Star Wars Galaxies

MMORPGS. Man. Talk about a strange lot. I'd been known to do so MUD-slinging back in the day...in the time of Door Games and BBSes. There was a big difference between those times and the current incarnation of the BBS. That key difference is...

You didn't pay for anything.

So naturally, coming from the old school of thought, you'd figure, if I was having fun for free, if I'm paying for this I should be having a whole crapload more fun, right? Apparently not.

I'm relatively new to the new crop of MMORPGs. I was in on the beta of Asheron's Call, and also the beta of Multiplayer Battletech 3025. If you never played MPBT 3025, you missed out, because it was the best MMORPG ever. I haven't even seen anything recently that was even close to as cool as it was. When it got cancelled it left a big void in my being where online fun used to be.

Star Wars Galaxies looked like it might have the promise that MPBT had. One of the big reasons I was hooked on MPBT was that there was a grand war happening. (Wars are great when people don't actually die. They can be a lot of fun that way.) You had the great houses, and they were all battling for planetary space. So, you'd go and see your team gain ground or lose it, or be charging towards the enemy capital, and it was awesome. SWG held a lot of the potential for that. The Rebellion versus the Empire and all that. Who has watched Star Wars and not thought, "Hey, those Storm Troopers look pretty damn easy to take out." or, "I could block laser blasts with a light saber."

So with this grand universe, the people at Verant aboard...the guys who pretty much invented the MMORPG, and with the financial might and name recognition of Sony behind all of this, how could this possibly be a losing proposition?

They could do it by completely ignoring all the things they had going for them.

In the Beginning...

I wasn't in on the beta. I heard various rumblings, though. Some guys liked it, some guys hated it, let's just call the whole thing neutral. So, I figured I might as well pick up a copy. I didn't have too much else to play at the time, and at the very least, I could buy the game, and then sell my account to some fan boy on ebay if the game turned out bad, right? Plus, there'd be a review on Netjak that we wouldn't have gotten otherwise.

So I plunk down $54.99...and then on top of that $15 a month. Yeah, you read that right. Fifteen. Not the standard $10. That kind of got my ire up a little bit. Then came the fact that despite selling limited quantities at launch to keep the servers intact, they didn't keep the servers intact. People weren't able to register, and even when they were able to register, the game crashed within minutes. I started playing a day after launch so I didn't experience these problems, I just heard about them from the people I was going to be partying up with later.

With that rough start out of the way, I went on to creating my character. Only the first 10 names I tried were already taken, or deemed illegal. No Darth Philanthropist, no Obi Wang. You can't share a first name with any character deemed "major" in the Star Wars universe. Sir Pimpington was deemed "vulgar", and every other name I tried got blocked because the game is using the First Name as the duplicate check, rather than First and Last name. What the hell? Apparently everyone else playing the game has some Star Wars name picked out that involves the usage of apostrophes and so that didn't seem to be a problem for them, but I'm just not THAT into the Star Wars universe. Eventually, I found a name that wasn't taken. Bat Manuel. You know, the guy from the Tick? That's me running around...the Rebellion's greatest hero.

The rest of character creation isn't bad. You choose which race you are, then skin color, eye shape, etc, etc. There need to be a few more hairstyles, because there are an awful lot of them that look the same. Aside from that, I really like the character creation options. You run through a little training thing with your character where you'll be introduced to combat and all that, as well as getting a blaster out of it. (despite your class.)

Graphics

The graphics look nice...for an MMORPG. They don't look nice enough to the point where I think my system should be lagging despite throwing the settings pretty damn close to the minimum. 512MB of RAM, a GeForce3 and a 1.9 GHz should be adequate for just about anything right now, but this thing lags once I get anywhere near to a town.

The character models are as detailed as they look in the creation screen, and you actually can see the little details you were tweaking with when you started the game. Animations are very nice. (the guys at SOE must have logged countless hours in exotic dance clubs...all under the guise of doing research for the Entertainer class.) You won't have seen anything quite as hilarious as a Wookie named Fozzie busting out dance moves in the cantina in any other MMORPG to date.

Scenery, water, forests, and all look pretty cool in SWG. I'd give the graphics an 8. It seems like probably the thing they spent the most time on. Maybe the Verant guys were tired of hearing about how all their graphics looked like crap, and they just didn't want to hear that again. Well they fixed that, and they fixed it good. What they broke though...

Audio

Audio isn't really all that bad, but it gets boring really quickly. I just started listening to other music because after hours on hours of the same music, you could have the London Philharmonic cranking out tunes for you and I wouldn't care...because it's all the same stuff. The musician in the cantina can learn different songs to perform, and you have all the sound effects from the movies, like blasters and such. Wouldn't anything less be criminal, though? Striving to just hit the bar of mediocrity. Woo hoo. 7.

Gameplay

Basic gameplay works like this. You have three status bars. The red is health, the green is your action bar, and the blue is your mind bar. The red bar drains when you get hit, the green one when you perform skills like digging, or dancing, and the mind bar also drains when you do certain actions, like healing people and when you get hit in the head. If you are in combat and any of the three bars gets completely emptied, you go unconscious. If they hit you really hard, you die.

According to your class, you'll have to level up different skills. Gaining new skills requires you to use some of the 250 skills points you've been allotted at the beginning of the game and also a number of experience points. You get these experience points by performing the action related to what the skill is. If you're trying to be a chef, you craft food. If you're trying to be a medic, you heal people, and make med packs. When you have obtained the number of experience points you need, you can be taught the skill from anyone who currently possesses that level and invites you into their group.

To get money, you can go to Mission Terminals and do missions. Every mission in the game involves you going to point X, and shooting the crap out of a lair, a building, or some fabulous lair/building. This gets you money, and the experience points from shooting stuff. There are no player missions in the game yet, and there aren't any missions that lead towards any plot. You can gain and lose faction point depending on which side your actions are associated with, so naturally, everyone on Naboo is hated by the Gungans.

The mark of a good game is not that I find the most enjoyable aspect to be that I can play other games while I'm playing it. There is so much tedium in SWG to get your leveling going that I find myself playing other games to keep myself entertained. I go searching for stuff to make medpacks. For some unknown reason...water is the most annoying thing to find in the entire world. There are rivers, lakes and everything. You search for water with your water resource locator and it searches for water vapor. I decided to go questing for water once. I walked (because vehicles were dropped from the game currently.) about 1.5km out of town to find a spot where I had supposedly a 50/50 chance of finding a good resource sample of water vapor. After 3 hours, I didn't have a full 1000 unit stock of water. I did, however, beat a couple levels of Advance Wars 2, and then I finished Generation of Chaos 3. I also was able to finish reading Stupid White Men. So, it's not like I wasted any time playing the game...just $54.99, plus shipping, tax, and $15 a month, to find myself a reason to do other stuff. Get the party started!!!

On top of that the amount of time you have to devote to upgrading your skills in these meaningless areas is phenomenal. I have a friend who's trying to be a droid engineer. He's got to make something like 300 mouse droids before he can level up to make better droids...the ones that actually attack. What makes it even better is that, without telling anyone, they lowered the number of experience points they gave you for making certain items. Awesome. To make things even more fun, if you're an artisan trying to be a chef or tailor, you end up crafting the same damn item like 400 times. On top of that, it's useless. I can make mods for guns, or biscuits and tea. Or all the freaking 10 sided die sets in the world. (BTW, the graphic for the 10 and 6-sided dice are exactly the same.) You end up filling your inventory up and then destroying all the items. Nobody's going to buy the crap off of you because 90 other people they know can make it. Plus, they degrade. You get 100 shots, generally from a mod on a pistol. That's interesting that you would try and keep all the classes so closely tied to each other, but nobody will pay more than 10 credits for a mod that short lived, and it costs 20 credits to post your item on auction.

Ranged combat is another one of those little "quirks" or the game. You see, not only are people with blasters and guns are capable of ranged combat, but so are your standard brawlers, guys with swords, and pretty much anything that has an attack. If it's a computer controlled enemy, it has what people in the game refer to as a "ranged melee" attack. If you, the player are trying to do this, you will find that you have to get right up on the enemy to actually do damage to it. This makes being a ranged weapon user almost entirely ineffective in combat unless they're partied up with some melee combatants. This is retarded. On top of that, you also have a fair number of areas in the game where blaster shots will travel through the ground to hit you and the like.

To make ranged combat even more useless, there's a modifier attached your attack score. If you're prone, you get bonuses to attack. If you're kneeling, the same applies. However, you get minuses if you're moving, or your target is moving. So while you pointlessly try and sprint away from a brawler (who can use attacks like "lunge" to drop you to your knees) while shooting you are almost always shooting at a -50 to your to hit. Want to stand and shoot? Once your target runs up to you, you have to spend some of your Action Bar to use a Point Blank shot to remove the negative modifier you get for them being too close. You can't win as a ranged combatant, unless you get lucky and there's yet another bug in the system that allows you shoot the enemy without them coming after you.

Things SOE would rather not talk about.

There are server outages left and right. In fact, there were 2 or 3 server rollbacks in the first week of going live. You'd think that maybe, just maybe, Verant would have this whole templat for this stuff down by now, but no. They handled this almost as badly as can be conceived. The only game I can think of that launched worse than this was World War II Online. It took them over a year to get everything straightened out. I waited a week and a half for WWII Online to get things right, and I did the same for SWG. There's no way on earth you're going to have me paying you a monthly fee to finish your damn work in progress.

I thought I may have just been a little harsh, so I tried logging in this weekend to do a little bit more checking so I could do a more in-depth review. Apparently, forces had conspired against me, because in an hour, I met with 3 different crashes.

Since lag and server outage is such a huge problem in the game, you'd think that SOE would have accounted for this by, oh, I don't know, making sure you weren't going to get killed during a lag spike or something. Nope. I've had the most piss-ant creature in the game devastate me because of server lag. It'll just assume that I don't want to fight anymore, and let this freaking little bunny rabbit bite me to death while the server gets its crap together.

Another dumb thing. Auctions. Why do I have to fly around the world to pick up my digital item? I don't fly to Japan when I win something on Ebay, and that stuff's tangible. Why can't the item transfer from planet to planet? Maybe an hour "ship" time would be agreeable. Otherwise, I have to fly out to parts unknown to stop off, find the auction terminal, and pick up my item...then go back home. Frequently this cost is around 4-6 times the actual cost of the item you won itself.

In order to help you find your way about all the various different worlds and towns, there's a "/find" feature in the game that's supposed to create you a path to the nearest whatever you're looking for. Med Center, Cantina, etc. While this is cool, even a function this small has bugs in it. The yellow path it gives will undoubtedly cut through a wall, be an inoptimal path, or in the case of the Star Port, be anchored inside the building so a path can't be generated to the point, and it has to create a waypoint instead. Oh..and you can't use it to find Bazaar Terminals, or Mission Terminals, or Rebel or Imperial Terminals. I can't think of a single function in the game that works without a hitch. Even the character creation function, as full of options and as highly praised as it is has mistakes. Can anyone else see the difference between the "muscles" and "chest" sliders? Because to me it looks like it just adds bulk to the character model in the exact same fashion. Combat, connectivity, creation, all of it does not work as it should.

Here's the biggie for me. There's no content yet. None. I could load the game, go past all the little flavor screens, and get into the game. If you played just the core gameplay...you wouldn't know it was the Star Wars universe. There's no Rebellion going on as far as anyone can tell, because all the Rebellion seems to be against is smugglers and gamblers. All the Imperial missions just have to take out the Rebellion locations. There is no large scale war, and there isn't anything even remotely interesting about any of this stuff. Apparently, if you're in good with the Hutts, you can find Jabba's little hideout and stuff. Whoopty-doo. Isn't this basically what the Sims Online was...except it was stable?

The idea to combat this staleness of the game was to have player created content. You'd make missions and someone else would carry them out, then you'd get paid. Players would add the flavor to their own game, and all SOE would have to do is host it, and add their own bits of content later. Well guess what. Stripped out of the game. May be added later. Maybe at that point it'll be worth playing, because as of right now, it sure as hell isn't.

Some of my friends who were playing were all amped to start leveling their skills to become Jedi. then one of them discovered that it would take about a year. Even if you pay using the pay for the year plan, that's still a crapload of cash. (For those of you not versed in the math department, that's 12 * 12 = $144, plus the original $54. $198 plus tax, etc., and all the time you've spent leveling your character. Make sure you get a good deal auctioning off your avatar on Ebay.) Here's the other thing though...it's the part of the game that most everyone in the game wants to reach, and yet, they won't tell you how to do it. So you take some random assortment of skills and hope you see some "Force Powers" skillset added to your character. Heaven forbid you actually get the right combination right now, because it totally would not surprise me if it wasn't added into the game yet...seeing as how a crapload of other stuff that WAS supposed to be in the game doesn't seem to have made it in there either.

I mean, imagine if you were falling woefully short of making a deadline. You have a part of the game the hardcore player won't reach for 6 months. Why add that from the beginning? Especially since you haven't made the core game stable yet anyway. The obvious choice for you would be to act as if you had that part ready to go, and then add it in 3 months down the line. Woe is you if someone finds an exploit and gets to that path ahead of time. If that happened, though, they'd probably just do a server rollback.

Overall

As I started playing one of the things in the back of my head would be what I would rate this game. At the beginning someone asked me that, and I responded, probably about an 8. You will see my score does not reflect that now. SOE developed a piss-poor build of a game that isn't completed yet and feels a whole lot like a cheap bait-and-switch. As of right now, it's not entertaining, and it's only online part of the time, so this seems to just be a product of Sony.

I had 3 friends at work who were playing this at the get go and we were all partying up for a while. In less than a month, all of us have decided that we now hate the game. A guy can only sample for minerals, craft Mighty Rods of Fishing + 1, and shoot the same crap for so long before they realize that it's just freaking boring. Isn't that why they were saying you wouldn't be allowed to be a Storm Trooper? Because it'd be too boring just being on patrol the whole time? News flash, SOE, standing in the cantina and dancing, foraging for herbs, crafting casual pants, or healing all the people in the infirmary isn't exactly the digital Mardi Gras.

Get some content, get your servers and your code solid, then get back to me with a free month or two for all this crap I had to endure AND PAY FOR, and maybe I'll hit you back with a better rating. As it is, you deserve every bit of this review, and the low scores that come along with it. This could be one of the greatest MMORPGS ever...but we here at Netjak don't hand out on scores on what you could possibly make your game into. We rate your game based on what you shipped. What SOE and LucasArts shipped is crap. Crap in a box with a big-ass manual. I feel sorry for the guy who put enough faith in this game to actually buy the Collector's Edition. You can identify them by their characters' signature headgear.

I'd accept this as being a good Door Game for free...but this isn't supposed to be Legend of the Red Dragon, or TradeWars, this is Star Wars, dammit. On top of that, $15/month means you're demanding a premium rate, for a game that isn't even freaking finished yet. This game deserves an 8 like Vin Baker deserves whatever the hell he's making for his 5.2 points and 3.8 rebounds a game in Boston.