Tipa has an article over on West Karana about getting back into EQ, at least a bit back into it. I’m going to say the same thing about another Red-Headed Stepchild, and that is Star Wars Galaxies. As we all know, SOE has become the St. Jude (the patron saint of lost causes) of the MMO industry. Their MMO assortment includes several games, most of which were either considered disappointments at launch or have become long in the tooth. I won’t run through the gory details because, well, you all know about it already.
Star Wars Galaxies is one of those. It shipped too early in most people’s estimation. It was way too large a world for hand-crafted content so there was little of it to be found. There was dynamically created content (i.e. cookie-cutter missions) and that was how you gained experience as an adventurer. There were also 30 classes. Well, not classes because the game was skill-based and not level-based. The game was a great deal of fun as a sandbox but deeply flawed as a main stream MMO.
About a year into the life of the game SOE issued the Combat Upgrade (CU.) In a lot of gamer’s estimation, this ruined the game for them. A lot of us adapted and kept playing. It changed the way you played, and narrowed the choices for equipment and munitions by your skills. It also introduced the concept of Combat Levels, or CL. It was also around this time that they also decided to allow anyone determined enough to do so to basically grind your way to Jedi. Before this, there was a super sekrit set of things you could say or do that might unlock a Jedi slot in your character selector. Once the Jedi Grind was introduced, it led to people doing just that, and it was no long Star Wars Galaxies, but Star Wars Jedi Race. A lot of us quit then when the content was trivialized or made obsolete by this change in design philosophy.
Then in 2005, SOE made a decision that they had to stop the bleeding of people leaving the game and introduced the New Game Enhancement, or NGE. This took the game from being a skills-based game to being a class based game. There were now 9 “Iconic” classes that you could choose from and the old skill tree was gonzo. This happened two days after they launched an expansion. People logged in and were asked to choose a class. It was a traumatic experience to have the game you had invested lots of effort into just fundamentally changed.
People were furious and quit the game in droves. I have personally lambasted them on every available occasion about this decision as well. The change was designed to attract new users to the game and to introduce a kinder, friendlier game to the general gaming public. What it did was alienate the user base and elicit bad will.
So far you probably aren’t that tempted to try SWG, based on this history. But I’d encourage you to give it a second look.
In spite of the fact that the timing and the decision to change to the NGE was disastrous, since that time they have continued to refine and tweak the game. Tarkheena and I took it up last week and we’re really enjoying the game play. There seems to be much more hand-crafted content in the game. While they are not planning an expansion for the game, there are regular updates to the game’s mechanics and content.
We have some houses set up on Corelia and have rolled up some characters and started playing just about every night and I’m finding the game to be as enjoyable as anything out there. There are annoyances in this game as there are in every game. I’d challenge you to give it a try. There is a free 14- day trial available that would allow you to get your feet wet in the game and see what you think. If you aren’t trying it for the first time and you are a returning veteran of the GCW, then I can’t recommend this Returning Veteran’s Guide highly enough. This goes a long way toward making you feel more comforatable and familiar with the game.
The quests are fun, the crafting that you remember is still mostly the same, although somewhat simplified. The character creator allows you to make truly unique characters, and the recent introduction of appearance armor really helps there too. If you are a roleplayer, I can’t think of another mainstream MMO that is a better place. The rich variety of emotes, character control, itemization, structures and their content, are now augmented by “Storytelling” tools that allow you to basically make your own custom in-game events.
If you are interested in joining us, roll up a character on Chilastra and shoot me a note here, or at genda at thegrouchygamer dot com and let us know. You’ll be welcome at our (richly decorated) house on Corellia.
I’d love to get a regular hunting party together. Any takers?
Talk about uphill battles!
Hard enough getting an EQ group together
Preach it, Brother!
I’ve been reveling in the emotes ever since I went back last November. /scare – /eek – /rofl – the list is endless. And of course, for the boys, /airguitar
I’m having a blast with the new beastmaster stuff. Sure, it’s not MCH/MBE, and in some ways it’s oddly soulless now (which is a criticism I could apply to the game in general – it may be easier, but it doesn’t have the richness of atmosphere it used to have) — but it’s still fun. The pet engineering side is a vast improvement, to me anyway, if you don’t include the ridiculously low chances for mutations. That BM/BE thing is in fact why I set up on TCP and not a live server – more char slots and less inflated economy. It gets kinda lonely… but it’s still fun, and I’m used to putzing about by myself.
Anyhow, glad you guys are having fun.
I appreciate you bringing up SWG. I missed it when it was new, and today I can say I wish I didn’t.
I signed up for the 14 day trial immediately after you post. I played to level 24 or something now. Here’s my 2 cents:
It doesn’t meet today’s standards. And I don’t mean WoW.
Basically, I am impressed to see how _masive_ SWG is, given its age. I appreciate the sandbox approach, even if it has been diluted a lot after the NGE.
Still, there is so much that’s simply not working:
Mob AI ist simply beyond horrible. You can’t call that AI. It looks like a 5 line LUA script. You can waltz through hordes of enemies. Enemies realize you based on either randomness or other horrible factors. There’s virtually no collision detection – enemies shoot and even follow you through walls. The respawn is strange, to say the least. Stupid mobs don’t respawn for ages, others almost immediately rise from the corpse of their defeated ancestors (making for example access to a nearby terminal virtually impossible).
You can run up vertical walls. Enemy ranking is strange (not that’s it better in Vanguard, anyway
sometimes. Sometimes mobs one level higher give you a good mashup, sometimes 2 or 3 levels above are no problem [not talking of individual mobs, but mob types].
Space combat is impossible with mouse by default, and even after intense configuration it remains hard. The interface for both modes ist very, very basic. (OTOH, I do like that it’s vastly configurabe, although I don’t enjoy the defaults much)
Questing up to level 20 has been boring grind. There were some nice ideas, but execution suffered. I can imagine socializing might have been quite some fun when popoulation was a lot higher. Today you see vast stretches of houses nobody frequents anymore.
I can’t say anything about late game content, but the massive technical flaws will turn me away from this game. I don’t really expect that much. I don’t need graphics only a $4000 rig can power. I’m okay wth SWG’s graphics. I don’t need the latest and greatest stuff. But I won’t cope with enemies that run/shoot through walls and don’t realize me when I stand on their toes. That’s bad today, and it was bad ten years ago.
It actually sad to see this game, because I can imagine how great it could have been. To make the comparison again: it could have been a freakin’ lot better that Vanguard could ever aspire. But it just didn’t, and although I am desperately seeking a nice, sandboxy” MMORPG, this isn’t the one.
You’re right, Iegmig – SWG is probably a lot more fun to go back to than it is to start, right now. That’s a shame, but it’s true of a lot of the older MMOs out there. And as regards UIs… I pray daily that sometime, somewhere (preferably this century) a company is going to learn that a GOOD customisable UI, rather than just a functional one, is a real boon to a game. I’m trying to think of the last MMO I played without UI mods… and can’t. I even played AC with mods to do what the basic UI wouildn’t (like sort stuff, or put stuff into specific bags, etc). Hrmph.
My words exactly on he UI. For me, that’s the one thing Blizzard does really, really well. I bailed out of WoW after 3 months because I basically found it too easy to see through the money making scheme (not in-game money, but subscriber’s money). I mean, when I see through it, I want some real reward that makes me stay _nevertheless_, Anyway, I don’t think the extensible UI was really a clever move, but just the look&feel of it (the “factory” UI alone) shows utter polish. Probably everybody knows it lacks function as hell, but it feels smooth. A lot of work went into buttons, window frames, hover effects, even te sounds — and it shows. Look at LotRO’s UI, for example – it resembles SWG or Neverwinter Nights more than anything else. It simply looks poor. And that, to me, somehow means “We don’t really care about you. You’re just a subscriber.” But it’s probably just me
I think it mostly means “we give the UI a really low priority among the million other things a game needs that we have neither the time nor the money for aieeee /headlesschickenmode”
And… they may be right. However, I’m with you on this one — a bad UI won’t usually prevent me from playing a game, but it’s one of the things that weighs on the side of “yeah, time to quit” when that time rolls around.
The LOTRO UI was (is?) awful, but I haven’t seen it since beta. The Vanguard UI was awful. The EQ2 UI was pretty awful too but had some lovely mods. Way back when, the Horizons UI wasn’t too bad for the time. The DAOC UI was awful. The AC UI – well, it wasn’t even part of the 3D area, hah (ahh, the good old days). I wasn’t a huge fan of the WoW UI either — graphically it was very polished, yes, but in terms of ease of use or customisability it’s just as bad as all the others. Course with “allowed” mods out there, why bother making a decent default?
My number one beef with most of the modern-game UIs is that they are too bloody huge. The button bars are huge. The windows are huge. The char / group indicator thingies are huge… and yet the text you need to read, half the time, is tiny. (God forbid you play in high rez.) Maybe I’m just getting old, but I’d like smaller, more compact UI elements and larger, more readable (or, novel idea, scalable) text. /hobbles off with walker
(Sorry Genda, this is getting slightly hijacked. Will attempt more subject restraint.)
Maybe one of you would like to write an article about what makes a good UI for the blog? That might be interesting.
/deerinheadlights
I’d actually like to do that since I have quite a detailled opinion about that – but regarding the fact it won’t change a single thing it seems like an awful waste of time. Unless you’re lead designer responsible for the UI of a game (and you have good argumentation skills which I’d presonally like to claim ^_^), an essay like that will simply get lost in blog space. Which basically means you lose like three hours of your lifetime for nothing.
Oh, BTW, I have seen the LotRO UI since beta – there was virtually no change ;P
@Ysharros
Chicken!
If you’re still on Chilastra, I created a couple characters in the free trial: Soipock (a mon calamari smuggler) and Saoswalo (a zabrak jedi-soon-to-be-sith). I forget the last names…. Oeded might be the zabrak’s.
The space game is fun. I haven’t gotten far, but I’m really looking forward to tweaking my ship with parts. The controls would feel tighter on a console controller, I think, but they’re good enough.
No creature handlers? The guide you cite says there are, but creature handling isn’t offered at the start and I have no idea how to get into it. That was my favorite thing to do back in the old days… explore exotic wilds and capture bizarre animals.
So far, I think I’ll love the free trial, but probably won’t buy the game. I’ve barely tapped the changes made. One thing I can tell immediately is that this game is barren compared to what the server densities used to be.