8 Year Star Wars Galaxies Veteran Gets His Feet Wet in SWTOR (Finally)

In June of 2003 I began playing Star Wars Galaxies. Having been fascinated by the Star Wars Universe since I was a child, and being a very avid console game player, I had played just about every Star Wars console game title released to that point. PC games were still quite new to me however, as most of my gaming had been done on the Sega Genesis, Nintendo, Super Nintendo, and Sony Playstation. The thought of playing an online game where I would interact with others was very new and exciting to me.

At the recommendation of a friend, I decided to give Star Wars Galaxies a try. Being a console gamer, I had no idea Star Wars Galaxies was even in development, let alone set to be released soon. I had played games like StarCraft and Star Wars Galactic Battlegrounds, but this was my very first experience in the MMORPG world, and the first game that actually had a monthly subscription attached. It was Star Wars, I simply had to be there I told myself. To my delight, I was completely amazed with the game itself and seeing hundreds of other players in just one area, moving about like ants, doing their missions, forming massive battles. I was very impressed. I spent countless hours and endured alot of sleepless nights attempting to unlock my Jedi character slot, which I finally accomplished on Mother's Day of 2004.


Throughout it's very checkered history due to unwanted changes in the combat system, a massive player exodus when World of Warcraft was released, the shutdown of SOE services for nearly two weeks due to intrusion by hackers back in April of 2011, and countless game updates attempting to restore the game to it's former glory, I had maintained 5 accounts until the very end. September 15th, 2011 was the last day subscriptions to the game were accepted.

I cannot even begin to list all the people I met during that time from all over the globe. I even learned that one of my cousins in Australia had been playing it for years as well. The game was simply amazing. I had put much time and effort into my characters I had created, which equaled thirteen in total in the end.

June 24th, 2011 will be forever remembered as one of the most depressing and disappointing days of my life. Sony Online Entertainment released a statement that all Star Wars Galaxies services would be closing down on December 15th, 2011. I was simply heartbroken. My characters had become an extension of myself. I knew of Star Wars the Old Republic long before the shutdown was announced, but I simply did not want to abandon the work I had done in Star Wars Galaxies, even though the writing appeared to be on the wall already when SOE has laid off their entire Denver Colorado office staff on March 31st, 2011.

I resisted. I became one of the very vocal players who voiced their unhappiness with the decision to shut down SWG. I posted on the SWG forums, Lucasarts forums, SOE's Facebook pages, and even helped circulate a petition that was created by another player in an attempt to alter this decision to shut down the game. We had reached close to 5,000 signatures, but it became apparent that our efforts were falling upon deaf ears. I became angry and frustrated, and even voiced my displeasure towards Star Wars the Old Republic, blaming it as the main cause for the game I loved being taken away. My friends and guildies stopped logging into SWG, perhaps sharing my frustrations, and the game lost alot of what had made it so special to me.

In July of 2011, Pre-Orders were started for SWTOR. I had come to the realization that the best way to continue on was to take my legacy and guild to another game. I pre-ordered the collector's edition for SWTOR. I came to terms with reality and accepted the fact that SWG would not be around forever.

While waiting as patiently as I could, in August 2011 the same friend who had introduced me to SWG asked me to try World of Tanks with him, a free to play battlefield type game with World War II tanks. It helped pass the time perfectly, and I still am playing it to this day. It is a very quick and action packed game which reminded me of some of the console games I had played in earlier years. My best description of it was "Twisted Metal with WWII tanks". My guildies and friends started playing it as well. There was video game life after SWG I realized.

After months of checking through my email, and very jealously listening to a guildie who was in the permanent beta describe the game, I finally recieved an invite to the beta test Star Wars the Old Republic last weekend, which began on November 25th, 2011.

I was not disappointed. I was completely overwhelmed by the amount of things to do in the game. It really did make Star Wars Galaxies seem very small and redundant. People had said the graphics were "cartoon-like" and "outdated" which I fully disagreed with. I heard that the questing became tiresome, which I did not find to be the case either. I was also concerned how the game would run on my PC, being that it was a little bit older. Smooth as silk I found when I logged in the first time.

By Friday evening I was completely hooked on the game and very engrossed into my character's storyline. Each day I played I kept learning new things about the game and progressed to level 22. I tried the other classes for a short time to get a small feel for them but simply could not stop wanting to play my Jedi Knight. No need for 5 account subscriptions, as the game allows a total of 8 characters to be made on any given server. This alone made the game seem so much more rich to me with content.

I am now a firm believer that everything in life happens for a reason. Star Wars Galaxies was on the decline for years. My guild which used to consist of hundreds of members who would log in on a regular basis, became just a shell of it's former self, with under 20 people logging in regularly. I was losing touch with them all and the game had lost it's appeal to alot of people.

Star Wars the Old Republic will be around for quite some time, and I suggest that any Star Wars fan completely embrace it for what it is. The music, while not composed by John Williams, follows in the same tradition of the movies. It has that very epic Star Wars tone to it and I am very happy that I will be getting a copy of the soundtrack as well with the Collector's Edition.

The combat is much more complex than I had ever thought, almost to the point of being on par to some of the console fighting games I had played like Namco's Tekken series. There are counters, combos, and enough of a challenge to make me keep wanting to come back for more.

The character story kept making me want to see what happens next, with enough side quests to keep my progression on par to handle alot of the content on my own, while I was overwhelmed at the amount of Group Missions and Heroic Encounters that I would need to call upon my guildies to complete. None of which seemed necessary to pass a certain point and I never got stuck to the point where I could not progress. There is so much to do that I could not possibly squeeze it all into one weekend, or see everything it has to offer.

The space combat was very action packed and fast. It did remind me of StarFox for the Nintendo 64, like many people have said, which I always had loved. After a few upgrades to your spaceship it should be alot of fun and enough of a challenge to make you want to come back for more.

Another thing I noted that was unlike SWG was that there was nothing your character did to leave a lasting impression on the server. There is no player housing to be tied down to, or player cities. While I did not like this idea at first, I come to realize now that when the game launches there may be close to 50 servers running for the game. Who knows what might happen say maybe five years from now. It should be a very painless transition should they have to merge servers, close servers, or introduce character transfer. Many of my frustrations in SWG were rooted in real estate squabbles, not finding enough room for my structures, or simply getting there too late to take advantage of resource spawns or prime spots for housing. Not to mention also that some of the less populated servers became ghost towns, before SOE finally allowed free character transfer to a more populated server of our choice. This service was previously charged at a whopping $50 or more per character, depending on whether you wanted to take your items with you or not.

Every game ultimately is defined by how well the Player vs. Player aspect is done, and how much content there is after reaching maximum level. While I myself did not try any of the Player vs. Player Warzones, the jubilence of my guildies who did participate in them over our Teamspeak server assured me that this game has gotten it right in pretty much every aspect.

I very much look forward to the game's launch and sharing my experiences with you all. It's going to be a very fun ride. Star Wars Galaxies was indeed a very good game for years and years past, but I feel we are in good hands with BioWare and Star Wars the Old Republic.

May the Force be With You!

Stephen Cefai
Goji-Phen
Guild Leader of Eternal Empire

Choose your own adventure. The pitfalls of MMO

Recently I decided to give RIFT another go. I got an email stating that they made all these changes and added new content .. blah blah. So I thought, what the hell? My account is still active until October ... I'll give it another shot.

The first thing I was asked to do was to change realms as the realm I was on had been allocated as a trial realm. This is a really good idea. This allows the developer to have trial accounts that don't get used by spammers, and real players with real accounts are guaranteed that they're dealing with and speaking to other real players with real accounts.

So I transferred over to the new oceanic servers. TRION, the developer of RIFT, created two new oceanic specific servers about a month ago. Although this might have been six months too late for a lot of oceanic players, I was surprised to see the server full, in the middle of the afternoon, on a weekday. Although TRION didn't listen to the community that begged and pleaded with them to create an oceanic server when the game began, they have eventually seen sense.

If you haven't tried RIFT yet, I do recommend that you give it a go. The levelling and the  storyline/quests are not bad ... but, where RIFT seems to be lacking is with a real in-depth story. I couldn't even tell you the name of the world I'm in, and I've played the game on and off for over two months ... let alone tell you anything substantial about the main characters. The lack of cut scenes and true story-telling really let this game down. The graphics, interface, classes, and general world are all pretty good. I'd be so bold to even say that those elements are better than WoW but WoW also had the story-telling, dramatic heroes and villains, and cut scenes. In WoW I built up a true relationship with my character that was maintained over several expansions. It wasn't until they tried to re-hash old content that I found it was time to move on. Even with the best interface, if an MMO doesn't have a compelling story that attaches a player to their character, players will not spend real time in a game.

Another perfect example of this is Star Wars Galaxies. When the game was first released it was classified as a sandbox game. It was a massive open world, with no real guides but it was a world created within the Star Wars universe. The majority of the gamers were there because they love Star Wars. It was a buzz just hanging out at Anchorhead cantina, or going to Jabba's palace for the first time. The story was engrossed in the game and the complex character development system suited it perfectly. It wasn't until Sony was put under the pump by Lucas Arts to show a massive improvement that Sony made a critical error. They stopped listening to their community. They tried to copy the WoW model and at that very time destroyed everything that was potentially unique about the game. The simplistic character levels that they implemented just didn't work with the complex world they created.

So, back to my point, it doesn't matter how simplistic or complicated the MMO world is, the story is king. If you can't make a gamer get attached to his character, develop fps instead! If you are looking for a general idea of what Star Wars the Old Republic may be like, I suggest you download and play Mass Effect II. This will give you a general idea on what is possible with real story development.

What to do, where to go in SWG

Sony online Entertainment sent out an email to all their Star Wars Galaxy members, inviting them to come back to the game for the month of February for free! When I received this email, I thought what the hell, let’s see what they’ve done. When I last played this game three years ago, I had a few max level characters – an elder Jedi, which I spent months levelling to be an uber elite character, and also a master Bounty Hunter, which has a full set of Madalorian armour and is extremely wealthy.
When I logged in, I found most of my houses in the game had been packed up. This was a feature Sony introduced a while ago to clean up some of the abandoned houses throughout the Galaxy. Unfortunately, for players coming back, this means that the first hours of their gameplay involves unpacking houses and sorting out where all of their stuff is. For me, this took about 2-3 hours of gameplay.
While I was unpacking my house I got whispers from old guild members and got invited back into my old guild that I had founded five years ago. The current guild leader gave me some gameplay hints and told me what I needed to do for the new content in the game.
The new heroic dungeons that were introduced in a recent patch involve simple quest lines to give access to these instances. Apparently there are five heroic instances in total and the guys in the guild told me about the improvements you can make to your character. But after showing them what I had, so far as geared was concerned, we discovered that there wasn’t much I would need to be competitive. So after three years, SOE have managed to provide little to no improvement to characters, apart from their appearance. It really seems like SWG is more like a World Sim than an Epic heroic adventure. It’s more about setting up houses, cities and communities than epic battles against epic villains.
For me, the first time around, I loved it and levelling my characters was enthralling. The first time you discover new worlds were good times ... exciting adventures. But when you get asked to go to the same place to do similar quests over and over again, it gets boring real fast. There are only so many times you can be expected to kill the same NPCs for a loot item.
Good luck Sony. I don’t think I’ll be hanging around – but thanks for the free re-trial!