 | Star Wars Galaxies...Why Sony Why October 08, 2007 2:48pm in gaming |
 So something got me thinking about my experiences playing Star Wars Galaxies sophomore and pre-junior year. It was actually the first MMO I ever played. When I first started playing it, it was really fun, it did a lot of things right. Sure, there were bugs, but such is the way with MMORPG's and Sony did a good job fixing the bugs as best they could. They had a good mix of professions, content, vehicles, etc. The one thing I really liked was that you could respec your profession at will. You could start out as a scout, play for a couple days, realize that it's not for you, and change to whatever else you wanted without penalty. You could do that after playing for years too if such were the case. And you could have a mix of many professions limited only by your profession points. For every skill in each profession you learned, you lost a profession point. Run out of profession points and you can't learn anything else. When you unlearn a skill, you get a profession point back...simple, yet done right. They did a pretty good job with the vehicles, adding speederbikes, swoops, etc. It made travel so much easier. The Jump to Lightspeed expansion did a very good job with integrating starships like X-Wings, Y-Wings, etc. into the game. No longer were you limited to the ground, now you could do space battles too. And the controls were beautifully integrated into the game. I really enjoyed the time I spent playing the game. Then came the disastrous combat upgrade where Sony did a lot of things wrong. Here are some to name a few. 1.) You could start out as a Jedi. OK, that may sound cool on the outside, but think about it. One, this is just after Star Wars A New Hope, there are only two known Jedi at this point, Luke Skywalker, and Yoda, save the Emperor and Darth Vader. The story line does not match the game. Now I accept the fact that you have to put Jedi in the game, it's Star Wars, you got to have them. But the way they did Jedi in the first place was much better. You had to work hard to become a Jedi, it was not something that you just got one day. Which was fine. You had to master 5 professions and then the Jedi profession. Took some work, but they were there, and because of the hard work, there weren't a flood of Jedi. Needless to say, post-CU, the new Jedi's were hated by all, particularly those Jedi who did all the work to get there only to discover people were starting off as Jedi. 2.) The whole profession system was all screwed up. I don't know whether they tried to model it off of the way WoW and Everquest did it or what, but either way, it was the wrong move to take. Now instead of using profession points, you simply choose one of the premade professions, really unable to constantly switch things around to suit your interests. Much like in WoW where you choose to roll a Warrior, Priest, Warlock, etc, you now do basically the same thing in Galaxies. The profession system was one of my favorite things about the game...and they ruined it. 3.) Tied together with the profession system was the leveling system. The old way allowed you to level up one or more aspects of your professions at a time. The new way. You're now level 1 through whatever its capped at. From what I remember in the little bit I played post-CU, there wasn't much else to it. There is probably more, but it disgusted me so much, that if I played for more than 2 months, it was a long time. As bad as it was, they did keep some of the better things the same. The worlds were still vast. The battle between good and evil, Empire versus Rebels was still there and done relatively well. But those things, just couldn't make up for what Sony Online did to a once good MMO. Part of me has considered trying it out again, giving it a second chance, as I still have my account, but I just don't know. The game I played and enjoyed just went away. |
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