Review of Star Wars: Galaxies: MMO Video Game Gone Wrong

Let me begin by saying that the game is -By Far- better than when I left the game in January. However, I have to say that the game still isn't better than it was in March of '05, not by a long shot.

The game has far more bugs than it ever did in the "Classic" or "Pre-CU" form, not only that, but the bugs are far more noticeable than they were then.

What are the major things wrong with the game at this point?

The Interface:

Very subpar on design, more difficult than the original to maneuver and understand. Buggy as all get out, some windows just simply disappear off the side of the game forcing a UI reset.

Customization is very limited. Are the Developers deliberately trying to force the way they like to see their game laid out on thousands of people? They have made the interface more customizable in recent months, but it simply isn't enough. WOW's interface has the best customization options of any game I've ever played. Perhaps SOE should take some notes on that aspect of WOW instead of the other blatant ones they've taken. [for the record I don't play WoW, I was in Beta, played the trial and went in on 2 "buddy passes"]

The game curser comes free of the game forcing you to flip control styles to regain control. Getting stuck in combat with inanimate objects is still a problem that sometimes forces a relog.

The Control set:

This is the part that really angers a lot of players, new and old alike. The attempt to force people to use the "FPS" style control set from the "NGE" is very obvious. The controls are lack luster, counter-intuitive and buggy. They claim to have had a PHD work on the controls for the NGE, if that's true then they got ripped off, the controls are very similar to every other game on the market. Another example of a good idea thrown out in order to follow instead of lead.

Again there's no real customization that works well. How about just simply giving the choice to use the original control scheme? They have one named to imply that it's the original control scheme, however it isn't even close, not to mention that in order to get the control scheme back to the true original form still takes a monumental amount of handpicked customization. And when you're done with all of the handpicked customization, the controls still don't work properly.

Can't they do any better?

The Content:

While there has always been discontent over the amount, or lack thereof, of content in Star Wars: Galaxies, the game has hit a true low in high end content. When I first started to play Galaxies in 2004 there were enough people playing that a group could easily "roll their own" content. While three expansions have been added to SWG in the 3 years of its release "Jump to Lightspeed, "Rage of the Wookiee's " and "Trials of Obi-wan" the fun was fleeting . Players continually asked for a PVP combat planet and it was never delivered. Instead the developers gave a PVP city on one of the least used planets. With fewer and fewer people subscribing, there's simply not much to do. The ever increasing emptiness of the SWG online world makes what content there is in the game not very fun. Without a mass increase in subscribers or a server merger I cannot see how any of the content, even if there was an abundance, can be fun.

Barren Waste Land:

Quite honestly the game world is a barren waste land at this time. Player cities that once housed hundreds of thousands of characters sit as a reminder of how loved the game once was. Players spent countless hours collectively loving, nurturing and decorating these virtual cities. Sadly only a spars population remains to enjoy the talent put forth in the creation. In revisiting the player city that I helped create on the Chilastra server, I only perhaps saw one other person go through the city in the 21 days I was playing the trial. This city once housed one of the top player malls on the server with 30 npc vendors and over 10,000 player products for sale.

The Simplification:

While I can agree that there was a learning curve to the original SWG game play, it was not "That" difficult to learn [it was one of my very first MMO's and I learned it just fine, as did hundreds of thousands of other devoted players]. Do the Developers really think that the paying customers are morons that require an over simplified over guided tour? The attempt to try, in vain, to get the World of Warcraft player base is embarrassing. The thought I'd like to put forth to SOE is that "Leaders do not follow" think about that statement. If SOE had tried to lead the way in the MMO industry instead of following they could have had the product that the WoW populace would have been looking for when they got bored of the simplicity, and that is an inevitability.

Items:

I'd have to estimate that close to 50% of the player made items either don't work or have absolutely no purpose in the game. This leaves players that would like to pursue crafting left wondering why they even have the professions in the game and why they as a player bother to waste their time on something that obviously isn't cared for. The fix in this case is a lot easier than with other problems, simply fix the things that don't work and give purpose to the things left neglected for far too long. They have a "Trader Revamp" planed, I'll believe it when I see it.

The Problems with Classic SWG

Impossible to Balance:

Completely untrue. If the developers had spent the same amount of effort on balancing the original game as they have over the last year attempting to reinvent the game, the game would be fantastic. Did they deliberately tank the game in order to make an attempt to justify changing it into what we have today?

I'd be more than happy to debate any mechanic aspect of the classic SWG that the developers would like to claim as "hopelessly un-fixable". Buffs, Armor, Weapons, and class defense and damage were all easily fixable by changing the formula that governed those systems and would only really require that they actually know how to use a simple tool...the calculator. Case in point, Buffs, I made the recommendation to change buffs from a hard set amount to a percentage of the stat being buffed before the CU came out. This would have made it easy to control the absolute maximum stat. Armor only needed the maximum percentage reduced from 90% to more like 50%-60% to bring it in line.

The developers have said many times that the game was too difficult to continue development in the original form. Buy yet they redesigned the game twice in a short time span. The claim that they could not balance 32 professions is an obvious misrepresentation. Not only was it possible to balance the professions, as almost half of the professions weren't even combat professions, it would have taken much less effort than a complete redesign of the game [NGE] and one half baked effort at a balance pass [the CU].

The "Alpha" Class Misnomer:

The making of Jedi as a starting class was based on a claim that "Alpha" classes don't work in games and that it was a huge failure. Then why was it so popular? The other claim is that everyone had figured out how to achieve the secret method by which to obtain Jedi, so all people would eventually be a Jedi anyway.

If "Alpha" classes were such a failure, then why have they been put back in the game in the form of the GCW rank system? Clearly with the difficulty of gaining the rank of General and the new skills and equipment available at that rank, General will be somewhat of an "Alpha". The Rank decay is eerily similar to the Jedi death penalty system ,without the death part. On the "everyone had figured out the path to Jedi" argument, the only reason that people figured it out quickly is because you gave them the path via "Holocrons" creating a situation where tens of thousands of people did nothing but "grind" professions in order to gain Jedi. Then you took out most of the penalties of having the alpha Jedi, hmm, wonder why it didn't work anymore? A dynamic system for attaining Jedi could have worked, or perhaps a mix of population caps and the permadeath system. Perhaps the answer was to add more alpha classes. In any case the abundance of Jedi is neither "Iconic" nor is it "starwarsy". People expect that when they play a Jedi that they will be playing a powerful hero or nemesis, sadly that feeling doesn't exist.

Not Looking Back:

The developers claim that there's no possibility that Classic servers will ever return. My guess is that they know that a vast majority of players of SWG would never play the NGE version of the game given a choice. Quite simply there's a zero percent chance that the NGE can ever win toe-to-toe verses the classic version and placing a Chevette next to a Corvette would make that obvious.

The Classic [Pre-Cu] game is coming back, whether SOE does it or not. There's several Emulators in varying stages of development as I write this. SOE has the unique advantage of putting Classic servers up as a subscription service gaining millions of dollars in doing so, not to mention saving some face with the entire MMO community. Let's check the math

Lets assume that the Classic version gathered 100,000 players, an easy goal for something so blatantly popular.

14.95X100,000= 1,495,000 per month X12= 17,940,000 per year. That's almost 18 million per year! Let me repeat -18 MILLION U.S. DOLLARS PER YEAR-for simply not only saying "sorry" but actually doing something to prove that you are in fact "sorry".

An Alternative:

Why not just release the classic game under a different name that is much less restricted by license? It frankly doesn't have to be a Star Wars MMO, it was a good game and that's much more important. Change the skins and make a niche game, in other words, stop chasing the Golden Calf.

In Closing

Avoid the NGE version of Star Wars: Galaxies, it's simply a waste of money. The lack luster attempt at making the love child of "Battlefront" and "World of Warcraft" doesn't work. The lack of a viable player base makes the game boring and tells the true tale of how good this game really isn't.

Don't believe me? Try it for yourself http://starwarsgalaxies.station.sony.com/