Star Wars Galaxies - Jedi, Vehicles, Speeder Bike Racing

Thanks to GameSpy for their interview with Lucasarts staff about playing as a Jedi in Star Wars Galaxies. The article discusses the powers granted to the newly-unlocked Jedi in this PC MMORPG ("There are over fifty Force powers, ranging from Force Lightning, Force Weaken, and Force Throw, to Jedi Mind Trick, and a variety of lightsaber moves"), and the possibility your Jedi character could be lost forever ("We have partial permadeath for a Jedi. Basically, a Jedi is allotted a certain number of deaths before they lose all progress that character has made.") Elsewhere, player-owned vehicles were enabled in the game earlier this week, and the official SWG page has information on the types, including the X34 Landspeeder, Swoop bike, and Speeder bike, and even documents player-hosted races that are being attempted, showcasing an in-game reproduction of the Mos Espa Circuit from Star Wars: Episode 1.

Comments

The Grind

[ziggles]

I don't know why anyone cares about becoming a Jedi. You'll be grinding through professions for countless hours and days.. just so you can get to a new profession to grind through. The game doesn't suddenly change once you're using a light saber instead of a pistol. I don't know anyone who has lasted more than 4 months in this game, even people who usually love MMORPGs get sick of the repetitiveness and lack of incentive to do anything other than grind. Such a pity too.. the Star Wars universe is a lot more interesting than the usual EQ/DAoC type thing IMO.

Re:The Grind

[kherr]

I don't understand why people feel a burning desire to max out at each profession by countless hours of grinding. That's why the game loses fun for them. If you just do stuff with your character (run missions, sell goods, whatever) eventually you get the experience to level up. But to make becoming a master your objective would get very old, very fast. No wonder people stop playing.

With the player cities there are more places to go and the vehicles now make it easier to travel. These player communities are where the interesting interactions in the game are. They've also (thankfully) nerfed the creature handler stuff so the game is not so much "creature wars".

Where are the spaceships?

[Andy_R]

I think I'd rather fire up mame and play the original arcade game to get my star wars fix.

Half the fun of the orignal film was the idea of flying around in cool spaceships, having battles, but that seems to be totally missing from this game. So they finally put in the vehicles that should have been there on day 1? All you get is a beaten up hovercar and two motorbikes that the wheels have fallen off.

Get back to me when I can win a souped-up smuggling ship in a game of cards and use it to run empire blockades.

Re:Jedi crap

[Mike Hawk]

Thanks for the info. Now based on what you said, there are a couple counter-points.

#1 YOU DON'T HAVE TO BECOME A JEDI. Using your great pistoleer example: Be happy as a pistoleer. If you enjoyed the steps it took you to get there and the game as a pistoleer in general, stay that way. The grass isn't always greener, in life or fake life. Its worth repeating, if you aren't willing to bust arse to become a Jedi, don't worry about becoming a Jedi. I imagine it would be pretty hard to become a Jedi in Ultima Online, yet noone there is complaining how hard it is. This brings me to point #2...

#2 Becoming a Jedi should be hard as hell and generally not a good time. Though I am not a hardcore fan of the movies, most of the characters seem pretty unhappy with the situation when they decide to follow the Jedi. They leave their families and loved ones forever. They just pick up and go. This is very similar to the profession issue. You stop what you liked doing and give it up for a tough road to hoe. Great sacrifice = great rewards.

#3 Not everyone should become a Jedi. If it was easy or fun to become a Jedi, everyone would do it. The game would cease to function. It would just be stupid. Now 2 and 3 lead me to #4...

#4 All of this is very consistent with the movie portrayals of Jedi. Other game inconsistencies aside, in the time of the movies (this is the time the game is set in, correct?) Jedi are rare. Being a Jedi in general seems to be pretty miserable. One guy lives in a cave or something, another lives in some swamp. Yeah, woo, being a Jedi rocks!

Here's the deal, anything positive or desirable about being a Jedi is assigned by the individual. I do not play this game but a few guys at work do. They enjoy the game very much and have no desire to become Jedi. Turns out, the Star Wars universe can be just a pretty fun place to run around if one knows where to look.

I'd also like to thank you for perpetuating the stereotype of gamer as whiny baby who wants everything handed to them and considers themself a game design god. You should reevaluate your own priorities in the game if you think the Jedi path is too hard, and maybe in real life if this is how you present yourself in general.

Re:Jedi crap

[Godeke]

While I admit that it seems pretty lame, they did explicit tell people that it would be rare to see Jedi. Frankly, it sounds like they made it too easy, with the holocubes giving 4/5s of the solution.

The fundamental problem with licensed MMORPGs is that everyone wants to be the canonical characters. This was a problem back in the day of text muds - those who build upon a "hot property" (usually illegally, but lets ignore that for now) found that they had unhappy players because everyone wanted to be "character X" where X is the most power, cool and unbalanced character you can imagine. Its like a kingdom made of nobody but kings.

In SWG, they *thought* they could avoid that by making the Jedi slot nearly randomly distributed. 32 skills, pick 5, means your chance of picking correctly is (5/32*4/31*3/30*2/29*1/28) = 4.9 in a million. So some clues were obviously necessary, and they could basically meter the Jedi slots. The holocrons difficult means only those who really want it are going to become Jedi. For the player who wants to be Jedi, this may suck, may force them out of the game and probably isn't worth it.

The real error was revealing the secret formula. Now that it is clear how base and arbitrary the formula is, people aren't happy. Of course not: they all wanted to be Luke, and now that possibility has been taken from them.

Re:Jedi crap

[Acidic_Diarrhea]

5 random events seem far from the movies? What event are you basing this on? And how do quests make this any more reasonable?

Looking at it, the movies really don't have that much in the way of how a Jedi is selected to become a Jedi. The only characters from the movies whose training has been portrayed is Anakin and Luke; Luke was mainly selected because of family lineage and events far out of his control demanding that he train AND Anakin was selected to be trainined because of his high level of forceness in his blood. Both of these situations seem quite random to me - I mean, you certainly don't pick your family lineage. Would you rather that in the game when you created a character, there was a random number generator employed to determine whether you had the appropriate inclination to become a Jedi? I mean, if you're basing it on the movies - that seems the most like the movies. Anakin and Luke both picked to become a Jedi but two events out of their control had to occur first - they had to be born with that special Jedi specialness and a Jedi had to be introduced to them so that they could be located and picked - in the Star Wars universe, Jedi are quite rare. If you make it, complete a set of quests and there's no randomness to it, then everyone would become a Jedi.