Star Wars Galaxies Jump to Lightspeed Reviewed

UGO is running a feature on Star Wars Galaxies, a week after the launch of Jump to Lightspeed. They have reviews of the expansion both from a veteran player and from a new player to the game. From the Vet: "Jump to Lightspeed is a dream come true for many loyal SWG players that have been itching for a new reason to dust off that old flight stick or buy a new one." From the Newb: "As time went on, the bloom started to come off the rose, for a number of reasons." If you've been considering getting your dogfight on, give them a look.

Comments

Re:The newbie review was a little dumb.

[wambaugh]

His review was definitely useful for me since, as you said, I was in the same shoes. I also agree with him that if a game is supposed to be open-ended, then you should be able to do what you want within the scope of the game. In other words, if x-wing pilots in Star Wars spent the years leading up to attacking the Death Star wandering Tatooine killing Tuscan Raiders to save up for an R2 unit, then that's how it should be. Since my impression was that pilots mostly piloted, then a player should not be forced to do many land-based quests. At least no more so than a player playing a land-based profession should be forced to fly a starfighter.

Having not played SWG, I found the reviewer's angle intriguing becase there has been a great dearth of space combat sims and even if JTL is more primitive than what was available five years ago (in terms of functionality), anything is better than nothing.

What I am surprised by is that it doesn't sound like there's much multiplayer combat (if any?). Perhaps the reviewer didn't get involved in any, but I certainly hope that JTL's space combat is multiplayer.

A word of warning to those thinking of buying

[SmallFurryCreature]

Both reviews talk about it but don't really seem to have spotted it. SWG has become poisoned. It has become poisoned with something that is lethal to any team game. Solo'ers.

SWG has a skill system where you use XP to buy boxes wich give you new skills. XP can easily be gained doing stuff related to the skills, kill for combat skills, craft for crafting skills. However each skill box also costs skill points of wich you only have a very limited amount. You can spend them as you wish, unlearn a skill and you get the points back.

The job of marksman cost 15 points to get novice in. Then you have 4 trees, carabine, pistol and rifle and a generic ranged combat. Now don't think that if you master the tree of pistol you are a capable shooter. You are crap. Totally and utterly. You need however novice marksman, the pistol tree and then go into the advanced profession of pistoleer. If you want to be any use in combat you better have an advanced combat job. Worse certain jobs like smuggler require you to have multiple novice jobs. These eat up skill points.

This leads to a problem. It is due to two bad design points. All jobs cost exactly the same amount of skill points despite the fact that a ranger is far less needed then say a melee. Second is that you need to be high level in any job to be of any use. Scout at low level does allow you to harvest wich is usefull but very costly in Skill points. Novice Medic is also theoretically usefull as long as you don't make your own medicine BUT because nobody wants to waste the points AND then have to pay for the pleasure of healing others EVERYONE uses docs to buff their stats to the point they don't need healing.

It basically means that people are in very narrow defined jobs with an awfull lot of people going for pure combat. I myself am guilty of this. Sure I could use scout to harvest and sell those resources to crafters BUT I can get more money being a pure combat class to buy the inflated prices becauuse the crafters can't get enough resources.

You starting to see the poison? Basically Sony has made the game have to few players harvest.

Another part of the poison is the lack of new or casual players. Basically the player base has matured and everyone is in the role they want. This leads to a problem. Absolutly no-one needs or wants to do low level stuff anymore. Recently a creature started dropping a very high quality resource needed for docs. The offered prices were insane. The take up non-existent. Why? The creature is extremely low level meaning no xp and little meat per kill and zero challenge. New players could have made their fortune but there weren't any around.

The simple problem is this. There is a mission type, killing humans on dantooine, wich pays so much so easily that money is no object. Far easier to grind missions solo buffed with some cheap armour then gather resources to increase supply and therefore drive prices down.

SWG also had another element. The hidden job of Jedi. Recently the path to gaining jedi has changed but the change has created more story but has increased the poison. Before each character had a hidden list of jobs you needed to master. Master them and you could create a new character on the same server that was a jedi.

This saw a lot of people grinding jobs they were not intrested in player BUT at least people were constantly shifting jobs and there was some movement. Even the most dedicacted holo/jedi grinder would be a doctor a medic a ranger etc for a while.

Now this is gone. Now you need to just get all the badges (for exploring) and then get an awfull lot of combat xp. An insane amount. A truly giganticlly insane amount of XP. Each combat type has its own XP pool wich is capped. What is the best way to grind jedi? Get two master combat jobs. First get one combat type maxed out on XP then the other, this will also fillout your generic combat xp, convert it to jedi xp and repeat.

Now all kinds of missions give XP BUT certain missions just make better sense. Your weapons and

Re:A word of warning to those thinking of buying

[Anonymous Coward]

"Sad but when an MMO goes solo its death can't be far away."

Asheron's Call 1 caters to the solo player, yet after 5 years of being online, it has a dedicated player base.