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

Re:I'm looking forward to trying this game...

[retrac]

june 26

Games' good but still a few bugs

[DrSkwid]

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.

not quite 8)

[DrSkwid]

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 !

skills

[DrSkwid]

It's "do something over and over for XP"
& yes, you can macro your way to the top /sample /sleep 500 /stand /sleep 500 /sample /sleep 500 /stand /sleep 500
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"

Not ready for prime time

[ccarter]

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.

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.