Star Wars Galaxies: Has anyone here played it?

[stellvia]

I beta-tested SWG but didn't buy the final version. Played a Teras-Kasi Artist and had Master Tailoring/ran a factory for it. It had a lot of potential, but they didn't know how to balance things properly, eventually punting on it with the whole Combat Update thing where they turned it into a level/class-based game. Reminds me of what happened with The Division: Some good ideas, but never got the balance working properly for group combat and eventually punted on the whole thing by making the Underground from your base of operations and making everything soloable.

Beta had issues, but it was progressing at a decent pace. Everyone imagined it would be ready for a fall release window... and then suddenly in early June they dropped the bomb on us that the game was gold and would be released in two weeks. The beta forums went into a riot and the mood immediately shifted from being fairly positive to tearing into the developers for releasing the game suddenly when it was not ready.

For example: Up until a week or two before the game went gold they still had major issues with their Oracle database. It wasn't saving item data after a session was closed. For the better part of a month you would lose almost all items you got or made once you logged out. Even at gold there were still some rare cases where items weren't saving.

You initially had 200 plots for placing structures and power and maintenance weren't yet implemented. So it was easier to just continue placing down personal extractors and letting them decay after a week or two. At the same time they finally implemented power and maintenance they cut the plots to 10 and reduced the extraction rate by 75%! It was woefully inadequate and in fact the handheld sampling tool extracted at a faster rate than the personal extractors did ... so then they nerfed the handheld tool instead of realizing the personal ones didn't have enough. Someone that ran one factory could have a medium house and if I remember correctly then you couldn't have any extractors then.

TKA was initially quite powerful as their best weapon (knuckles) was only a Tier1 weapon, whereas only Tier2 guns were out at the time. But with how shoddy the netcode was and the fact you could fire guns on the move, it was quite easy to kite a TKA and they couldn't do any damage unless they actually got into melee range and pinned the player. So it made sense that if they actually got into melee range that the melee master should beat a ranged player down—at the same time they released Tier3 and 4 guns they nerfed TKA damage by a whopping 50% and they became a worthless class.

The devs basically showed themselves to be utterly clueless when it comes to iterating on balance. Using a wrecking ball instead of a ball-peen hammer. And given the trainwreck that happened post release, I think I dodged a bullet by choosing not to buy it after that beta experience. Still makes me sad though

I'm told that Crowfall takes a lot of inspiration for its crafting and resource system from SWG, so I'm crossing my fingers that game will be fun.

[Piglord]

I played all three iterations, pretty heavily. So many development issues though. Even with all the bugs, lies, bait and switch, and underhanded bullshit it was still my favorite game to date. There were so many features of the game that I feel were superior to anything that's been released to date. I get on SWGEMU every now and then (I know, forbidden topic, but it was allowed to stay by both SOE and LA), it's just not the same. Mainly for nostalgia.

[mizeri]

i never did, but a guy at work played it, i was playing FF11 at the time, but he got another dude at work to play and they would talk about this "awesome carpet" he has gotten for his home in the game, i was like wtf?

[I Push Buttons]

Always wanted to play it back when I was a kid, but never got a chance because my family's PC back then was pretty garb.

By the time I built my first gaming PC, the game was long dead and then shut down entirely soon after.

[Equoowe]

I started playing at the start of 2004 then played on and off as I didn't have much money, then from about one month before the CU till a few weeks into the NGE I played, I didn't mind the CU and really got into PvP after unlocking my jedi and making a bounty hunter alt, had great fun doing huge guild wars with pretty much every rebel and imperial guild merging to make some mega guilds just to war each other.

When they announced the the NGE and pretty much said it was coming out in 2 weeks I was pretty pissed, has to be the most retarded thing you could ever do to a game and to think if they put as much effort into pre-cu as they did on the CU and NGE that the game could have been so much better.

Beta had issues, but it was progressing at a decent pace. Everyone imagined it would be ready for a fall release window... and then suddenly in early June they dropped the bomb on us that the game was gold and would be released in two weeks. The beta forums went into a riot and the mood immediately shifted from being fairly positive to tearing into the developers for releasing the game suddenly when it was not ready.

I think a lot of the issues with the game being rushed out and the devs being clueless was that a lot of the original dev team was taken off SWG, then you had stuff like the jedi holo grind which was really stupid in that if you wanted to unlock jedi you could possibly spend months playing professions that you didn't enjoy or just afk grinding to finish something like dancer.

[stellvia]

The Jedi hologrind stuff wasn't even around for release AFAIK. They were still talking about how it would be some sort of mysterious hidden path that would be different for everyone, etc. The concept of there being a Macguffin you look at for what the next thing to grind must have been something they came up with later.

[fangless]

Played at launch for a bit, all I can remember is I was some sort of a tailor, and sold a lot of trenchcoats and had to check on a lot of resource generator things quite often.

Our little guild had a city built up and whatnot, we were really organized from launch.

Idk, something about being able to just be a merchant full time was pretty interesting to me, same with being able to run out to the desert and see all the houses/buildings of the players. Brought me to back to Ultima Online days.

[WarpedAcorn]

The Jedi hologrind stuff wasn't even around for release AFAIK. They were still talking about how it would be some sort of mysterious hidden path that would be different for everyone, etc. The concept of there being a Macguffin you look at for what the next thing to grind must have been something they came up with later.

Oh, I remember quite clearly that they specifically Jedi's were IN the game at launch and you had to find the right combination (for your specific character) to unlock it. Of course no one ever did, and some classes were INSANE to level like Architect.

I also recall there being some patch later on and someone datamined that it contained the first hint of Jedi content.

[Syri79]

I used to play, pretty much from launch to NGE. I quite enjoyed it pre-NGE, even thought the Combat Upgrade (CU) wasn't too bad, but then just as it looked like it was all coming together, the NGE blasted it all apart, and took a huge crap on all of the current players, because someone who didn't know better decided they needed a WoW-Star Wars game, and rather than make a new one, why not just butcher the existing one... No, I'm not bitter... Not one bit...