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SWG Timeline Moves Forward
Rumours have been working their way through the Star Wars Galaxies boards about the possibility that the timelines of events will be moved forward past the current "post-New Hope, pre-Empire" point. Darniaq writes on this possibility, and links to a post on the boards where the Community Manager confirms this development. Unfortunately, the posts have already been removed. Fortunately, an individual at Sony Online Entertainment was able to confirm with LucasArts that there are plans to make this change to the game. Here's hoping the timeline change will be a breath of fresh air for the beleaguered game.
Anyone want to bet that they still won't fix outstanding game bugs before new expansions come out?
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
What with all the news over the "New Game Enhancement" (or whatever they call it), I figured I'd download the demo and give it a try. Here's my experience:
1) The tutorial is wrong. This game has been around, what, 2.5 years now and even the TUTORIAL has bugs in it. To be specific, when piloting a spaceship, the tutorial says that the mouse controls the ship's movements when not in pointer mode. What it doesn't mention is the rather important fact that if you have a joystick plugged in, the mouse doesn't do SQUAT, only the joystick does. So despite the game knowing I had a joystick plugged in, the tutorial was giving me the wrong controls, lying to me. I was stuck in my little ship outside of the training base for about two hours before it occured to me to try the dusty old Logitech joystick hidden behind my monitor. And to make things worse, while you're stuck here, you can't put in a ticket for the help system because of (I presume) another bug where the Help button doesn't work.
2) During the non-ship sections, my framerate slowed to 1 FPS twice for no apparent reason, and I had to re-log to fix it both times. (The second time, I actually died because some NPC shot at me while the framerate was screwy, and I didn't even know it until I logged back in.
3) Even after I was done being stuck in my starship, I couldn't figure out how to open a support ticket for the above two items. I found where the game listed open tickets, so I know it's possible, but I couldn't find how to make a new one.
4) The game is generally crude, ignoring the bugs. The creatures didn't have death animations, instead just going from standing to being dead in 1 frame. Many items had no visual appearance, so they appeared as a huge featureless cube around my character. There were (get this) clipping errors in the *pre-rendered* videos describing the classes! If you're pre-rendering the movie, pick a camera angle that won't show obvious clipping errors!
Anyway. The game is losing players because it's crap. Other than the Star Wars brand, I have no clue why anybody started playing it in the first place. I used exactly four hours of my 10-day demo before giving up for life.
Comment of the year
...if they played it out in the game, rather than arbitrarily advance it all at once. I think I'd enjoy enlisting in the big movie battles and playing them out.
Since no-one seems to care about this, I may as well pass on an off-topic question... if the time setting is post-New Hope, how is it that people are able to play Jedi? Are there no Jedi in SWG? I thought for sure I had read about characters being Padawans and Knights.
In the former profession system, you got to be able to get a Jedi character by mastering professions, there was 30+ some professions so mastering them was no easy matter. Thus started the hologrind. Which made the economy in SWG go boom because everyone was grinding things out, which meant they were going through weapons, armor, in the combat professions, and when they were mastering crafting professions they had to make things which require vast amounts of specific resources. Then they added the force quest, which made it an entire different task to become a Jedi, you did a very long quest for it that would take many weeks. Now with the NGE they gave everyone the ability to be Jedi. Before the Jedi were an alpha class they were extremely strong, now they are on par with every other "iconic" profession. Its easier to balance and equalize 9 professions then the 30+ professions they had.
The thing is, being Star Wars, and the Star Wars franchise, of course the customers for the most part would definitely want to play Jedi at some point.
So yeah, you can play a Jedi when there should be no Jedi running around.
If you think about it, its a hard thing to create a MMORPG based on Star Wars. All of the movies happen over a couple of fictional years, people die and the things drastically change. And to concentrate all of that history on one specific timeline point is just silly, because some people would want to play Before A New Hope, Some before Empire Strikes Back, some after Empire Strikes Back, and some After Return of the Jedi. And who wouldn't want to take part in the major battles. There is plenty of stuff to work with because of the extended universe with the books.
The thing with the Jedi in the game though? I think the best defense for that is the Greedo defense, shoot first ask questions later.
If what you are reading sounds funny, or sarcastic, lame, or stupid
it is because it is supposed to be. just laugh
at the rate things are going, it might be possible to do that...but not for atleast another 5-10 years.
there are some games that keep inching closer to the 100 player mark but none of them can manage to stay up long enough for it to fully work (either the games owner shuts it down cause it's a hacked server or the server just crashes from the load).
if anything consoles would be the first place that it could happen, since everyone would have the exact same setup (seeing as it would be an MMORPG everyone would have a HDD) so developers could make it for that one setup, then for the connection would be the only problem (but that's where the 5-10 year thing comes in).
your idea is interesting though, I know a war game would probably get the go ahead first (Battlefeild 3 possibly) but having a game where you really are a part of something would be great.
I used to play Star Wars Galaxies years ago (around the time the space ship expansion was coming out), I was on like week 2 or 3 of paying for it, killing my 300th rat thing when I realized I wasn't part of the universe in anyway what-so-ever, I wasn't making an impact, I wasn't getting any praise for what I was doing. It just seemed so boring, you had to level up fo weeks only to find out you had to level up even more before you got a mission of any importance (I joined the empire and it was always fetch quests with the occasional "Stop these people" quest) it just seemed pointless to fight the same damn thing, wait for hours on end to get a buff just so I could survive 10 feet out of the damn city, so I lost intrest in it and just gave up.
I moved on to City of Heros & City of villians cause I actually felt like I was a part of something, but had to quit it cause I just didn't have the time or money.
Disclaimer: I'm not that representative as a MMO player, and in fact I'll take a good SP RPG instead any day.
Still, on a scale of "pretty cool at least at low levels" to "its _only_ merit is the franchise name", WoW would be at the first end, SWG seemed _the_ poster child for the latter.
SWG, after all this time at it, has pretty much any problem you can imagine.
E.g., design problems, such as classes whose only source of income is hoping that someone would drop by and give them a tip. (Try making any money as a male entertainer, then tell me how it feels.)
E.g., underhanded custommer support, such as banning everyone who's been tipped with duped money. (Never mind that they can't even refuse a tip or know it's been with duped money.)
E.g., technical problems (a.k.a., bugs), such as seemingly having _massive_ lag even on a 50ms connection. Sometimes enemies you've just killed would hang around and seemingly talk to each other for another ten seconds or more. Sometimes they'd rise from the dead and melee you, then fall over dead again. Sometimes a whole herd of low level animals you've killed and already skinned when farming for resources, would remember "oh, wait, we were supposed to fight back" and give you literally a death by a thousand cuts. (Never underestimate the damage a tattooine chicken can do if 5 minutes worth of a whole herd is applied in a 1 second burst, not leaving you any time to heal or run or whatever.)
Etc. That's just scratching the tip of the proverbial iceberg.
And yes, changes which swing between bad, worse and horrible. And let's make up for it by giving some free in-game money to stimulate people to buy the latest expansion pack. (You get a free vehicle which happens to be the best vehicle in the game, and sells for over three million credits without even trying too hard.) Says a lot when an expansion pack's main merit is that it's a veiled and more socially acceptable way to buy gold.
In fact, the only game that sucked more, and even then at launch, was AO. You can read the AO review on Something Awful and rest assured it's entirely accurate. I can personally testify that all the problems described there were true, plus a bunch of others.
So does anyone still give a fuck about SWG, other than purely for franchise sake? If you took away its Star Wars license, it would shrivel and die like the piece of junk it is. So does anyone really give a damn if they move the timeline forwards, backwards or sideways? I'd assume that even out of the minority of desperate SW nerds who stay there just because it lets them dress like a jedi, the majority would be just as happy in any timeline as long as it has lightsabers and skimpy cantina-dancer outfits.
(I mean, obviously, other than Raph Koster, who uses the glory of having majorly fucked-up design for _two_ MMOs as an excuse to give interviews about good game design all over the place.)
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
While this problem is trivial by itself (just wait for the game to completely download) that is exists at all just goes to show Sony has mismanaged the game to an extent that can not be believed only experienced.
To clarify, the demo is a partial download of the full game. Why? Because probably it would take far to long to download the whole thing. The problem is that for some reason SOE didn't include ALL the loot items in the demo download. Nor did they restrict the loot you get in the demo. CUE you getting items with no 3d model attached.
They should either just have given you all the models OR restricted demo users from getting loot items. Neither are complex to do. That SOE didn't manage or perhaps didn't even think about it tells you everything you need to know.
The demo is however far worse then this. At the start it has the typical tutorial were you are run through the game. Lets just say that it is bugged and you can easily get stuck if you make the mistake of running ahead of the instructions. The instructions are SLOW.
Another problem is that the SWG graphics engine has never been the fastest. Granted it has to do a lot more work then say a Doom 3 or Half-Life 2 engine. YES really. All these games do is render big enviroments with maybe half a dozen clones. SWG has to render far larger areas with easily 2-3 dozen unique individuals with their own body build they own clothes and equipment. Since SWG allows so much diversity in avatars it pays for it in graphical performance.
However the NGE adds to this problem by having the beginner areas designed by a packrat. The early levels are overstuffed with every item ever found in the game and trust me there are a lot. It makes the space station your on crawl at times as there are easily 200 or more items on screen and over a dozen NPC's. It is lag city.
Then there is the fact that the game has had quests bolted on. The game was never about quests, it doesn't support it and the few quests that were in it were boring and buggy. Now it is all about them and oddly enough they are even worse then before. Bugged, unclear, illogical, lame, boring.
SWG had something. It was a complex deep open-ended sandbox wich had not just a player run economy but a player run content system as well. Simply put, SWG was nice if you were in good guild or had lots of friends. SWG was other people.
The NGE is an attempt to give more single player content and it just doesn't work.
The worst change? You can no longer mix and match characters. Before you could be a killer and a dancer. Now you are just a dancer. Do you really want to spend all your time dancing? You won't have any choice, your combat skills can never improve if you choose entertainer. Oh and if your new. Well good luck. Existing players who convert to entertainer attain instant max level. Good luck getting the millions of points of needed XP.
By all means do what the parent did and download the demo. It is only a few gigabyte and you will be able to see for yourselve how it is. Do not think bugs are going to be fixed. SOE was finally arriving at a state were some of the longest lasting bugs were getting fixed and then they started with the combat upgrade wich reintrocuded many of the old bugs and now the NGE wich adds a complete new layer of bugs.
What little promise SWG had has been slaughtered by the NGE. It really is that bad. If you manage to play without it it can still be fun with the right friends but more and more it is inspite of SOE efforts then because of it.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
This makes a huge difference. For many SOE games are the only MMO games available appart from the fee free Guild Wars.
But apart from Sony being the only MMO company willing to take my money, SWG was the most open and free of the games out there at the time.
It wasn't D&D and while bugged it wasn't as crappy as Anarchy Online. It also had rancors and before the doc buffs arrived they were actually scary.
But when you first started the game it showed a lot of promise by actually allowing you to design your own character. You could easily create a very balanced character dabbling in all the proffesions in the game. Use the pistol you made youreselve from materials you gathered to shoot a critter then switch to melee once it close heal yourselve, rip the beastie apart for its skin meat or bones and then dance your worries away.
Mid level you had to make some choices, specialise and give up certain jobs OR just not be able to move on.
It was the end level that was the bitch that killed SWG. You either had to give up all the freedom of making your own character OR just resign yourselve from never being able to do the high level stuff unless you found a large group willing to drag you along.
SOE in its infinite wisdom made all new content exist of dungeons that only the leetest combat specced characters could complete. Had a sideline in say Ranger? Scout? Entertainer? Beast Handler? Crafter? Bio-Engineering? Useless mate. Only non combat characters that were of use in say the corvette or death watch bunker were the doctors as they could revive the dead.
SWG had something but sadly it was ruined when you moved on from the fun midlevels when Dathomir was a place of nightmares to the end game when you were engaging in 20 minute slap fests with 1million hitpoint enemies.
The sad thing? In a way the Death Watch Bunker and Corvette missions were exactly what people on the forums had been asking for. SOE has a lot to answer for but so have the players themselves. If you doc buffed, if you solo grouped, if you spin-attacked a rancor lair, if you armor holed, if you stacked resists THEN you are one of the people that killed SWG. I did it myself and know that. SWG never had a chance. SOE and the players raped it up the ass and then called it a whore.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.