Star Wars Galaxies NDA Lifted

Thanks to several readers for pointing out that, according to a post on the official Star Wars Galaxies messageboards, the NDA has been lifted, so Beta testers are free to talk about their experiences playing this PC MMORPG, which ships on June 26th. Naturally, the official messageboards are filling up with many and varied viewpoints, and sites such as SWG Warcry, SWG Vault, and many other fan sites are posting a multitude of screenshots and opinions of this much anticipated title.

Comments

Bug fixing has been generally pretty rapid

[DrSkwid]

last week we had a nice" /show corpse" bug which brought you back to life if you got killed, that was a fun night. s'been fixed now bah

Non of them are show stoppers really. Just a pain when you walk 2500m to find you mission has spawned inside another spawn and it you can't target it. Or theres nothing there at all except a way-point on your map.

However, if it was my software it would be labelled version 0.9 and I'd say it wasn't ready. Early adopters beware, you'll be getting regular patches.

I'm running in 1280x1024 with a GForce ti4600 on dual 1ghz with 768Gb RAM

When I tried to run it on my Voodoo5 it said "Directx9 not installed" even though it was. I tried finding some more XP drivers for it but lost the will and switched it off.

My current character (that's the wiped one on the wall)

The player built houses & shops will really change this game as time goes on. Not enough time on the beta for a massive building plan, "player citites" are said to be the first post-launch big new feature. The characters all seem pretty individual because there's not the "the best armor for Trolls at level 15 is the Chainmail" feature.

There's plenty of entertainment

My beta experience.....

[Anonymous Coward]

I got in at the end of beta 2, I had pre-ordered my copy 1/15, and I'm a huge SW fan. I loved this game...at first.

I made a Wookie and got him up to creature handler, playing every night for 3-4 hours. Then my interest started to fade. Is this all there is? Then one of the devs posted a list of "10 things to do in SWG" because people in the beta had started asking (bad sign?). I read the list and realized that everything on the list except the last 2 items sounded boring *to me*.

The last 2 items? Unlock the force sensitive slot and make a Jedi Master. The time required to unlock the FS slot? At least a year. So...pay $12+ a month to play a game that *I* find boring with only a slim chance of unlocking the FS slot...no. I cancelled my order last week.

Someone mentioned on the beta forum, "If you want to play a Jedi, buy Jedi Knight". My copy's already on order.

Note many people will love it. It looks great! And I loved playing a creature handler. I would wonder around, trying to find creatures to tame. Then the creature handler bugs set in and he became useless. Plus lag prevented creatures from spawning in the wilderness. (I assume they fixed this).

Throughout the beta I was told "it's a beta". I can only hope their QA department does a MUCH better job after release. They can't hid behind "it's a beta" anymore. I was getting tired of patches that screwed up more than they fixed. Ask someone about the 40 hour patch download (on a cable modem). Or the new "feature" slipped into a hotfix. The hotfix was to repair the WORST patch I'd ever seen. This feature? Bleeding. The idea was to have a TINY percentage of creature hits cause a bleeding wound. This wound would do a tiny bit of damage (8-10 points) every 5 seconds for a total of 60 seconds (a DOT basically). The problem? Close to 100% of the hits caused bleeding for 80-100 pts a shot. So you attack a newbie creature, kill it and bleed to death. (Note this was fixed and I got the patch time down to 9 hours after reinstalling)

Wait, wait let me say it! It's a beta.

A few fun(ny) things
-Beating the crap out of a gungan, pretending it was jar jar, making him PAY for Episode I!!
-Hearing about people taking a shuttle to Endor to visit the cute Ewoks. Only to find people begging for money to get off the "hell planet" and Ewoks running around killing people.

Boy this ended up sounding very bitter didn't it? It just isn't my kind of MMOG. Oh well I'm waiting to sign up for the City of Heros beta :)

Wasted Potential

[Farscry]

I've been rather negative regarding Star Wars Galaxies due to my experiences in the beta testing since November. Not because I want the game to fail: far from it. I wish the game would actually live up to the hype and be a solid, revolutionary online title. That's what it was originally intended to be, after all.

Unfortunately, as of now, 7 of the 10 planets have yet to be beta tested. The in-game help and reference files are incomplete. Many objects and items in the game don't even have any descriptive text beyond "cha_tabl_2_1_acc" and such. Vast areas of emptiness permeate the game world with nothing to do (or even battle). I've gone literally minutes running across Tatooine without so much as a gundark appearing on long-range sensors.

The game isn't ready for release. June 26th as a release date means that the gold master was pressed as little as a week ago, possible further in the past. The game is not content-ready for release, and with the gold master being that old, prepare for people having a massive patch to download on release day. There will likely be a good amount of initial content for very low level characters, but I anticipate that there will be more problems plaguing this release than we saw with WWII Online and Anarchy Online⦠combined.

Re:SWG...

[Farscry]

I refuse to pay to continue to be a beta tester

That's just it, and it's a large part of why my comments about the game appear to be so vitriolic. For a long time, I was patient with the shortcomings of SWG, because it was early Beta.

As time went on, however, I began to realize that they were preparing to release an incomplete game on the public. Despite that knowledge, I was taken aback by the announcement this week that the game would go live on June 26th, fully 3 months before I figured they'd be anywhere near ready for retail!

The problem is that the precedent has been set by nearly every online game that people will be forgiving and understanding. It's as if we expect that any online game should be released in a nearly unplayable state, and that it's ok for them to continue finishing the game while on our clocks as paying customers.

Would you find it acceptable if you subscribed for cable television, but they finished working out the kinks in delivering certain channels over your first few months? "Oh, sorry about the Weather Channel cutting out on you. Yeah, you can hear about that tornado warning on the radio at the moment. The Weather Channel router's been on the fritz, and we're taking it offline for a while until it's ready. Your other channels will work fine in the meantime."

Just what is it that makes it acceptable for us as paying customers and subscribers to have to put up with incomplete and unreliable online game releases?