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Thread: Unlimited Potential for failure
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jawa-warrior
Sat Nov 06, 2004 12:27 pm
#1
Today is the day to talk about what Star Wars Galaxies could have been ... if it was a great game.
I will not cover every concern of mine in this thread, but i will cover a few missing elements that lessen the awe of the SWG experience. Oh, and I'll gripe about a few details.
The game's focus is living the Star Wars movies.. then why can't I do most things that are in the movies? (For explaination look below.. I will go more into detail farther through the post)
A WARNING to people without ADD: This post jumps all over the place
Where's Hoth? You dare to release a Star Wars galaxy without Hoth, but now you forgot it in the expansion? How can you trip over that error without noticing it. Who wouldn't want to battle a snow monster or ride on a tauntaun? Oh yeah, we have those other creatures that look like tauntauns instead... I don't get it...
So much for speeding through endor shooting ewoks off your speeder. Still no ground vehicle weapons, and i guess you couldn't pick of ewoks anyway because they have like a million hit points for some odd reason. I don't remember them being that tough in the movies. Then again, they were a lot more resourceful in the movies such as throwing rocks, using log traps and that sort of thing rather than running up to you and hitting you. They must all be on a workout program.
At least you can have an AT-ST, those are really cool. Nope, they used to be until the developers realized that they were too strong. In the movies when AT-STs were walking throught the forest and everyone was running from the giant two-footed mechanical terrors it must have been because there was water on the other side of the forest and they were all really thirsty, because those mechanical things were kind flimsy.
Good job of making those things weak because nobody uses them anymore. You could just take them out of the game completely at this point and nobody would notice.
No wookie armor was a bad idea from the start, we figured that out when they couldn't survive without it. So you have to make freakishly huge headdresses that take up half my screen? Where the heck did that come from? I didn't see those in the concept art. I guess i wasn't looking close enough, or maybe too close so i thought those were mountains in the background. Thankfully the combat upgrade is being worked on at this time. Do i have to tell you that the wookie armor needs a lot of work? I'll give the guys working at SWG some credit.. at least they realize that the combat as a whole was a bad system. No game of this size to my knowledge has ever taken it on themselves to admit and fix a huge chunk of their game. Too bad they have to do that about 5 more times before this game will live up to many expectations.
What happened to cloning in space? When you die you are cloned to be the same person in SWG. What happened to that idea in space? My ship blows up and now all the sudden i'm not cloned, but I'm formulated out of thin space dust near a space station and my ship is too! I could be missing something cause i didn't read the JTL manual but something seems wrong.
Where did the star destroyers go? I used to look up into space and see these truly gigantic forms orbiting the planets but I finaly get up into space and they are gone. I know it's still around the halloween holdiay but I'd like a treat instead of a trick like most people give out.
It's funny cause when I watched the E3 videos way back in the day they showed charcacters running around with AT-ATs and flying their X-wings around Star Destroyers, those things really got my attention. I said to myself, “Wow, these guys know how to make a really cool game that I can't wait to play.” Then most of those cool scenes can't be done except in such rare cases that they aren't even worth hoping for.
Even if some cool scenes are unplayable for me, at least they made some scripted battles that i can watch. Check out your datapad and on certain planets you can see epic battles come to life right in front of your eyes. Go watch the gungans battle it out on naboo. When I get there, there are about 20 gungans standing around scratching their.. uhh... earflaps looking bored, definately not fighting with the other 20 npcs. I'm surprised i didn't see some small tables set up with teapots for a nice little teaparty cause they looked like they were getting along just fine. Maybe its because characters were allowed to build houses two meters away from the POI, so that screwed it up. I don't really care cause I'm not going to check out any other npc epic battles anytime soon. It would be really cool to see and even join in on some in space if they are working.
Lets go back into space to do some missions. Hey this isn't too shabby flying around and shooting stuff. Space looks really cool all colorful like on Star Trek, but don't remember seeing this in Star Wars movies before... Oh well on to my mission. The gameplay in space is truly fun. As a fan of the Wing Commander series growing up it was very easy for me to get in the role of a space pilot again.
Until i started getting good and getting better missions.. longer missions... excruciatingly long and dreadfully hard missions. After I spent over a million credtis upgrading my ship I was told to go and do a mission that I got almost all the way through after about an hour of playing, then die quickly after I'm overrun by about 20 enemy ships. Not only did they not tell my I should probably have a group of three or more players help me on this mission, but they also didn't tell me that after an hour of playing you will die and not be able to save the progress that you achieved. It's good to have a challenge every now and then, just let me be rewarded for completing 90% of the challenge and tell me when my million credits don't do jack for me in upgrades cause i will be bombared and die in like 2 seconds if I don't have my posse with me.
What's the first thing you think of when someone mentions Star Wars? Most likely it's Jedi. Why would this be? The star wars universe is massive in its entirety with all the races and planets built into one ongoing and truly immense saga, so why think of one little sect of people in this universe. It's the movies. The movies are what all people (ok, except maybe four) refer to when they talk about Star Wars. These movies follow the path of a handful of jedi through their lives. That's the major perspective of people playing SWG.
Now a massive Star Wars game comes along and in this massive game, just like the massive Star Wars movies, people are stuck on the idea of being one of a handful of people called Jedi. Why not, I mean, they can use the force and those cool light saber weapons. Why wouldn't you want to be a jedi.. especially since it says right on the Lucas Arts website, "allows players to live the Star Wars movies." Since we came to the conclusion that the movies were about Jedi then we will be Jedi.
What the heck is this kid talking about? You can be a jedi in the game! Duh. Yeah, it's easy to get your dream of being a jedi if you first get your character pimped out, which takes a couple months, do tons of quests, which takes a few more months, then grind to jedi status which will take you a few more months of spending every waking second of your free time to do given you are a steady stream of tax revenue in this country. Well you're right, you could only do it in that little of time if you didn't work forty hours a week and spent that time just playing SWG... but at least you're getting your moneys worth out of the game. Wait, if this game is taking every waking second out of your day and you feel like you are never getting your jedi experience you dreamed about until months and months later wouldn't that be a letdown?
Do i think that the whole jedi system is in ruin? No, i'm fine with the system. I also understand the Star Wars continuum, but do others? I'm sure a lot of people were truly letdown by the fact that they wouldn't be able to ever experience their dream in the SWG world due to time constraints. At least their jedi dream had been snuffed out in this massively multiplair world anyway. Go find another game that can fulfill your jedi dream. So that person goes out and buys Jedi Academy or K.o.t.O.R. to fulfill their jedi needs. I guess SWG wasn't for you, Star Wars fan.
Who I'm really talking about is the Star Wars fan turned gamer who isn't used to the whole MMO gaming experience where it is as much about the friends and conversation as it is about the game. MMOs are comprised of much more than what's on the surface, but if what's on the surface annoys and doesn't continue to entertain, the other factors of that MMO don't feel as fulfilling.
Wow I just spent way too much time talking about Jedi and I'm sure that subject didn't need any more talk but I'm done now. Good thing I moved this Jedi talk to the bottom of the post or else most of the people would have stopped reading it after the first couple paragraphs.
You see, it's not that SWG isn't fun, it's the fact that it had so much potential with a Star Wars themed universe that anything less than the most entertaining computer experience ever encountered is a letdown.
It might be that Star Wars was just too big of a realm for even SOE to undertake.
Disclaimer: My brain works in it's own separate world apart from most. If you didn't agree with anything I said that's ok because I said it, you didn't.
I will not cover every concern of mine in this thread, but i will cover a few missing elements that lessen the awe of the SWG experience. Oh, and I'll gripe about a few details.
The game's focus is living the Star Wars movies.. then why can't I do most things that are in the movies? (For explaination look below.. I will go more into detail farther through the post)
A WARNING to people without ADD: This post jumps all over the place
Where's Hoth? You dare to release a Star Wars galaxy without Hoth, but now you forgot it in the expansion? How can you trip over that error without noticing it. Who wouldn't want to battle a snow monster or ride on a tauntaun? Oh yeah, we have those other creatures that look like tauntauns instead... I don't get it...
So much for speeding through endor shooting ewoks off your speeder. Still no ground vehicle weapons, and i guess you couldn't pick of ewoks anyway because they have like a million hit points for some odd reason. I don't remember them being that tough in the movies. Then again, they were a lot more resourceful in the movies such as throwing rocks, using log traps and that sort of thing rather than running up to you and hitting you. They must all be on a workout program.
At least you can have an AT-ST, those are really cool. Nope, they used to be until the developers realized that they were too strong. In the movies when AT-STs were walking throught the forest and everyone was running from the giant two-footed mechanical terrors it must have been because there was water on the other side of the forest and they were all really thirsty, because those mechanical things were kind flimsy.
Good job of making those things weak because nobody uses them anymore. You could just take them out of the game completely at this point and nobody would notice.
No wookie armor was a bad idea from the start, we figured that out when they couldn't survive without it. So you have to make freakishly huge headdresses that take up half my screen? Where the heck did that come from? I didn't see those in the concept art. I guess i wasn't looking close enough, or maybe too close so i thought those were mountains in the background. Thankfully the combat upgrade is being worked on at this time. Do i have to tell you that the wookie armor needs a lot of work? I'll give the guys working at SWG some credit.. at least they realize that the combat as a whole was a bad system. No game of this size to my knowledge has ever taken it on themselves to admit and fix a huge chunk of their game. Too bad they have to do that about 5 more times before this game will live up to many expectations.
What happened to cloning in space? When you die you are cloned to be the same person in SWG. What happened to that idea in space? My ship blows up and now all the sudden i'm not cloned, but I'm formulated out of thin space dust near a space station and my ship is too! I could be missing something cause i didn't read the JTL manual but something seems wrong.
Where did the star destroyers go? I used to look up into space and see these truly gigantic forms orbiting the planets but I finaly get up into space and they are gone. I know it's still around the halloween holdiay but I'd like a treat instead of a trick like most people give out.
It's funny cause when I watched the E3 videos way back in the day they showed charcacters running around with AT-ATs and flying their X-wings around Star Destroyers, those things really got my attention. I said to myself, “Wow, these guys know how to make a really cool game that I can't wait to play.” Then most of those cool scenes can't be done except in such rare cases that they aren't even worth hoping for.
Even if some cool scenes are unplayable for me, at least they made some scripted battles that i can watch. Check out your datapad and on certain planets you can see epic battles come to life right in front of your eyes. Go watch the gungans battle it out on naboo. When I get there, there are about 20 gungans standing around scratching their.. uhh... earflaps looking bored, definately not fighting with the other 20 npcs. I'm surprised i didn't see some small tables set up with teapots for a nice little teaparty cause they looked like they were getting along just fine. Maybe its because characters were allowed to build houses two meters away from the POI, so that screwed it up. I don't really care cause I'm not going to check out any other npc epic battles anytime soon. It would be really cool to see and even join in on some in space if they are working.
Lets go back into space to do some missions. Hey this isn't too shabby flying around and shooting stuff. Space looks really cool all colorful like on Star Trek, but don't remember seeing this in Star Wars movies before... Oh well on to my mission. The gameplay in space is truly fun. As a fan of the Wing Commander series growing up it was very easy for me to get in the role of a space pilot again.
Until i started getting good and getting better missions.. longer missions... excruciatingly long and dreadfully hard missions. After I spent over a million credtis upgrading my ship I was told to go and do a mission that I got almost all the way through after about an hour of playing, then die quickly after I'm overrun by about 20 enemy ships. Not only did they not tell my I should probably have a group of three or more players help me on this mission, but they also didn't tell me that after an hour of playing you will die and not be able to save the progress that you achieved. It's good to have a challenge every now and then, just let me be rewarded for completing 90% of the challenge and tell me when my million credits don't do jack for me in upgrades cause i will be bombared and die in like 2 seconds if I don't have my posse with me.
What's the first thing you think of when someone mentions Star Wars? Most likely it's Jedi. Why would this be? The star wars universe is massive in its entirety with all the races and planets built into one ongoing and truly immense saga, so why think of one little sect of people in this universe. It's the movies. The movies are what all people (ok, except maybe four) refer to when they talk about Star Wars. These movies follow the path of a handful of jedi through their lives. That's the major perspective of people playing SWG.
Now a massive Star Wars game comes along and in this massive game, just like the massive Star Wars movies, people are stuck on the idea of being one of a handful of people called Jedi. Why not, I mean, they can use the force and those cool light saber weapons. Why wouldn't you want to be a jedi.. especially since it says right on the Lucas Arts website, "allows players to live the Star Wars movies." Since we came to the conclusion that the movies were about Jedi then we will be Jedi.
What the heck is this kid talking about? You can be a jedi in the game! Duh. Yeah, it's easy to get your dream of being a jedi if you first get your character pimped out, which takes a couple months, do tons of quests, which takes a few more months, then grind to jedi status which will take you a few more months of spending every waking second of your free time to do given you are a steady stream of tax revenue in this country. Well you're right, you could only do it in that little of time if you didn't work forty hours a week and spent that time just playing SWG... but at least you're getting your moneys worth out of the game. Wait, if this game is taking every waking second out of your day and you feel like you are never getting your jedi experience you dreamed about until months and months later wouldn't that be a letdown?
Do i think that the whole jedi system is in ruin? No, i'm fine with the system. I also understand the Star Wars continuum, but do others? I'm sure a lot of people were truly letdown by the fact that they wouldn't be able to ever experience their dream in the SWG world due to time constraints. At least their jedi dream had been snuffed out in this massively multiplair world anyway. Go find another game that can fulfill your jedi dream. So that person goes out and buys Jedi Academy or K.o.t.O.R. to fulfill their jedi needs. I guess SWG wasn't for you, Star Wars fan.
Who I'm really talking about is the Star Wars fan turned gamer who isn't used to the whole MMO gaming experience where it is as much about the friends and conversation as it is about the game. MMOs are comprised of much more than what's on the surface, but if what's on the surface annoys and doesn't continue to entertain, the other factors of that MMO don't feel as fulfilling.
Wow I just spent way too much time talking about Jedi and I'm sure that subject didn't need any more talk but I'm done now. Good thing I moved this Jedi talk to the bottom of the post or else most of the people would have stopped reading it after the first couple paragraphs.
You see, it's not that SWG isn't fun, it's the fact that it had so much potential with a Star Wars themed universe that anything less than the most entertaining computer experience ever encountered is a letdown.
It might be that Star Wars was just too big of a realm for even SOE to undertake.
Disclaimer: My brain works in it's own separate world apart from most. If you didn't agree with anything I said that's ok because I said it, you didn't.
BruSwillis
Sat Nov 06, 2004 12:39 pm
#2
Wrong timeline.
jawa-warrior wrote:
Today is the day to talk about what Star Wars Galaxies could have been ... if it was a great game.
Where's Hoth? You dare to release a Star Wars galaxy without Hoth, but now you forgot it in the expansion? How can you trip over that error without noticing it. Who wouldn't want to battle a snow monster or ride on a tauntaun? Oh yeah, we have those other creatures that look like tauntauns instead... I don't get it...
jawa-warrior
Sat Nov 06, 2004 12:46 pm
#3
Ok I know Alderaan got jacked but what happened to Hoth? Yeah the rebels had to flee but that doesn't mean nobody can go there again.
WillinB
Sat Nov 06, 2004 12:51 pm
#4
hoth hasn't been discovered yet in this timeline, I am not kidding. its so remote that the rebels discovered it and made a base there after this current timeline. And the only thing there would be maybe a tauntaun or snow monster every mile or so.
NivekSenoj
Sat Nov 06, 2004 12:51 pm
#5
BruSwillis wrote:
Wrong timeline.
jawa-warrior wrote:
Today is the day to talk about what Star Wars Galaxies could have been ... if it was a great game.
Where's Hoth? You dare to release a Star Wars galaxy without Hoth, but now you forgot it in the expansion? How can you trip over that error without noticing it. Who wouldn't want to battle a snow monster or ride on a tauntaun? Oh yeah, we have those other creatures that look like tauntauns instead... I don't get it...
so this means that no one can go there until after the movie?
Felix_Deco
Sat Nov 06, 2004 12:53 pm
#6
hoth didnt djust appear as a planet when the empire striked back... and starwars timeline is way f*cked up anyway since in star wars episode 1 uses more sofisticated and better technology than they could use 30 years later... and.... yes there you go.. the clone wars was erlier so why did all those jedies clone..
WillinB
Sat Nov 06, 2004 12:55 pm
#8
"hoth didnt djust appear as a planet when the empire striked back... and starwars timeline is way f*cked up anyway since in star wars episode 1 uses more sofisticated and better technology than they could use 30 years later... and.... yes there you go.. the clone wars was erlier so why did all those jedies clone.."
umm...what?
umm...what?
BruSwillis
Sat Nov 06, 2004 12:57 pm
#9
NivekSenoj wrote:
so this means that no one can go there until after the movie?
Why would the Rebels build a hidden base away from Imperials on Hoth if (in SWG and in our timeline) Rebels, Imps and neutrals were running around day in day out placing harvesters by the hundred everytime a good resourse spawned and why woould the Empire send out a load of probes to unchartered planets such as Hoth when they could have just asked the 250 solo groups running round getting 500k per hour hunting Wompas?
I agree we need an ice planet, it would be very cool, but there's more Ice planets than Hoth to use without breaking continuity
DJ13
Sat Nov 06, 2004 2:05 pm
#10
yea this game stinks like why don't the gungans have those water ball things? i have killed many gungans and they all used blasters!
DJ13
Sat Nov 06, 2004 2:06 pm
#11
yea this game stinks like why don't the gungans have those water ball things? i have killed many gungans and they all used blasters!
NuclearDevil
Sat Nov 06, 2004 2:11 pm
#13
What the hell can you do on hoth anyway? It's desolate. Unless the SWG timeline reaches ESB and they make it a PvP planet where the Battle of Hoth is recreated ...
GAT Idiot From Time To Time
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