How SOE Destroyed Star Wars Galaxies

By HCG Existimator

In Brief
If I was asked to recommend an MMORPG to someone, I would only suggest Star Wars Galaxies if the person asking actually enjoys smacking themselves in the head with a mallet. This game, first released back in June of 2003, was once pretty good if you were not a Star Wars fan, and if you were one, it was truly righteous.  Players could live in the Star Wars universe as they chose, be it as a Jedi, soldier, pilot, technician, scoundrel, politician, or whatever their hearts desired.

With the mix and match skill-based systems based off of 32 professions, you could create a template that truly reflected your chosen style of play and build a virtual life that was absorbing on a level that all other games (including that glorified chat room Second Life) could only envy from afar.

 

Then came the dark times
Last November, SOE with the tacit approval of LucasArts, released the NGE (New Game Enhancements) and destroyed it all. Suddenly any drooling, mouth-breathing, “733t do0d” with the attention span of a mayfly could start out as a Jedi right out of the gate. This made said Jedi as commonplace as transvestites on Hollywood Boulevard and about as delightful to be around considering the “gimmie gimmie gimmie” mentality of the majority of the people playing them. Tradesmen (crafters) became completely useless due to the lopsided loot tables and lack of item decay. Some professions such as Bio-Engineer and Creature Handler, simply disappeared altogether as they were not considered to be “iconic” and “star-warsy” enough in spite of them being very popular among the players.

Entertainers suffered the most egregious humiliation, as instead of getting rid of them outright, they were relegated to the level of a gaming gewgaw by having all of their abilities eliminated. Sure you could still go into a cantina and see the usual slutty Twi’leks tempting juveniles and lonely older guys who have the libido of Captain Kirk, most of which were AFK grinders by this point (no pun intended). However there was absolutely no reason to. Also, the medical clinics became as deserted as the cantinas due to the removal of wounds from the game. With no wounds to be healed, there was absolutely no reason to ever seek out a Doctor or Medic. You see, Doctors were removed from the game and Medics were turned into one of the 9 “iconic” classes. The only thing to set the current Medics apart from the other classes is a fair AOE damage skill, and a better heal skill than the other professions that incidentally rarely ever works in combat, even this many months after the NGE has gone live.

The developers’ contempt for the Traders became apparent because of, (but not limited to), the screwed up loot table, which remains completely lopsided even now. This has made looted weapons, armor, what have you, far superior than the best items that could be crafted by players. This caused a vibrant player-based economy to devolve into a spontaneous loot-based economy quite literally overnight.

As if that wasn’t enough, the NGE also introduced a serious and intractable bug which made it so that harvesters emptied their hoppers upon the server reset every morning. Such a game-breaking bug would have caused an apoplectic fit in the QA department of any conscientious MMORPG company with even a smidgeon of morals, followed by marathon coding and testing sessions to fix the problem as quickly as humanly possible. At the very least, some sort of stop-gap measure would have been taken in the interim. However, judging from SOE’s lackadaisical approach to this overwhelming and disastrous problem for a significant portion of their existing player base, their attitude was essentially “Fuck ‘em. Crafters aren’t important enough for us to care.”

I could cite many such instances of how seriously a fucked up game this is, such as the smuggler revamp which has been promised for more than two years now, but for the sake of my blood pressure I will continue on. Ultimately, the NGE was generally regarded by the gaming community at large to be a colossal screw-up on behalf of Sony Online Entertainment. Just look at any recent review for the game since the NGE, be it from a humble gamer like myself, or a major website/magazine column, and you will find almost without exception that what I am saying is true.

Also to those of you that attended this year’s E3, did you see SOE’s “GREAT SUPER WOWIE ANNOUNCEMENT THAT WILL CHANGE THE FUTURE OF STAR WARS GALAXIES” that SOE had been trumpeting for many weeks leading up to the event? What? You didn’t? Then you get my point. Lead on the players, lie to the players, shit on the players. This seems to be the consistently applied corporate strategy of SOE from Everquest to the Matrix Online, and everything in between. Why else, at least 2 years before earliest possible release, would many potential players of Stargate Worlds and Star Trek Online be saying that they will have nothing to do with these games if SOE is even remotely involved with them?

And one more thing; one of the most common complaints of the former SWG players is that SOE is trying to make the game more like World of Warcraft. To this I wholly disagree. Very simply put, WOW is a fairly decent game, while SWG in fact does suck major portions of ass on almost every level.

Seeing is believing
If you don’t believe my assessment of the SOE attitude towards its customers, see for yourself. Go to the official SWG forums on SOE’s website, and just look into the “General Discussion” forum. Go ahead, I’ll wait…

See how much people love this game? And the posts that you are seeing there only reflect the ones that haven’t gotten deleted outright by the forum police. But I’m betting you saw a lot of the posts that were edited by the moderators with the catch-all denouncement of “Off-Topic” in its place. Those could hardly have been complimentary postings, or so I’m guessing.

If you want to see the real loathing for this whore-spawn of customer relations, go to some independent sites and read their forums. Really, for example, try the SWG forums on www.mmorpg.com and see how much people really love SOE.

Beauty is only skin deep
Let’s talk graphics. The graphics were very nice when the game launched, and they still are today by comparison with such MMO titles with the ultra-realism of “Roma Victor” or “A Tale in the Desert III”. But when compared to a title even older than SWG (and I’m talking here about Mythic Entertainment’s “Dark Age of Camelot”) one wonders why there haven’t been any serious attempts to upgrade the graphics and look of SWG. Fans of Mythic’s DAOC and even another of SOE’s game “Everquest” have gotten graphical upgrades since their launch, so why no love for SWG?

Well hold on to your hats folks, because SOE is apparently pushing out some new character skins to improve the look of the players’ avatars. For the mentally challenged, this might be enough to distract them from the horrendous bugs, the general lack of content, the absence of player community, the abysmally shitty customer support, and the fact that all this is true more than three years after the game has gone live. For those of us however that are not lobotomized SOE fanboys, these new player skins are like putting perfume on a pig.

That being said, the graphics are still acceptable in SWG, and the game will perform well even on an older system. BUT with the new twitch-based fps style combat that was forced on players that generally never wanted it in the first place, you might have to turn your settings way down just to reduce the lag and stutters to the point where combat is even feasible. Compare that to Pre-Combat Upgrade (PRE-CU) where only the most horrendous lag could really disrupt combat in any substantive way due to the combat cue that was built into the game for just such a reason. The combat cue was another of the many features that were lost when the NGE hit and lobotomized the game.

Do you hear what I hear?
The music in SWG is probably the only element that remains true to the movies. The sound effects are acceptable, with the exception of some of the weapons (e.g. the scout blaster) that are more reminiscent of ray guns from a child’s toy or a Saturday morning cartoon. Ambient sound effects are sparse, leaving a distinctly empty feeling when walking around the deserted cities in vain for something to do.

Lag lag lag
How stable is the game? Under the best conditions, it’s not too bad. Considering that most players abandoned the game like rats from a sinking ship with the onset of the NGE, the populations on the servers are very low. Consequently, there are rarely so many people in one area that you start to lag out. Load times can be a bit long when transitioning from one planet to another, or when hopping across a planet on a shuttlecraft, but they’re not too bad. But, when there are more than a handful of people in one spot, the game basically turns into a slideshow making any sort of gameplay impossible.

You shall know them by the company they keep
Let’s discuss the player base. Oh boy, this is a big one. Before the NGE, I played with many people that were actually quite sensible and mature. I would venture to guess that most of the players were like that. There were of course griefers, gankers, annoying little tit-mice, whatever you want to call them. But in spite of their being poignant arguments in favor of parental licensing, the percentage of the overall population that they comprised was very low. SWG was a more deliberate sort of game that required a bit of thought and planning to really get the best overall gaming experience, and was not given in to the concept of instant gratification. As such, the kiddies tended to avoid it for other games.

After the NGE however, the ratio completely flipped. There still are a few rare, otherwise mature individuals that are such hopeless Star Wars fans, that they will even play this donkey show that the game has become. On the other hand, while once they were in the minority, now I can best describe the bulk of the current player base as pre-pubescent little fucks with their heads stuck so far up their collective asses they can’t see the light of Tatooine’s twin suns.

Case in point: before the NGE, it was common for people to gather in certain places that were a nexus of travel. In front of the starports in Coronet and Theed are examples. It was very common to be inundated with people barking out advertisements for their wares or their services, and I picked up quite a few waypoints to good vendors that way. If you wanted a weapon sliced, that was where you’d most likely find a smuggler to do the job. The same goes for if you were looking for a hunting partner. Anyway, if you were to advertise in these places now, you will probably be flamed for “spamming”.

SOE’s people said that some of the reasons that the changes were made with the NGE, is because there was too much reading, and too much time was spent finding weapons and armor to replace the ones that you were wearing out through normal use. What this means is that they wanted a larger audience of players that had lower reading skills and an overpowering desire for instant gratification. Well SOE, mission accomplished. Or as one of SOE’s favorite mantras is, “Working as intended.”

If every other facet of the game was simply perfect, based on the maturity and intelligence level of today’s average SWG player alone, I would say you should avoid this festering genital wart of a game like the plague. But coupled with the other somewhat less than ideal game elements, and since the NGE, this is just simply not worth playing.

Endgame
In summary, Star Wars Galaxies is so completely degenerated from its bygone glory, and we former loyal players so devastated with the willful destruction of our beloved virtual world, that we need the levity of some Officer Barbrady character telling us that “There’s nothing to see here, move along people”. Only with humor can we retain a bit of sanity in retrospect of what we have lost. That and to look forward to the fantastic games that are currently in production. And then again, there are always excellent games like God of War on the consoles that will allow us to blow off steam. Learn from the past; enjoy the present, hope for the future.

To those of you that might be looking for a good sci-fi based MMO to enjoy, let me make these recommendations. If it’s a space game you’re after, try EVE Online. It is beautiful to see, rich in diversity, and truly epic in scope. If you are more interested in a ground game, try Anarchy Online. AO has evolved into a respectable title with a grand world to explore and conquer. Best of all, both of these games have free trials, so you risk little besides the time to download the client software.

But to those of you tempted to try SWG let me just say this. If you really think you would like this game, let’s find out. Take an upholsterer’s staple gun. Not one of the manual, spring loaded jobs, but rather one of the heavy-duty pneumatic ones. Drive some extra-long barbed staples into your butt-cheeks and then sit down into a bowl of Tabasco sauce and lemon juice. If you enjoy this, then perhaps you should try SWG. But only after your doctor ups your medication of course.

Those of you with tiny minds that are always looking for the “I WIN” button in every game will not likely have the attention span to have read an article this long. For those of you that have, and still want to try Star Wars Galaxies, don’t say I didn’t warn you.