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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.
june 26
I've been beta for about a month
The game isn't finished but that doesn't stop it being fun. It's not a shoddy product but it doesn't shine like the first day I played EQ (admittedly in June 1999 which was about 3 months after launch).
The AI can be dumb with NPCs standing there clapping as you pummel their friends.
Here's me killing a very red MOB by getting it stuck behind a small rock
Having seen the changes from the last few (no doubt panic stricken) weeks I'm pretty confident this game will matrure into something pretty good. I don't think it raises the benchmark that much. Some of the grind has been removed but not all of it. Best thing is that you are not stuck with your initial choices (important on a one character per server game). You can surrender skills and try new ones and adjust your base stats.
And you you look for it there is certainly plenty of action with groups of up to twenty
Many people will like it on it's own merit but I'm sure for many people it will be a welcome stop-over on the way to EQ2.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
nah, there are two forms of "death"
Incapacitated - this is generally what happens to you, MOB takes you down and you fall over until your hits/action.mind points recover (typically about 60 secs but I've had 128 & 4)
Sometimes a MOB will come in and give you a death blow and it's back to town.
Even then you can insure your belongings so that you wake up in town with everything you've insured and the stuff you collected since insuring yourself will be on your corpse with your money.
There is a galactic bank (but you have to return to your bank's planet to get to your items [you can move banks]. Cash transactions are available at all banks.
As for the underpants - the reliance on fancy armor has been removed. You start with some clothes but I took them off for fun.
I look much like this atm. although last night I found a new hat but I don't have any good screenies of it.
I'm not very powerful atm. because we had to start again this week because Sony wiped the server ready for the start! [without warning just "Oh. we've wiped the servers, could you start again please". Nuff ppl were getting mardy in the forums but thats the life of a tester]
As well as that most of the MOBS are random spawn so if you come back tomorrow chances are they will be gone.
hehe twice now I've been trying to do a good post and different family members want my taxi services !
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
It's "do something over and over for XP" /sample /sleep 500 /stand /sleep 500 /sample /sleep 500 /stand /sleep 500
& yes, you can macro your way to the top
etc.
The client kicks you out after about 30 mins afk (although I've never timed it but I have been kicked)
You can buy machines to do the harvesting for you but it can be a bit of a grind fest making 500 pointless items for the XP and then destroying them.
After 10,000 or so XP you have to go to a trainer or PCs can train each other in all but Master & Novice and for this the PC gets 20ish Apprentice Points (APs). For some disciplines you need 600 or so APs to become a master.
I'm sure you'll see the skill tree on the fan boards soon, it's not that complicated.
You are given 250 skill points to spend at the start of the game & each discipline takes 64 skill points to Master all 4 branches. There are about 20 disciplines. You can surrender a skill at any time and recover your skill points so if you're fed up of something you can switch.
They've done a great job at trying to appeal to all types of MMORPG players from chatters to fighters. I think the game is a success already despite the minor flaws I've seen.
I'm told that EQ was pretty much the same at this stage of development.
I think I will be moving from tester to player.
I played EQ for 3+ years, I'm pretty sure SWG will grow enough to accommodate long term players.
The game is more fun and dying isn't such a pain.
Navigation is easy and so is finding your group. (open you datapad, click "create waypoint" and everyone in the group can see it on their maps)
Advancing seems steady and you can group with players of all abilities and still participate (you need to do at least 5% of the damage to a MOB to get any XP)
They've tried to take the pain out of the game and I think, on the most part, they've suceeded.
Is $15 too steep? We'll see.
At launch Star Wars Galaxies: An Empire Divided will offer four subscription plan options: Month-to-month - $14.99;
three months - $14.00 per month;
six months - $13.00 per month;
and 12 months - $12.00 per month.
I really hope that when EQ2 comes out they'll say "$20 a month for SWG & EQ & EQ2"
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
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
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
My biggest concern was that this would be a bad product with some familiar names and logos on it. After playing beta for a month I was happy to see this this is just as good as any other "Lucas Arts" product, with rich detail that makes you feel like you are playing in the Star Wars universe. Yes, there are bugs. Yes, there is missing content one week before release. No, there has never been a product that was flawless at release. Yes, I have already pre-ordered it.
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
I'm told that EQ was pretty much the same at this stage of development.
Of course the era's are different but EQ was definitely no anywhere near as lacking in content and other such things at its release as SWG will be. In other words EQ was basically finished at launch, SWG is no where near so.
The game will undoubtedly succeed to some degree simply due to the fact it is Star Wars but there is still a lot missing and a lot left to do development wise (How about at least fixing the character sync problems that currently require a server reset to clean up before launching guys????)
In my estimation SWG is a good 6 to 12 months of development from being something a seasoned EQ player would find to be an acceptable game (I know, I know, we've been mindlessly soaking up unfinished expansions since Velious came out). I've spent a decent bit of time with Beta 3 and I am not so sure that this launch won't end up making the Anarchy Online launch look good. ^..^!
My recommendation is do not buy it at launch, wait 3 months or so and see what the buzz is saying about it then. Or maybe even wait to the first expansion hits and check the various boards to see what the buzz about the game is then.
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.
Mmmmm.... Pigeons. Sometimes, they come with notes attached...it's like...a fortune cookie with wings.
The game has tremendous potential, but in its current state is a far cry from ready. Content is lacking, there are still some pretty serious bugs. 90% of the resources required to craft objects have not even been introduced to the game yet. Lag is an issue as is rubberbanding (most people reporting 2-5 FPS in the cities). Problems with being able to shoot through solid rock...
I canceled my pre-order, however that does not mean that I wont play the game... eventually. It just needs time to mature and I refuse to pay to continue to be a beta tester.
If anyone wants a one stop place to go and read various reviews and comments about the beta test. Head over to IGN's Star Wars Vault. This place is loaded with reviews, screenshots...and so forth.
I played this in beta a couple of weeks ago for one night. Frustrated, I put it away. Essentially, I logged in and spent an hour running around. No vehicles were available, and all the obvious quest boxes gave quests which were too hard to complete within a reasonable amount of time. Any time my character was close to destroying something, for example, I would have to run to avoid defenders. Then the health would shoot back up, and I'd be stuck with low health and a fresh, alerted enemy.
NPCs were inside of each other, text wasn't entereted (as you said). I figured that this was why the console versions had been cancelled (while the Xbox one could maybe be patched, the many gigs of patch data would not be something you could cram on; don't even think about a PS2 one). I also figured that the game would not be ready for an August launch.
Then I read it was launching on the 26th.
Kids, this game is so not ready for prime time, it's not funny. Do not get Star Wars Galaxies. It doesn't crash like Anarachy Online did at first, but it sure sucks the same. Spend your money on something better, like Daikatana -- or Anachronox, a good budget title you can buy 4 times over for the price of Galaxies.
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