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wondering what this game is like
cowboyupinbl
Member Posts: 32
I've been thinking about starting up this game. I can find lists of the professions and guides on all these complex things I don't even know about, but what I'm trying to find is a general explanation of what the game is like, how it plays, etc.
--Is this game driven by quests/missions like other MMOs? What is a typical 1-hour session? How long will it take me to get a strong foothold in the game (a house and/or ship, a routine pretty much pegged down, confidence in all game mechanics, etc) and how long does it take to reach the "end game" and max level?
--What is the mount/vehicle/spaceship system like? What kinds of vehicles can I get, and are there organic land mounts like creatures and things?
--I'll probably go with either Bounty Hunter, Smuggler, or Jedi. In short, what are each of these like? What roles do they play in groups? Are my quests/missions going to be based on my profession, or is it just for playstyle?
--What kind of grouping is in this game? Is there solo content, heavy grouping, etc; does the game REQUIRE that I group? Am I going to have to join a clan to get anything done?
Those are the sorts of questions I'm wondering about. Any answers to those, or other similar topics you think I'd want to know, anything would be appreciated. Thanks.
Comments
Hope u get an answer soon cause I´m curious about the game aswell. Heard something has happened to it and lots of people left it. What I´m particually curious about is the housing. I just started Vanguard cause of the housing but havent got any house yet. Should I stick to VG or should I try galaxies? Or both?
If you want to find out what the game offers, you can review the many forums and player guides on the O-boards here -
http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/forums/list.m
Why not just try the game via a free game trial and come to your own conclusions about the game. Just make sure you go to the Starsider server since most of the other servers are dead.
http://starwarsgalaxies.station.sony.com/players/content.vm?id=6296
Like I said, the forums are all about topics from people who've played the game for years, there's not a lot of newbie stuff describing the gameplay. And I don't want to start a trial and invest 20 hours in the game only to find it's not really my thing; that's why I asked some basic questions.
Wa min God! Se æx on min heafod is!
I am a former VET of SWG and left after the infamous "SWG NGE CRAZE". It was the games turning point to what some of us viewed as a failure, but others saw as a good thing. I'm not a fan of it, but hey you may enjoy it so here it goes.
The game plays out very similiar to a third person tactical shooter, you still have point and click and auto attack with guns and stuff, but there's a lot of cursor and crosshair moving now, you actually need to point your character into the right direction of attack so to speak.
As for the vehicles you summon and hop on and move, you can choose to get off and let them sit around, but if you are flagged for PVP people can destroy them. You can get them repaired at vehicle garages for a small fee (Depending on the vehicle you may actually have to buy a vehicle repair kit, which aren't cheap). Different types of vehicles go faster and etc, and some are just for show, some can also carry more than 1 person.
Housing is based on towns and if you are apart of it, meaning if your in the "Guild" practically, you can plant your house (Not sure if this has been changed, but some planets have house type restrictions), but you plant your house and then you can decorate the inside with pretty much any type of item you can think of in the game, aside from Vehicles (I think).
The classes are similiar to most games, Bounty hunters and smugglers are ranged professions. Bounty Hunters favor the carbine type of rifles and Smugglers prefer pistols. Jedi's are kind of a jack of all trades, but they really aren't super powerful anymore. They used to be near God mode characters in SWG many years ago (Myself having one) but the "NGE" completely rewrote the gameplay and class system of the game changing the way they work. Jedi can still be fun however, so don't get discouraged by the disgruntled vets that tend to roam the forums and trash talk SWG in bitter tones. I am bitter myself about SWG and SOE in general, but the game is still a very neat game, so good luck to you.
TwitchTV: iNeoki
And the OP should be sure to get a CC reader installed on his PC so he can enjoy all of the TCG "content."
This is pretty much what you'll get out of swg without all the hyperbole. When you first start swg you'll have the option of choosing a Galaxy/Realm/Server. You'll probably want to choose either Flurry or Starsider because those are the two most populated servers and some of the less populated servers are REALLY less populated. You'll then create your character, you'll probly choose that jedi or boubty hunter class you were thinking about and rightly so, why not play the game with an iconic class like jedi? So go for, it probably won't matter anyway for reasons i'll get to .
After charcter creation you'll be given the opertunity to either go through the tutorial, which is a one-time only, closed off area or enter the game world immediatly. I say do the tutorial, it has a nice little story to it with Han Solo and you'll get a basic idea of the games core mechanichs and concepts. You'll also walk away with some usefull gear and if not level 10 than pretty close to it (level 10 is the tutorials lvl cap). The tutorial takes anywhere from 1-3 hours on average a little longer if you do the space portion which is mostly optional throughout the game anyway. If you do the space portion of the tutorial you can expect to add another 45 minutes to possibly 3 hours of play depending on your skill. The tutorial is very old and has not been updated so there is a lot of missing info on a lot of swg's content so be prepared to do some offline reading on everything from player camps to the Galactic Civil War content. (http://swg.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page is a good place to do this). Once you decide to end the tutorial you'll be transported to Mos Eisley, right in front of the Star Port and this is where you'll star the games one and only quest line, called the Legacy Quest. And you will join a guild at this time, because you probably never seen such agressive guild recruiting ike you will see in swg. i joined a guild with around 50 members and less than 3 weeks later we have over 250 members.
You'll probaly start doing the Legacy Quest right away as whatever class you chose but sooner or later you'll change your class to commando because everyone will tell you that it's the fastest and easiest way to level up and it's pretty much true. Commandoes have the best AOE attacks, and the best self heal so they can solo much of the content in the Legacy Quest and they can afk grind the easiest. Afk grinding is something I've never encountered in an mmo before (at least as far as i know, probly happens all the time in other games just not so obviously). SWG supports reapeating macros, and you can very easily write them using the games macro ui. By using reapting macros you can form a group, usually with guildmates and go to an area with a lot of mobs. One party member will be a max level commando dealing AOE through a reapting macro while another party member, in this case a medic(healer) lvl 80-90 who fires off AOE heals. the rest of the group will be either low leve commandoes or bounty hunters all dealing AOE damage. setting this up over night will not only get you leveled to the game's level cap (90) it'll net you a tidy sum of credits( the in-game currency). I could be wrong on some of the details on afk grinding because I've never done it but I have seen the macros and I've seen a few get set-up on my guilds chat channel.
One thing that almost never get's mentioned about SWG and is something every player decides and that's what faction you choose, either Rebel Alliance or Imperial (now you can also choose to stay neutral but what fun is that?).The reason the SWG factions never get mentioned is that for the most part it doesn't really matter which faction you choose because there's only one main quest line and it's the same (with a few differences in contacts) for both factions. The only real impact your faction has is weather you fly an x-wing or a tie fighter in the space portion or if your reward armor is storm trooper armor or rebel armor. Both factions can be in the same guild and can group together. Another thing i'l mention here is that scattered throught swg's zones are various mission terminals. The terminal you'll be intrested in are simply called "mission terminals" (as opposed to "artisan or bounty hunter mission terminals"). These terminals offer 2 types of missions, delivery or destruction. The first 10 destruction missions you do from a terminal, every day, is worth double xp for mobs you kill and a heafty bonus xp when you destroy the mobs nest. This is a great way to level your character without resorting to afk grinding.
There are 2 things that set SWG apart from other mmo's and they are the only 2 reasons I came back to the game. The first is the space content, it's twitch-based, stat-driven real time space sim style play, it's the only space sim out there that get's regular updates (why oh why was there never a sequal to Freelancer?) the other unique aspect is bounty hunting. When you reach level cap as a bounty hunter you have the option of tracking down and killing other players who have a bounty placed on them. This is something I'd like to see more of in other games, it's an exciting and unique way of handeling PvP content and would really go a long way on PvE servers on other games. Basically bounties are placed on players by other players, or if the target is active in the Galactic Civil War the game will place a bouty on said target. The bounty hunter uses a probe droid to find which planet (this games realms) the bounty is on, travels to the planet and uses a small tracking driod to pinpoint the mark. Bounty hunters can force players with bounties into one on one PvP.
All in all i say give SWG a try it has a lot of cool and unique features (forgot to mention the visual customization options of your toon, which is another strong point) and the crafting is second to none, but it does require a seperate, non-combat character that has limited appeal to a lot of players. SWG was the first mmo I ever played and I've recently come back to it after being away for 3 years because like i said i dig the space content but I won't be staying. The graphics and animations are really bad and the lag is worse and it just feels, overall, sloppy. This is really too bad because, I mean come on this is Star Wars. It should be freakin' awsome.
You can solo almost everything.
SWG is no longer a sandbox game, it is much like all the themepark MMO games currently on the market, go kill "X" amount of Durni and report back to me.
There are only a few class options. The typical ones like Tank (Jedi), Healer (Medic), etc, etc, the cookie-cutter options.
While crafting is still around from the original system there is no item decay, so there is no need for repeat business, therefore greatly diminished.
The servers are quite slow and the population is very low in this game, but like I said, you can solo most of it.
Things like the Trading Card Game are designed as cash sinks in almost microtransactions, etc.
All-in-all there is NO WAY this game is anywhere close to worth the monthly subscription to most reasonable consumers, hence the terribly low population, but the trial is FREE, so try it out and see for yourself.
You might just be the 1/100 who enjoys the mess they have created.
Tecmo Bowl.
I have played since Fall 2004, non stop, thorugh the CU and the NGE.
The game is fun and alive with content and players period. It is a traditional sand box MMO still in it's current form. The older PreCU game was a deeper game, however those dayz are long gone.
There are many ways to level up and I helped a NGE jedi turned smuggler level up to 90. The legacy line is the obvious starting point and a great way to acclamate to the game. We mixed up legacy with hunting, space, and mission terms. From Legacy we moved on to Meat Lump and Mustafar eventually. Then you can also do the Imperial or Rebel Theme Parks as you go and Jabba's as well. Sometimes we just killed stormtroopers and other imperials.
We even spent some time dueling / PVP'ing to help teach the differences in play style.
The climb to 90 was the most exciting for my padawan and then she lost interest. However that was mostly casual play over a years time. She lost interest because the level of play at 90 for heroics and PVP was more than she was willing to handle. PVP in SWG is very competitive and groups that don't know heroics are a good challenge.
Anyway, it's like anything, MMOs included, it's what you make of it that counts.
For me I have yet to find another MMO that offers as much. When I do I'll let u know.
This post sums up my recent experiance of the game exactly. Had a lot of fun in the time I was subed but overal I was left prity disapointed. Like most SOE games if they just invested and updated it a little I think it would still be up there with the best mmo's on the market. But as the quoted poster says it just feels sloopy and unloved and I can't sum it up any better than that. It's still worth doing the trial imo just to have a look for yourself.
Then why did they close half the servers and many of the remaining servers are dead...not on my word but on the word of the players playing on those servers?
(mod edit)
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Ten Golden Rules Of Videogame Fanboyism
"SOE has probably united more gamers in hatred than Blizzard has subs"...daelnor
Its a combination of the server architecture and the way SWG players gravitiate towards perceived higher population servers.
In the graph below you can see a lot of Bloodfin players using the double XP bonus weekend to regrind PvP characters on Starsider/Flurry. This is whole guilds paying to transfer or regrinding, just to be able to play wherever the population is deemed optimal for them.
Bloodfin was for many years one of the highest population servers, but when guilds start jumping ship there's not much that can stop the decline in that servers population.
This puts seven servers under the 500 officers, the first round of server mergers was triggered when the now closed 12 servers were on average at around 200 ranked players per server. Sunrunner is on 280.
There are 1.4 Starsiders worth of players on those seven low population servers, if SoE decide to do another roll-up of the low population servers then thats a lot of data to move but it might be worth doing as in general those players would get a vastly improved gameplay experience. Probably not a good idea to let them all move to Starsider though.
Honest data Badger and that is appreciated. The underlying issue though is that SWG is no really alive with content and players...not your words I know.
Rolling the servers up makes sense but it spells further doom at the sametime as the underlying problem has never been dealt with...They continue to lose overall players. At what point do they hit a threshold of not worth keeping it going?
The server arcitecture is fine if you look at what they were built for. They were not designed for the speed up of the client and the I/O of the server itself has increased by a large factor due to the NGEification. Further the fact that from what I read graphics are rendered via the CPU before it hits the GPU. Not sure if that is true but it makes sense when considering the lag many experience.
Just doesn't seem like the game is viable any longer.
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Ten Golden Rules Of Videogame Fanboyism
"SOE has probably united more gamers in hatred than Blizzard has subs"...daelnor
It's viable as long as SoE make a profit from it and there isn't really a marked decline in players at all. It's more like peaks and troughs.
Each time content and features are pushed in a game update the population goes up and then slowly declines until the next update comes along. The overall game population at any one time pretty much depends on how attractive the recent and imminent game updates are to the general playerbase.
The returning vet trials seem to work in terms of getting vets back into the game and we're still seeing plenty of new players. SoE need to just make sure they consistently continue to deliver desireable high quality content and features to keep players interested.
When I mentioned server architecture, I meant the "Shard Architecture" of Ultima Online where you have copies of the gameworld on different servers, as opposed to EvE or STO where I understand they have a model where players can all play on the same game world instance.
Performance wise SWG servers do a pretty good job, many lag complaints are due to client side problems when you start drilling into them. Mass PvP and sheer weight of players in one area (high traffic areas have dedicated server resources) pushing area activity to Very High/Extremely High is the kind of lag that the Devs can do something about.
It's this lag that the players via the Senators focus on identifying and documenting in order to get the code causing it optimised or more server resources dedicated to the effected areas.
No marked decline in players but yet you agree they need to roll up servers again...gotcha
You all keep saying the lag is client side when these folks have quadcore CPUs with top of the line graphics cards and a gazillion amount of RAM. The problem is not client side...its the CLIENT/SERVER SOFTWARE. They cannot fix that without a core rewrite. This has already been admitted by the developers and confirmed by a senator very recently.
I understand that SWG:NGE is your game and you feel the need to promote and support it. That is fine. At least be honest about it please.
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Ten Golden Rules Of Videogame Fanboyism
"SOE has probably united more gamers in hatred than Blizzard has subs"...daelnor
SWG offers a 14 day free trial. Like the poster above, I honestly recommend the free trial (which, last I played a couple years ago, did limit some of your chat options and possibly your mail options due to the need to combat credit spammers' use of trial accounts) in order to make your own assessment of the game.
In all honesty, don't listen to any of us on a message board here. This is a place where you will read all kinds of opinions, ranging from good to "oh my god, Sony is Satan incarnate! Don't dooooooo eeeetttt!!!" and while we are all entitled to our opinions, I don't necessarily think that it is fair to you or to the game for you to make a judgment call based on others' opinions without ever having at least given it a shot. I also recommend Starsider because as the poster above states, it has one of the largest populations, everything the game has to offer - space, PvE, PvP, RP, crafting, decoration - you name it, there are players there who have been at it for a long time and who are, as a general rule, willing to give new players tips to help them get started, and if you're inclined to group, you're probably not going to have a terrifically hard time finding people to group with. (Also, I am biased because Starsider was my server
)
The trial is free, it won't cost you anything except the time it takes to download the client. If you love it, play it. If you hate it, uninstall the client and move on.
Firebrand Art
"You are obviously confusing a mature rating with actual maturity." -Asherman
Maybe MMO is not your genre, go play Modern Warfare...or something you can be all twitchy...and rank up all night. This is seriously getting tired. -Ranyr
I agree...try it and make up your own mind. The game will speak for itself.
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Ten Golden Rules Of Videogame Fanboyism
"SOE has probably united more gamers in hatred than Blizzard has subs"...daelnor
Wait...Badger, I am not sure I understand your post here. Can you clarify? Are you judging server populations by PvP officer rankings?
I'll grant it's been a day or two since I played regularly, but I keep up on things via a few friends who still play, more or less. Bloodfin, for instance, has always been a more heavily PvP-dominant population than has Starsider, which has always been a more heavily-dominant RP population. Even with the free CTS (which I did use a vet trail when the new GCW changes were rolled out to check how that was looking), Starsider still wasn't as heavily PvP-dominant as Scylla or Bloodfin back in the days when I was on Scylla, so my question would be is it really fair or even correct to use GCW officer ranks as a judge of population numbers, considering that overall server populations, "pound for pound," are not accurately reflected in the number of people on the PvP batlefield gaining officer ranks? There are plenty of people decorating, crafting, RPing, PvEing that officer ranks simply do not reflect since the basebusting exploit no longer exists (thank God), so does this graph account for them as well in terms of server population, or do they just "not exist" in terms of this graph's representation of server populations?
Firebrand Art
"You are obviously confusing a mature rating with actual maturity." -Asherman
Maybe MMO is not your genre, go play Modern Warfare...or something you can be all twitchy...and rank up all night. This is seriously getting tired. -Ranyr
It is not 100% accurate but it is emperical data that can be used. It clearly shows trending and is one indicator of game health.
You can see where they made changes on how GCW points are earned. You can also see where Bloodfin tanked. Now some of those players transferred...some quit outright...and some just stopped playing on Bloodfin and moved to SS or Flurry.
The GCW update also makes it easy for non combat toons to obtain rank without risk which to me is indicated in the chart.
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Ten Golden Rules Of Videogame Fanboyism
"SOE has probably united more gamers in hatred than Blizzard has subs"...daelnor
I'm not arguing that at all. I'm just asking the question. Personally, I have always, always, always hated the practice of using GCW rank as a means of attempting to determine server population because it's just not necessarily the most accurate (and GCW senators and devs alike have used it to argue for unnecessary changes to the system, in my opinion) - though I do understand that it is often the best anyone can do because Sony keeps sub numbers very close to the vest as a general rule.
Whether it's easier to gain rank through PvE or not isn't the question (though the update was necessary, long overdue, and I applaud them for finally getting it done). Starsider does admittedly have an insanely high pop, evidenced by simply logging into the server. Honestly, were I Sony, I would strongly consider disallowing any more existing player transfers to that server in order to allow new players to roll there if they wish to do so. The server's fairly well packed - or it was the last time I logged in right after the update went live.
Firebrand Art
"You are obviously confusing a mature rating with actual maturity." -Asherman
Maybe MMO is not your genre, go play Modern Warfare...or something you can be all twitchy...and rank up all night. This is seriously getting tired. -Ranyr
Can you clear something up for me, beacuse it sounds like you have an idea what is causing the client side lag and you have a good relationship with devs and have gotten good information from them in the past, but your statement is somewhat confusing. If the lag is being caused client side maybe new players can do something to avoid the problem if you explain what is happening client side to cause the lag?
Do you mean that most computers today are not beefy enough to run a 6 year old game and that is causing the lag? Do you mean the client software needs to be optimized or do you mean the server software needs to be optimized? Do you mean graphic and game setting optimization or programming the code in the engine to be more effecient?
I can see where adding more servers to handle high population zones might reduce server side lag, but how can that help resolve client side lag?
Heh, the servers probably need to be merged because players from low population are paying to transfer/regrinding on higher population servers. Things are pretty steady otherwise.
The biggest problem in identifying lag in SWG is that many players can't differentiate between client lag and server lag. All you need to do is turn on the network monitor in options and keep an eye on the "Area Activity" indicator, this ranges from "Very Light" to "Extremely Heavy" depending on the load on your current sub-server.
Anything over "Very Heavy" is going to start giving you problems.
To Nifa,
I don't just look at the GCW ranked players, check my >>> SWG Galactic Civil War and Player City Statistics - 22nd of March 2010 <<< to see how I also factor in player city partcipation. It's certainly not definitive but does show us trends.
Daffid011, SWG players that have a decent rig and are aware of how server side and client side lag are differentiated say they dont get any client side lag. I don't know what a minimum spec machine would be to ensure you dont suffer from client side lag, that would be a good thing to know and I will see what I can put together on that. The other thing gamers need to be mindful of is ping times and packet loss from your connection, SoE dont tend to get any issues on their end so most problems in this department are down to the user.
Personally I have been playing SWG on a 10 year old PC up until recently. I just ordered a new machine as I am fed up of the client side lag in mass pvp. I can play the rest of the game no problem but the more extreme situations require a half decent PC.
A lot of lag can be cleared up by turning the graphics settings down, to be honest. Do you really need every single flower or blade of grass to show and wave in the breeze? Do you need volumetric shadows turned on? Do you really need all particle effects turned all the way up? (In PvP especially, trust me, you don't want them turned all the way up or it becomes a blinding mess.) Turning graphics settings down under the options menu can clear up a lot of lag issues in game.
There is some lag that is server-side if too many people are in one place at one time. Period. It happens in any game. And when a large part of a game's population is crowded onto fewer servers, that means more people are in a smaller space. This is just speculation on my part, but I would suppose that when they did the server transfers, they did not also significantly upgrade the server hardware and software to deal with the significantly increased populations. Yes, that many players and that much data added to the server will affect lag. I am not attacking Sony or SWG, I am merely stating known fact.
Some lag is also caused by the player's ISP. It cannot all be blamed on the server or the game - the player's internet connection and bandwidth restrictions (yes, Comcast, I'm looking at you and a few other companies) do play a role in lag.
And there is some that is coding. Once there was a huge issue with inventory that players complained about for over a month, but it only affected some of us. Finally I PMmed a dev with my system specs. It was quickly determined that, no, it was not a client-side issue as many of the senators and several devs were claiming. Because I handled it politely and without flaming, my account was cloned on the devs' boxes, the devs found and corrected the coding issue, and the entire population that was affected by the bug got a fix. The fact is the game is old. There are hundreds of thousands of lines of code and sometimes code is written today that conflicts with code that was written when the game was in development. Those things take time to find and correct.
Firebrand Art
"You are obviously confusing a mature rating with actual maturity." -Asherman
Maybe MMO is not your genre, go play Modern Warfare...or something you can be all twitchy...and rank up all night. This is seriously getting tired. -Ranyr
Thanks for the clarification, Badger.
Firebrand Art
"You are obviously confusing a mature rating with actual maturity." -Asherman
Maybe MMO is not your genre, go play Modern Warfare...or something you can be all twitchy...and rank up all night. This is seriously getting tired. -Ranyr
It's really all coding tbh. Why is it people only have issues running SWG:NGE but not any other game they play?
They really cannot fix it without updating the client and engine core. The core game was not written to run at the speed it is running right now. The backend server is now having to make calculations much faster than it did. I believe this is one of the reasons things sometimes don't fire when triggered. Throwing hardware at it is only a bandaid.
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Ten Golden Rules Of Videogame Fanboyism
"SOE has probably united more gamers in hatred than Blizzard has subs"...daelnor