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Star Wars Galaxies - Fastest Selling MMOG Ever
Thanks to several readers for pointing to a LucasArts press release announcing Star Wars Galaxies has attracted more than 125,000 users in its first week, an all-time MMORPG sales record, and something LucasArts call "..the single most successful introduction of an MMO to date." This PC MMORPG is thus far proving extremely popular, despite teething troubles, and the press release also mentions the development team "..is working on a variety of new features, such as player-owned ground vehicles and player cities, along with substantial new content to be added on a regular basis throughout the coming months."
You'd have to be living under a rock not to have heard about this game in the first place. It's been a long time since they starting hyping it, and it's finally out. It should be no surprise that a franchise like that would make a lot of money initially.
I've been playing since Beta 3. Initially, I was most worried about the graphics performance of the game, seeing how bad it was near the end of Beta 3. I was pretty happy to see they seem to have cleared most of that up.
I've been playing for a week now (off and on...mostly off, since I have a real life), and initially I was pretty happy with it.
But right now, I'm sitting here wondering... "Well, what next"? I'm not sure how they're going to maintain people's interest in this game. I've made my way to the first tier of exp in the game, (one of initial professions you have to start with), and now I'm on my second tier.
Unlike Everquest, in which it was pretty clear what getting more experienced in something would get you, it's not all that clear in SWG.
They've always said that this was a game where you could "live Star Wars". Well, I can tell ya, it must be pretty damn boring most of the time down on Tatooine....
Yes, the collector's edition is about $130 CDN, but the regular one is just over $50. (Which is what I bought.) It includes a relatively-thick manual, a little booklet, three-cd case (with cds, of course) and a couple of advertisements to Earthlink and such.
I'm happy with it. Plus it has that new-game smell which puts me beyond the joy of extacy.
- shazow
The collectors edition allows (among other things) the owner's characters to wear some special in-game sunglasses.
IMO they are really stupid looking, but to each his own...
If you're quitting because of downtime in the first month of play and not because you dislike the actual gameplay then you're being foolish.
If you think it's going get beter soon you've no idea about how SOE do business - PlanetSide (another SOE game, that's been running for longer) has constant down time issues, they STILL reboot the servers daily and take them down during peak times and they still have lots of problems when they are running.
Doors frequently don't open in the game, you can get stuck in the game until they servers are rebooted, you can shoot through some objects (like trees), people can shoot and kill you even when they are facing the *opposite* direction (which makes using stealth suits to sneak up on someone a joke), the killer client side hit detection means you can - for example - get run over and killed by a vehicle (like a tank), even if it seems to you that you were 10-20 feet away from where you are standing - all issues that have been knowen about for a month, but not fixed.
A couple of months won't be long enough for them to even nearly sort it out, trust me (or read the the SOE Station.com forums). It might be sufficently useable to be considered ready for release in 6 months, but not in 8 weeks.
I say people are right not to go beyond the first month if it narks them, the bugs in SOE games such as SWG and PS can be really annoying, and the issues are NOT going to go away anytime soon - the developers don't even know what's going on with there games.
For example, the developers of PS recently said they didn't know sticking doors were an issue, despite the numerous bug reports submitted by players (including myself) and forum topics dedicated to the subject.
The games are not ready for release by a long shot (and many of the issues are not specifically to do with it being massive multiplayer, simply that the game has had too short a development cycle).