SWG Combat Upgrade Final Details

lunatick writes "After a year and a half in the making, details for the fabled Combat Upgrade for Star Wars Galaxies are posted to the message boards. It is being met with cheers, boo's and a certain amount of skepticism. Can the game truly survive such a massive reconstruction almost 2 years into live?" From the post: "The Combat Upgrade focuses on the entire spectrum of the combat experience, combat-related professions, their special abilities, and all of the weapons and types of armor in the game. Choices players make about each of these elements will be more intuitive and be significantly more impactful in the new system. Individual profession abilities and attributes, terrain and environmental elements will take on more consequence, making combat more engaging and fun."

Comments

looks kinda promising

[MuNansen]

First off, I'll start by saying my opinion that most of SWG's problems are no fault of the developers, but instead the fault of deciding to do an MMORPG in the Star Wars universe in the first place. All the fighting in Star Wars is either with vehicles, blasters, or lightsabers. That's it. Doesn't allow for much variety in professions/classes. SWG has plenty of professions, but they're really forced variety, and it deludes the usefulness of each profession just for the goal of having plenty of professions. I would've preferred they'd done Planetside in the SW universe. Can you imagine that?! Wow. Anyways, the CU looks promising. For combat it's really a "wait-and-see" standpoint, but healing-wise it looks very good. Although I enjoy crafting, crafting for Docs and CMs was so expensive that it was very prohibitive, with Docs and CMs really not having many options for income. I think SWG is a great game with some big problems, so hopefully the CU will fix or reduce the problems. The ground combat was really the only thing keeping me away. The JtL expansion is truly amazing.

Re:looks kinda promising

[miu]

The problem was that anything different was met with howls of derision and demands for nerfs. Creature handlers went from being ridiculously overpowered to nearly completely worthless, Bounty Hunters went from being an elite class that was actually fairly interesting to being a "dabbler" class that people took a single track in so they could be a TKM and hunt jedi, commando, combat medic, ranged combat in general was reworked and made weaker over and over till you had nothing left but: buff bots, crafters, melee monsters and jedi. The other options still existed, but only someone with ridiculously good gear (often since made unavailable for new players) could make it work.

Absolutely someone at SOE dropped the ball, but I really blame marketing much more than I blame the development team - they had a design vision of a builder world and player generated content that was actually moving in the right direction, then someone decided that the "elder game" had to be jedi because that is part of the brand and the game fell apart.