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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.
As long as you can shoot Ewoks like in "Star Wars: Battlefront", I'm in for this one! Wonder if they will have those shrapnel-shooting Corellian elite blasters that easily turn Gungan ears to tatters.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
From what I've read, JTL sounds like a good game and it may be enough to convince me to finally buy SWG and this expansion. Also, there is a review on Gamespot as well: http://www.gamespot.com/pc/rpg/starwarsgalaxiesjum ptolightspeed/review.html
SIGFAULT
from the newbie review - "Does the air force require its pilots to buy their own F-18s?"
I guess that's because from independance day on every fighter jet in every film is an F-18 no matter what branch of the military is involved.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
SWG has been floundering since their release. Many players felt they were paying for beta accounts. Then EVE Online came into the picture and started absorbing their playerbase. It'll be interesting to find out if this new expansion is enough to pull SWG out of the gutter.
**insert favorite profound quotation here**
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.
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
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
I was in the early phases of the JTL Beta. After a few weeks of testing I found it so buggy, and more importantly, so boring and badly implemented, that I stopped testing. So did a lot of other testers. They had to send out bulk E-mails to testers, begging us to come back, because their test population, especially veteran testers like me, had dwindled so much.
The gameplay of JTL is so mind numbingly bad that it is a major turn off. I used to lead a 120+ member guild in SWG until I started testing JTL. The total suckiness of JTL has decimated server population, and veteran players are leaving in droves for EQ2 and WoW. Luckily, I am moving over to WoW (Beta is great, game is real polished) with some mates from my SWG server.
1) Can you fly your own ship from planet to planet and forget the reliance on other forms of transportation? I should be able to at least travel to nearby planets, especially if I have a cargo class ship.
2) Can I fly from shuttle port, or from location to location on the same planet? If I have my own ship, I should be able to travel around REALLy fast, and for free since I have a ship.
3) Am I only limited to just flying up into the immediate space and fighting? What else is there to do besides fighting? Can I board another ship? Walk around in ships?
1. I have a medium-sized Hutt ship. I can travel between planets as it has hyperspace. I think most ships that aren't your starter (newb) ship have hyperspace capability. When you are in your ship hit the H key to toggle the Hyperspace window.
2. You can go from the starport to space. Fly back into the space station and go to a different starport on the planet. You may not travel "overland" in your ship so to say.
3. The veteran SoroSuub ship (Lando's Lady Luck style) is a multi-player ship. There is a rumor of guilds being able to buy capital ships later on. From what I can tell 'space' for each planet is about the same size as the planet but has the x,y,z coords instead of just the 2. Supposedly you can dock with other ships, I haven't been able to pull this off, I may not be a high enough level yet.
( o ) one could say I'm rather baked
JTL does have multiplay space combat,but its such a ass backwards system where tie fighter equped players can be on the Rebel forces and vis versa that it make for some interesteing gameplay. But Im with you guys if I dont want to be doing land based missions, then its the fault of the developers to force me to to make money. I also agree with his problems with the Rebel and Imperial forces.... a much better idea might have to make it a glory thing and to have the better ships be given to you as you rise up the ranks