Several weeks ago, Thud and I actually became nostalgic for SWG (Star Wars Galaxies), enough to try playing it again. We had been playing Everquest II for a while, but never really got into it. And we got to thinking about the massive planets, the player cities, bantha herds on Tatooine, rancor-hunting expeditions. We finally signed back on to find our houses still standing. We’d been away for well over a year, and our houses were still up. It was kind of a nice surprise, but one with disastrous consequences for the game. It turns out that such unoccupied “zombie houses” had been a persistent problem that SWG is just now preparing to solve – on June 6 they will finally come down. In the meantime, the player cities had been dying, and no one could start new ones since the planets were full.
Yesterday morning I wanted to log in, and the login screen said all the servers were down. It wasn’t a regular update day and had passed the time when I would have expected it to be back up if they had done a restart, so I went to the forums to see if I could figure out what was going on. But, the forums were incredibly slow, so I gave up trying to get them to load and decided to check back later. When I mentioned it to Thud, he noted that it had said the same thing when he tried to log in the night before, so he tried waiting for the forums again and informed me that there was a bug in the server status reporting, and to try logging in anyway. And it worked.
A bug in the server status? How dumb can you get?
So SWG is still SWG. Instead of complaining about the most recent release like the players of normal games do, SWG players can complain about that and also, as a bonus, issues unresolved since the release of NGE (the “New Game Enhancement”), which came out in November 2005. The player movement is still twitchy, and combat even more so. You can turn on “auto-targeting,” but I’ve found it to be very wonky. I like to play melee classes – but in the “streamlined” NGE, Jedi are the only true melee class. And boy are there a lot of them. When you do see other players, 75% of them are 13-year old supercool Sith Lords. And, once you have decorated your house and set up shop with your crafter alt, there isn’t… much… to do. We will probably stick it out for a while to see if the communities rise again when the zombie houses are finally put to rest. But annoyance still seems to be a large part of the SWG experience.
3 Comments
I’ve never played SWG, but I’ve kept up with the game in the online media since its launch. It sounds like the designers just gave up after the cold reception of the NGE (at least that’s the only conclusion I can draw if something as basic as player movement is still buggy a year and a half later). What a shame.
I keep hearing rumors that an entirely new Star Wars MMO is in the works (possibly by the same team that developed the awesome Knights of the Old Republic Star Wars RPG). I’ve been dying to play a good sci-fi MMO for years. I wish LucasArts would just go ahead and give me one.
Philip and I have been hoping for a new sci-fi MMO. We played EQ2, we played Vanguard… all the fantasy based ones are feeling very much the same now. The last game we really had a lot of fun with was SWG, so I can understand your nostalgia. We still talk about it too. “You remember when we were in the cantina and that guy called you an imperial dog…”
Philip keeps saying he’s tempted to get out our subscriptions, but I’m not. We quit before the NGE (actually, we quit before they introduced Jedi), so I’m not sure how we’d deal with the game systems actually just being totally different to the way we remember.
Oh yeah, here is one of those rumors: http://www.mcvuk.com/news/26750/New-Star-Wars-MMO-in-the-works
Interesting.
You do pretty much have to re-learn SWG if you used to play pre-NGE. The changes to the gameplay, not to mention the character classes, are drastic. The only thing that hasn’t changed is the look.
And, as much as they claim to have been “streamlining” the game, aspects of it are still complex and arcane – especially the crafting system that involves reverse engineering of certain looted items. You have to refer to fan pages constantly to figure out what’s worth keeping and what to do with it.