Star Wars Galaxies - First Impressions

I was on holiday for three weeks, and when I came back I found my copy of Star Wars Galaxies (SWG) in my letter box. So I've been playing that for the last 3 days, and here are my first impressions:

The Good

First of all, it's Star Wars. The game manages well to create the atmosphere of the Star Wars movies. When you sit in a cantina in Mos Eisley on Tatooine and see a Wookie entering, you nearly expect Han Solo to enter next. If you are old enough, like me, to have grown up with the first Star Wars trilogy, that will probably mean a lot to you.

The next good point are the graphics. SWG is plain beautiful. The landscape and vegetation is nice, creatures look great, and character models are really awesome, they even modify their facial expressions and gestures according to what you are saying. Obviously these graphics do tax even high end machines. But SWG is running smoothly on my 2 GHz, 512 MB, Geforce 3 Ti200 system, with framerates only rarely dropping below 20 when entering very crowded citites. As MMORPG are designed to run for several years, shooting high with the requirements on release is generally a good idea, so graphics won't seem outdated already next year.

Good from a casual players point of view is that SWG is relatively easy. You won't lose weeks of work from getting killed. And your character progresses at a good rate, even if you just play in 2 hour sessions. Obviously that means that its a bad game for powergamers, you can probably max out your character in as little as one month if you play 100 hours a week in a power gaming way.

Also good is that there are several different career paths that are markedly different. Unlike EQ, where all career paths are just different ways to kill monsters, SWG has careers as artisan or entertainer in which you can progress without fighting. Then you have the scout career, which is somewhere between a peaceful career and a pure fighting career. The last three careers, marksman (ranged combat), brawler (melee combat), and medic (healer/wizard), are the fighting careers. All careers branch out in many different trees, so there is a wide variety of playing styles supported.

Another good thing is that player housing seems to work rather well. The world is huge enough to allow for players to place houses without taking up every flat surface like in UO. Players of one player association (PA, like a guild in other games) can build a guild hall at one place and build houses around that hall, forming a kind of village. Player run cities are announced for later in the game.

Monster hunting in SWG is great, because it really feels like hunting. Spawn points are not fixed, but you have to run around in an area to fight monsters. This avoids the "camping" from EQ, where you just sit and wait at always the same spot until the next monster pops up. Combat is varied, with a range of possible special attacks that you can perform, depending on your combat skills.

The Bad

SWG is rather obviously unfinished. Vehicles and space flight will only come out next year in an expansion. But even the stuff that is there isn't all working. Up to now you can't lose items when dying, because the system of insurance and corpse runs described in the manual simply doesn't work. There are lots of bugs. Fortunately not of the game-crashing kind, but still of the serious kind. Your guild chat often disappears, you can't access the containers in your inventory any more, the waypoint system stops working, stuff like that. For some of these bugs there are fixes, like you have to log out and log back in, but its rather annoying. Servers often go offline, and there is a daily server down. The game is patched nearly every day, with some of the changes that are introduced being important, so you might find your character class fundametally changed.

Also bad is a "lack of content" (see my previous blog from last month). The landscapes are huge, but mostly random. Fortunately at least the different planets and cities look different, but outside of cities all landscape looks sameish. There are a few hand-designed "tourist attractions", kind of like dungeons. But it's too early to say whether they will provide that famous "Crushbone factor" to SWG.

The Ugly

The most ugly thing in SWG are macros. Macros are a sure sign that something is wrong with a game. If an activity is so repetitive and boring that people prefer to macro it instead of doing it manually, there is a serious flaw in the design. Some macros are still okay, like a combat macro in which you kneel down, aim at your target, fire, and shout a battle cry. But you just have to enter a cantina to see where this goes wrong. Entertainers make xp by dancing and playing music in cantinas. Part of that comes from people watching them, part comes from them performing special moves (flourishes). Now most people create a macro that continuously loops these special moves, with some pauses in between to allow for the recovery of the action points the flourish costs. And thus their entertainer is performing automatically with no player interaction required. It is against the Terms of Service of SWG to leave macros running unattended, but obviously the developers are busy with the bugs and don't have the time to check. The game kicks you out if you don't move your mouse or hit a key for a long period of time, but forums are full of how to find simple mechanical workarounds (fluttering paper in front of an optical mouse). Thus people go afk (away from keyboard) while leaving their characters online performing as robots and earning xp, and sometimes even money from tips. With the entertainers being robots, cantinas turn into simple automatic healing stations (watching entertainers heals your mental wounds) and lose a lot of flavor. I haven't met a single entertainer yet who was actually trying to entertain people, by telling jokes or altering his performance. If you are lucky you find one who is not away from keyboard, so that at least you can chat while he is running his entertainment macros. Similar macros exist to gain wilderness survival XP with your scout, or to gain survey xp and resources by sampling with your artisan. Ugly.

A similar problem is the so-called grinding. People have found that the fastest way to gain xp is to repeatedly do the same boring action over and over for several hours. For example the most crafting XP are gained by repeatedly creating the same item. You CAN create a range of different items, do interesting modifications called experimentation, and try to sell your improved goods with the bazaar terminals. But making 100 standard heavy axes is simply gaining you XP a LOT faster. While finding people that buy your wares, especially if you are not yet a master artisan, is really difficult. There exists the concept of "usage XP", where you get XP whenever people are using the stuff you created, but the amounts are small and it doesn't really work when you are offline. The developers are complaining about people grinding, but that just shows how little they understand the average player. Most players tend to do the action that gives the highest reward. Only few people are unaffected by the reward system and just play whatever way they like.

Right now SWG is seriously unbalanced in its in-game economics. At the start there were only two types of mission, deliver or destroy, as the main source of money flowing into the economy. Deliver missions, while not really exciting, were the most profitable. You took 2 missions (the limit) paying up to 1000 credits each to deliver stuff to another city on the same planet. From the mission terminal you first have to run to another place in the same city to pick up the delivery, then fly to the other city by shuttle (they fly every 10 minutes), then deliver the goods in that city. Picking up the two parcels, flying with the shuttle, and delivering the 2 parcels took around 15 minutes, so minus the shuttle cost you ended up with about 6k of profit per hour. Now there are new missions, from special artisan mission terminals, where you can earn up to 900 credits per mission (twice that for higher level characters) by doing a successful survey for a metal, ore, or gas at least 512 m away from the mission terminal with at least 70% concentration. So you find a spot 513 m away from the terminal which has one of these in more than 70% concentration, set a waypoint there, take 2 missions of that type at the terminal and run back and forth. I tested that for 2 hours and made 25k credits per hour, 4 times more than the previous best missions. And thats with a newbie character, some guild mates of higher level made twice that, due to having high combat skills (another bug, should obviously depend on artisan skills, not combat skills). Obviously players flock to the most profitable missions, and the economy will be flush with cash in no time, leading to inflation. And running back and forth for hours between the same two locations is obviously not much fun.

Summary

SWG is not a bad game, and it is fun to play at times. But in summary there are two major issues. One is how high your tolerance for unfinished games is. If you don't mind bugs, imbalances, and serious game changes, you can play SWG now. But if those things annoy you, you should wait a couple of months before starting to play. Of course MMORPGs are never totally "finished", but bugs and patches tend to get less serious and frequent with time.

The second major issue is how likely you are to fall in the grinding trap. There are basically two ways how you can play SWG: You can do whatever looks fun and then just take whatever reward the program is offering you for that. In which case your progress will be slow, but hopefully you will have a lot of fun while playing. The other way is to look which action gives the most rewards and do whatever is required to gain money and experience fast. In that case you will most likely get stuck in rather boring activities, or even run macros while being away from your computer. But you will be richer in virtual goods and of a higher level. The choice isn't as simple as it looks. We all WANT to play in the fun way. But the lure of the high rewards is strong, and due to bad design the way to these high rewards leads through the most boring activities.


- posted by Tobold @ 11:44 AM Permanent Link