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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.
Does the game not suck now?
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
How long between when SWG was originally launched until now?
I wanna know how long its been for SWG to become everything people EXPECTED out of the game before it was released.
Seriously... how long have people played this 'StarWars' game without the main element?
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
Due to a genius marketing decision by Activision, the European distributors, players in the Old World don't get to see the expansion until November 5th at the earliest. The latest date predicted is November 19th.
It's almost as if they WANT the players to move onto WoW.
I can understand that publishing all over the world on the same day is a little rough. While it would be nice to just download the software and pay the developers the fee, there are stores to keep happy. There has been so much bad press about this game, and the expansion. I don't understand most of it. The game is pretty decent, and lots of people have fun with it.
OMFG! STAR WARS!
Enough already. Star Wars was good. Lucas made a good movie. Then Lucas killed his own project.
I wish I had the lyrics to the Ewok song though...
If I wrote something witty, you would say I stole it from somewhere.
If it's about combining the social thing with your gaming, there's gotta be a good MUD out there somewhere. MMORPGS are basically MUDs with chrome and a billing system.
Try not. Do or do not, there is no try.
-- Dr. Spock, stardate 2822-3.
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.
Does it matter with World of Warcraft coming out?
Yes, it's addictive.
Especially the parts about improving your character's karma and fighting trolls.
-- SouNerd.com
As a hardcore Star Wars fan, I gave this game a year to become fun. I tried many of the different professions, I did their content based stuff. This game is just a boring, grinding treadmill. Just sit there all day killing stuff or using macros to repeat crafting.
The Jedi system was awful and clearly not well thought out. The new ship system is difficult to use without a joystick. This game really feels like EQ in space. The "Star Wars-y" feel isn't there. I was their target audience: a hardcore gamer who also is a Star Wars fan. Yet they failed miserably.
When WoW and EQ2 come out, they'll lose a ton of subscribers. Maybe then they'll finally try to figure out what went wrong, but it will be too late.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but don't Star Wars spaceships supposedly go beyond the speed of light, thereby making this a rather silly marketing-induced name?
I'm not a big enough Star Wars geek to know this...
-- n
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
... a little more polish on that turd!
LilMikey.com... I'll stop doing it when you sto
The engine certainly looks beautiful. Would it be too much to ask them to take it and make another game in the X-Wing series?
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
MMO user fees represent the ongoing costs of developing and operating a service, not "being charged to live." It costs a lot more to maintain and operate a MMO than to develop one.
I wouldn't find popping a fucking cap in the ass of some cocksucking dancing wookie, though. Or maybe I can pimp that bitch out to some fucking Star Wars fanboy. You know they'd fucking pay for that shit.
Man I love being a fucking adult. These vulgar games have no gadamnned effect on me whatsofuckingever.
--- Ban humanity.
I'll wait for the super-special-edition box set of the game to come out! This time my character gets to shoot first!
....sigh.
Hyuk! Hyuk! Hyuk!
As a beta tester, I can tell you right now, I don't know what the reviewers were smoking when they said this game was so cool. I'm sorry, but the fact that you can use a joystick does not impress me. The fact that it *looks* pretty does not impress me. The fact that I can't do anything of even the slightest importance in space *does* effect me. It makes me not want to enter space with my character, and thus I did not.
For those of you who purchased the Planetside "underground" expansion (you can tell what kind of an effect it had on me based upon the fact that I cannot remember its name) you'll know exactly what I'm talking about. JtL introduces a new area that everyone will enjoy for 48 hours, and then they'll go back to the real economy of the game.
Speaking of which, "2500+ buffs! 3.0 hours! 15k!".
I played the beta and was very impressed.
:)
:)
The times I ran into lag it turned out to be client-side.
the netcode is very impressive. I think the whole design of the SWG enterprise was based around scalability. Early in the beta I was flying towards the tatooine space station and I estimated that I was rendering around 100 spacecraft flying about the station (i have a screenshot, need to corraborate that)- the netcode "view distance" was then scaled down, since this undoubtedly caused processor lag (and the netcode was likely maxxed out), nevertheless I was very impressed by that many clients being rendered in realtime.
The graphics engine is great, it's huge. it's expansive. eventually they will make an FPS with it (planetside seems to use a scaled-down version of this engine). I bought this game for the graphics engine - sometimes I just turn off the lights - turn off the games HUD and zoom in to first-person view, just to suspend my disbelief and pretend that I am actually standing in coronet on corellia.
The sounds are wonderful as well
I'm not a big RPGer, but I've had lots of fun playing this game. Now, I AM a big simmer - so JTL is just wonderful
All in all I think this game is great. Of course, that's an opinion and as we all know, it's pointless to argue tastes.
"Ben?"
"You must go the the Dagobah System. There you will meet Master Yoda. But first you must buy the new Jump to Lightspeed Expansion Pack. Preorder it now and save! Be the first in line..."
"OH SHIT, THERE'S A HORSE IN THE HOSPITAL!"
Alright, to my understanding, the space aspect of SWG is like any other MMPORG but worse - to get better guns/ships/etc you have to gain experience. Ok, there's nothing wrong with that - if there were 1500 models of the Tie Fighter. Now correct me if I'm wrong but I thought the idea of being in a ship was that it took SKILL TO KILL THINGS and not time.
This is the downfall of any MMPORG that attempts a standard system for space flight. I want some schmuck that logs on with godly pilot skills to start killing people with their pretty super ships they spent weeks getting, but of course that'll never happen because then the long-term degenerates that spent 90% of their life getting ShieldXII SuperMart Booster Plus will whine.
The gaming community needs a massively online space spim where everyone has the same grades (but different styles) of ships and it actually takes piloting skills to be decent. I want descent or X-wing vs Tie Fighter with 500+ people - the day that happens is the day I become a truly happy gamer.
Board of Directors: How long before you can make the "Jump To Lightspeed"?
Developers: It'll take a few months to get the code from the navi-computer.
Marketing: Are you kidding? At the rate World of Warcraft is gaining??
Developers: Traveling through hyperspace ain't like coding dancers, boy! Without precise error-handling we could fly right through a release date or bounce too close to a complete rewrite and that'd end your little trip real quick, woudn't it?
Marketing: What's that flashing?
Developers: We're losing another thousand subscribers! Go strap yourselves in I'm going to have to delay the "Jump to Lightspeed"!
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.
..." Oh, really? As in "Dune"? Or in "The Matrix"? Or in "Lord of the Rings"? Or "A New Hope" (the original 1977 "Star Wars" movie)? Or ... make your own list.
How do you want to make a good Star Wars game without cliches??
Basically, I agree with you. But keep in mind that Star Wars games are a direct effect of Star Wars movies. For example, few days ago I saw The Phantom Menace with friends. This was actually the first time I watched Star Wars since I was a kid. And let me tell you, this was a one giant cliche! I mean, underwater cities? A city that covers a whole planet? Where've we seen those before?
Well, they may be cliches, but Lucas stole them fair and square, and served them back with loads of panache, so he's forgiven. On the other hand, there are other cliches that make you moan aloud. For example: "Hey, you guys, don't you mess with me because my mom is the Virgin Mary! (At least that's what she told her folks when she came home pregnant one day.) I guess you know what that makes ME, so everybody drop down and give me 20!" Oh lord... "I think maybe he is the CHOSEN ONE
It will stretch for light years. "He is too old to train to be a Jedi". - Uh, Yoda? You say 6 is too old, but Luke Skywalker will be a doable fixer-upper at 20? When do you recruit novices - ripping them from the breast, like the Psi Corps in "Babylon 5"? Does the Jedi Way require complete denial of normal childhood? An odd message for a kid flick! "Oh no! There's an unstoppable robot army! Of course all we have to do is pull a master switch and they'll all shut off!" This recalls blowing up the shield projector in "Return of the Jedi" (which is achieved entirely thanks to the wookie - neither Luke nor Leia makes any real difference in achieving the Rebel victory. Think about it!).
Or a computer virus shutting down all alien shields in "Independence Day". Or Obi-Wan dialing down the tractor beam. Or the hero in "Logan's Run" shooting one computer console and blowing up a city. And so on. Yeesh! Are villain equipment-designers really that bad in every off-Earth empire? In fairness, this cliche is endemic. Ever notice how, in "Star Trek", Kirk talked five different super-computers into self-destructing? If the universe really is like this, we Earthlings are gonna kick butt when we get out there! A good machine is one that has to be hammered into turning on for you (e.g. Anakin's speed-pod, his space fighter, the Millennium Falcon, C-3PO and so on). If it starts right up, it must be evil. Some might view the pod race as a rip-off copy of the speeder bike scene in "Return of the Jedi".
Actually, I found the charioteer imagery charming. Hey, a swooping chase scene past scary obstacles is always a good thing to throw into a whiz-bang sci-fi flick! Nevertheless, having a 6-year-old slave toss together a better pod than all the galaxy's technicians can create? (Those Tatooine slave schools must have a great curriculum!) Couldn't he have had help from an old but great engineer who retired to Tatooine for his health?
That cliche would have lent plausibility. Big animals try to eat whole spaceships, yum. Where've we seen that before? An apprentice Jedi - watching helplessly as his beloved master is slain in a sword fight by a Sith Lord - screams, "No!" Where've we seen that before? (Incidentally, the angry apprentice succeeds where his calm master failed - just as Luke Skywalker does better angry than when he was composed, in "Return of the Jedi". So much for Yoda's sage advice!) But enough wallowing in small stuff. Let's get down to the Grand Champion cliche of all: "Gee whillikers, R2, the folks out there sure are in a pickle. What's that, girl? Solve the whole plot by diving my tiny ship into the center of a big bad-ass one, and set off a chain reaction to blow it up from the inside while we run awa
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.
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.
No fuck duh! JTL is finally creating some twitch element in the game that was before just hitting the right buttons to perform some moves. However most people made a macro so their toon would do a certain sequence of attacks all the time optomized for their style of play.
JTL is different. It is far more based on your skill as a pilot. Two things limit your capabilties. The type of your hardware, dictating stuff like damage, speed, shield power. You also learn skills needed to things like shift your shields. But turning and keeping behind your enemy is purely based on your skills with a joystick.
Many people have complained that SWG had no twitch. Now people are complaining that JTL is twitch.
If you played any of the old Star Wars games like X-Wing, tie-fighter etc etc then you will find a lot of JTL awfully familiar except you now operate with larger planets in the background. They added some missions that are more complext then "fly to X kill Y fly back to Z" but nothing so far approaching the complexity of X-wing or its sequels.
All in all it ain't bad, just horribly bugged.
Do I recommended it? Absolutly not. If you still haven't been seduced by SWG then JTL won't do it either. I played an imperial in the beta and one of the early missions has you walking on the ground. So far space mission payout is also very low, although my ship was made out of superior looted equipment I think that will soon be adjusted meaning you will have to do ground stuff to get the cash. In the beta it would have been impossible to fly enough missions to pay for a new ship.
Personally I would stay away from the game. SWG can be fun but it is dying. The time when a new player could find a group hunt easily is gone. Wait to see if JTL attracts enough new players to become intresting again. It was fun when the 14-day trial got a load of new players who were not trapped into grinding boxes. The uptake was however very low. Many enjoyed the game itself but found that to many of the other players were to involved in a solo grind.
Fun can be had in SWG but with WoW so close, why should you bother to try to find it?
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
This isn't my quote, but it seemed to sum up the game pretty well:
I don't know, Galaxies always seemed like the mmo for people who wanted to play those two guys in the background in mos eisley while obi wan and luke drove through on their speeder. The two shoveling bantha shit.
From the Shacknews forums
You can look this up on pages 26-27 of Developing Online Games.
Then of course you have bandwith charges, utility bills, server amortorization, rent, and of course the salaries that are paid to customer service and the technical support staff.
This doesn't neccessarily mean they are right of course. Even experts make errors, however given that they are pretty much showing their math and basing it off of practical experience unless you wish to publish your numbers I would have to suspect theirs are more accurate.
>There aren't enough dungeons or cool things to do besides run around and kill stuff and hope for loot.
All MUD-based games are like this. Essentially you are putting yourself in a Skinner box.
Repetition and the lack of "cool loot" is a feature not a bug. With so many players, there will never be rare loot you can get, and if there is someone who has been playing 23 hours a day is hoarding it. Running around and killing stuff is basically the design.
A lot of people complain about these things without realizing this is why these games are so addictive. There are simply more fun online games that dont demand all your time. The skinner-box is profitable for now, but even the implementations are weak. I played SWG for about two months and its like a generic space game with a few token star wars themes applied. The incentive is poor. Worse, they made the best character, the jedi, next to impossible to score. Compare that to all the Jedi fun you can have with Jedi Academy.
I like games that are challenging, take me away, let me be creative, let me horse around, etc. I have real life leveling to do and MUD-playing back in college did affect my grades and social life (or what was left of it). I'm really curious to see if the skinner-box profit model is going to last.
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.