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Star Wars Galaxies: Jump to Lightspeed Launches
If you already play the Massively Multiplayer Game Star Wars Galaxies, you're undoubtedly already aware that the Jump to Lightspeed space expansion officially launched today. For the rest of us, there are some details on the developer side regarding the ramp up to release available on the official site. Details on the experience of the new expansion is available at Gamespot and PC.IGN. More ... colourful analysis can be found on Grimwell's boards, and N3rfed has a post discussing the fact that the rest of the world has to wait until November 5th for their space-goodies.
Since July or August of 2003, longer if you include the beta.
Bullshit. The loot system is good enough to support your ship needs except when you need the absolute BEST. At least in beta it was.
KARMA TAG! You're it.
1. A starport system was used for planet hopping. Basically, a loading screen,
2. Yes. Yes, but there are some limitations.
KARMA TAG! You're it.
I've been playing SWG awhile, sometimes more than I probably should have been. The ground based game is pretty fun, although it can get a little repetitive.
My biggest complaints:
1) There aren't enough dungeons or cool things to do besides run around and kill stuff and hope for loot.
2) The path to becoming a Jedi takes a filthy, sick amount of time. You pretty much don't have a girlfriend, wife, friends, or job if you can sit there for the required amount of time to make it all the way to jedi.
I've played on the JTLS beta, and overall its pretty fun (but not very challenging). Once I figured out that you can target specific enemies by pressing the TAB key (this isn't immediately obvious), then it was a breeze to kill the enemy ships.
I'm probably going to cancel my account soon, the game just doesn't have much to offer me after 3 or 4 months of playing. I made millions upon millions of credits, I've had most of the cool loot, and it just gets boring after awhile. The only thing I haven't done is make it to jedi, and I'm not about to invest 200+ more hours in the game.
I think if you've been wanting to try out SWG, this is a good time to start. It's somewhat fun, but all the cliches about MMORPG's definitely apply. After my 3 month experiment, I just figured out that I play video games BECAUSE I'm antisocial - not because I want to be around people more often.
"If you think you have things under control, you're not going fast enough." --Mario Andretti
The monthly fee is a fairly trivial ($10-15 normally, $40 for EQ Legends) for potentially a month's worth of entertainment. You could play 24/7 and never be billed more than your fee. When my boyfriend and I go out drinking it's at least $30-40, more if we go for dinner first.
:)
I used to play MuD's and enjoyed them back in 1996 or so. However now my opinion is, if I'm going to spend a considerable amount of time levelling up a character I'd prefer it have pretty textures all over it than be an @ or pile of text.
Sacré-bleu! Where is me mama?
You were restricted to buying shuttle tickets to move between the game's 10 planets: Corellia, Naboo, Tatooine, Rori, Talus, Dantooine, Lok, Yavin IV, (the forest moon of) Endor, and Dathomir. Transitions were handled by annoying load screens. Of course, transitions to space are handled by annoying load screens too...
2) If you bought the first, do you have to buy the upgrade? If you don't have the upgrade can you still play?
You can still play, but you can't access the space areas or create Ithorian and Sulustan characters. Which is dumb, since the models for those character types are downloaded to your system anyway.
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
lifted from http://www.blueharvest.net/scoops/anh-script.shtml
HAN: Watch your mouth, kid, or you're going to find yourself floating
home. We'll be safe enough once we make the jump to hyperspace.
Besides, I know a few maneuvers. We'll lose them!
EXTERIOR: SPACE -- PLANET TATOOINE.
Imperial cruisers fire at the pirateship.
INTERIOR: MILLENNIUM FALCON -- COCKPIT.
The ship shudders as an explosion flashes outside the window.
HAN: Here's where the fun begins!
BEN: How long before you can make the jump to light speed?
HAN: It'll take a few moments to get the coordinates from the
navi-computer.
At first, I hated it. I thought it was difficult to control and an utter bore. Then I poked around, and saw that many other people really enjoyed. So I thought I'd give it another chance.
Two key things you need to know if you're not enjoying JTL yet:
1. You can't just attack and win, or go straight after your opponent and win. You actually need to practice, think, and use some tactics. It's much harder to play than you might expect at first. You need to stay behind your opponents so they can't shoot back at you, and you need to match your speed to theirs. If a ship is in front of you shooting at you, you need to high tail it behind them immediately. This "actually needing to play" and having what buttons you push actually make a difference is a bit of a shock to most SWG players at first.
2. The design of the ship modules and ship crafting is incredible. It gets a lot more exciting when you get your first ship upgrade, which took me a couple of nights of play.
The first non-free ship you can use has something like 13 different components on it (guns, missles, armor front, armor rear, shields, engine, booster, etc.). But there's a mass limit on the ship that's fairly restrictive. So that leaves it up to the player to decide how he's going to outfit his ship. These choices are non-trivial, and very interesting.
For example, Initially I just threw whatever components into my ship that I could scare up. I was doing OK in battle, but began to suspect I could do better with a different configuration on my ship.
The way the ship crafting system works, you can use all kinds of different strategies in equiping your ship. For example, I really wanted some bigger guns on my ship, but the big guns put it way over the weight limit. I decided to build some shields for my ship that had strong defense in the back, weak defense in the front, and lower mass. I completely took the armor out of the ship, reasoning that hopefully my shields would hold long enough for me to quickly kill the enemy. I essentially gutted my ship to make room for a big fat fun. The strategy worked! I had a great time tinkering with my ship for hours on end, trying all kinds of different things.
The crafting system for the ships lends itself to all kinds of different cooperative strategies, too. For example, you can use blaster that eat through shields but are weaker against armor, or vice versa. You and your friends might get together with a couple of shield-eater ships to soften up the opponents, and group with one ship that specializes in destroying the armor after the shields are gone. And then have another guy with you who acts like a rodeo clown: he uses all the mass on his ship for shields and armor, and carries a light, slow engine and no guns. This guy would talk a lot of smack to draw enemy fire, and even though he wouldn't have much offensive cpability he'd be very difficult to kill.
The crafting system in SWG always had a lot of promise, but it's finally showing its original promise in JTL. Not only are there lots of ship components, but every one of them can be experimented in several meaningful ways. Most items in the game have only a couple of useful ways to experiment on them. In JTL, components have 5 or more ways to experiments, each of which will be useful for various situations.
This kind of complexity where equipment can be tailored to special strategies is going to make JTL a lot of fun. Perhaps this level of thinking isn't for everyone, but many people are going to have a great time with this-- even people that aren't just Star Wars nuts.
Remember SubSpace? It was only 2D but it was great fun. Especially when as a lowly newbie you managed to take out someone with an extremely high bounty value. It would be cool if someone took the Edgar Rice Burroughs book "Beyond the Farthest Star" and turned the massive air battles into a game. How they'd add depth in order to keep subscribers would be an interesting challenge.
You make a great point here. I played for a while and liked it, here's my take on it.
It does take skill. If you try JTL, you'll probably find that the game is much more difficult than other MMO's-- what you do actually makes all the difference. If you blindly go in with guns blazing, you're going to get owned. You have to actually work at this game.
It takes time, too. Not just a mindless grind, but it takes time to develop the combination of a playstyle style and a configuration of your ship that you like.
I agree with your point, though, and I think that you're touching on the principal weakness of current MMO's: we don't need the grind. We need things that challenge our skills.
There's still a grind in JTL, but it takes skill, too-- both skill in piloting and skill in deciding how to configure your ship and match that configuration with a play strategy.
I have a friend who was in the beta. The things that turned me off are:
- TIE Fighters are pretty durable - they can take more than a few hits
- Because of the way the PvP system works, rebel starships (X-wings, A-wings, etc) and imperial starships (TIE fighters) can encounter each other without being hostile to each other - which is wierd given that it is the Star Wars universe...
- No control of the deflector shield system - you can't route all power to the front/rear shields as you can in X-Wing/TIE Fighter series of games - it's a feature that's also mentioned in the movies.
It is a bit like that. It's not like there are 6 ships and you just get a new one each time you level up. You can buy/loot upgrades for your ship and get droids to help you fight.
You can also teach the droids new tricks to fire better and stuff. It's really neat.
you may want to check out Free Worlds, a multiplayer Star Wars Total conversion mod for Freelancer.
"I say we take off, nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure."
It ain't really all that massive. Perhaps it would have been if SOE had managed the 1 million subscribers they had aimed for, although how their hardware and software would have coped is beyond me. The few people that are playing are further devided over a dozen different server clusters meaning they will never meet each other. So if you start on a server you will play with perhaps a total of 1000 other players if your lucky. Or rather more accurate, 1000 other accounts. Many hardcore players operate more then one account. The number of total players must therefore be lower then what sony claims.
Is any of this important? Well yeah. SWG has a complex economy that is based on there being enough players to keep the economy balanced. Supply and demand and scale of economy. However because of the few number of players and SOE hopless balancing the player class of Image Designer can be very very very hard to find. Doctors are essential because they buff the stats and without them the fights become impossible very quickly. At times on my server the entire game grinds to a halt because no doctors are buffing the stats of players. This is ultimate the death of a lot of online games. To few people playing and to many advanced players so far ahead that many newbies are instantly turned off.
But lets say you persist. You now create a character on one of the servers hoping to find the server with the most fun community. Selecting sex is pure cosmetic but race is not. Sadly because of some stupid decisions by SOE (you will see a lot of these but nothing compared to your stupidity to pay them each and every month) humans are the best class. Armour was absent for along time for wookies making them useless in the thougher fights.
But you persist and choose a race. Now you gotta choose your starting job. Well actually don't bother. It costs 100 credits to train in a new job so any newbie can easily get basic training in every job out there (except politician I will come to this one). A smart newbie does this as early on it is really really helpfull to be able to help yourselve.
The early jobs are melee (hit things with a stick), ranger (shoot at things), medic (poke players with needles), artisan (make things to hit or shoot thing with), entertainer (stand in boring cantina listening to a 10 second music sample being played over and over again watching the same motion captured animation that is fun once twice or a hundreth times but wich you will have to watch a gazillion times) and finally scout (walk faster up hills and get resources from critters).
Well you can start as an artisan but artisan need resources to make things wich you don't have or any money to buy them with. There are crafting missions that pay you but they pay so low that I wouldn't recommend it to anyone but the most brafe.
So we are going to be involved in some way with combat. Choosing melee means you will be running after everything running away from you while shooting at you. Ranged means you will be trying to snipe things biting your arm off.
Your character has 3 main bars. Strenght, action and mind. They could have named them anything as strength does not make you stronger and action does not make you faster. The whole deal is that you have an X number of strenght but also a value Y indicating how much strenght something will cost and a value Z indicating how much strenght you recover. Same for action and mind. For instance when a medic heals someone he uses up a certain amount of mind points. How many exactly depends on how high Y is. If Z is high enough he will recover the lost points without the main bar ever dropping. If not then the act of constantly healing will slowly deplete the bar until you no longer can take an action.
Weapon use deplets all bars but varies per weapon wich is used more. The smart people will have thought of something. The value of the main bar is of no imp
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
I understand that you might feel that they are biased (though there is no reason for them to do so) and I have admitted their numbers may be flawed, but again I am giving you their numbers, which seem accurate even against your statement, and you have not given any in return.