter). The Holoemitter collection pieces can be looted from droids within and outside of the instance. Most notably they can be looted from inside Borvo's Vault and the Droid Engineer's Cave on Lok.
With Hoth released one cannot wonder what is next for SWG. Game Update 6 is set to address Politicians, Cities, Spies, and Player Associations, and Chapter 12 is entitled Droid Commander. From what has been released so far, Droid Commander will entail a new expertise tree similar to Beast Master but for droids. No word has been said how this will apply to Droid Engineer Traders yet. Hopefully Game Update 6 will make cities viable again as a place to congregate and receive bonuses. Although many players have decided never to endorse SWG again, current players can be rest assured that new content will continue to come until we see the day that SWG closes down. Will Star Wars: The Old Republic (SWTOR) be the end of SWG? Only time can tell; and surely that will depend on player subscriptions. For now however if you are looking for a Star Wars MMO, SWG is the only viable option. For all the MMO's I have played, I have always returned to SWG and it will always be close to my heart.
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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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.