Oh, and my favorite... Open war.

None of these ridiculous 10-man raids full of sub-par players on the crossroads and towns that don't even matter to the rest of your faction. None of this waiting in line for organized, artificially generated battles. Who cares if the horde takes AV, as long as you get your honor points, right? No, real war is when you can pull out a gaffi stick in the middle of Theed, go overt, and suddenly turn the better half of the city into an urban battlefield as friend and foe alike rush into the fray.

So let's let SWG be what it was and always should have been. WoW is a great game, and I played it for an equally lengthy period of time, but there's no definitive "perfect" MMO, and SWG, for all its trips and stumbles along the road, was a truly fantastic game in its day, with an entirely different focus than the competition, and an entirely different appeal. Unfortunately I doubt we'll ever get those good times back...

Ehecu

enter WOW.......simple game make simple people happy.......not to mention that its WarCraft and anyone who ownes a PC has at one point or another played a Craft game while not as many have played MMOs or Star Wars games

VenoMuS

Luziphir

Step 2: Completely revise game, alienating the few fans who have stuck by you for the long haul, and somehow make the game worse in doing so.

Step 3: Slowly add "new" content that is really just features the game had before you "reinvented" it.

Step 4: Profit!

Gouki4u

It was a really fun game till yea jedi's popped up everywhere and would take out all your group and the only ones to actually do anything were combat medics, Oh yea they were really overpowered till they finally balanced them but i think they sucked after that.

idk, i thought of coming back and saw a buddy of mine still playing his bounty hunter, the biggest city on the server (eclipse) was a ghost town, which was my guild's town btw.

As it stands now i'll stick to WoW and maybe move to warhammer.

Savior

Shermi

I had to sub to SWG last week in order to contact some people on the SWG forums who have been using my artwork without permission (RadiantCG.com check it out, but please don't steal/re-use w/o permission!), and I figured for the $15 I'd get the chance to log in to SWG and lament all that has been lost.

I logged in at first, completely lost presented with the FPS-kiddy wannabe gameplay and was resigned to sign off. However, just before I did someone from my old friends list signed on! They told me they started playing a few months ago and showed me all the (relatively) new interface options that allow you to turn off all that FPS crap and make it into a semi-normal MMO. Complete with target selection, "auto-aim" and the ability to use special attacks from the two-row toolbar (i.e. normal MMO)!

OMG, it suddenly clicked. SWG is strangely not the same complete piece of crap I remembered/expected it to be since the NGE! I mean, it almost plays the way it did post-CU, which admittedly is not as good as if it were pre-CU but still. The Expertise Trees seem to give your character some semblance of uniqueness. The devs seem to have realised their cluster@#*& and moved the game away from the NGE crapfest towards what a more normal MMO should look like...

The distillation of the 30 some odd myriad of classes into 9 isn't entirely as terrible as I expected it to be. I used to RP a sniper by combining the Ranger and Rifleman trees. Well, after I did a little checking around and playing with a couple profs (Officer, BH) I found that Spy had options to line up pretty well with what I used to do. It's surprisingly not bad...I'd have to say the biggest loss to the game is the ability to combine a trader/entertainer with a combat class. Pigeonholing crafting / "social" characters I think is something that hurts the game more than anything else.

There were also surprisingly not as many Jedi as I expected there to be. I'd say my encounter rate was somewhere around 303%. Now that is high, when given even class distribution only 1/9 players I encounter should be a Jedi, and even given 1/7 for combat classes, it's still not as bad as the 50%+ that I expected it to be.

So, I must say, that after a week back, my intial impressions are roughly positive. Yes, there are bugs still. Yes, there are some balance issues. But yes, I've also had more fun this past week than I've had with WoW in the last 3 months.

Giolon

Tezs

Take them out of the toaster please, they're done.

axiomatic

I actually enjoyed the game for the first few months, once it became obvious that half assed expansions were going to be released every 2 days in place of actually adding content and bug fixes that the players were asking for, it was over for me.

Pull the plug already!

Patient

Sheesh, first they try to threaten the vets with the whole "let the noobies blow up your house thing" and now they're re-implementing pale imitations of what greatness existed before and calling it new. Very crafty, but I'm not buying it.

Trekkervger

They've actually done a good job of overhauling the old profession and getting all of the crafter professions involved.

The best part are new mounts, and mutated creatures.

Go to the SWG and check out the mutated Rancor images and tell me thats not impressive.

SWG is fucked up, but its still the most interesting MMO out there. When somebody makes a space MMO that doesn't suck golfballs through a garden hose (yeah I'm looking at you EVE) I'll be happy but until the industry gets over their infatuation with swords and elves I'll be here. It still has the best community I've found in an MMO.

iameleveneight

scratch

DiscoBeard

Cap'n Jack

I used to play SWG back before the huge shakeup, and I really did enjoy it. I had a fairly useless character (Bioengineer/Pikeman) but had also been a Wookiee Mayoress and a droid engineer in the past. It was a game for the Explorer player type, but then they changed it and to a great extent pushed away the players they had and gambled on attracting other types instead. I too sigh when I look at the box on the shelf.

Tinkergirl

I enjoyed being the mayor of a small city; we had lots of great parties at our local Cantina, and the small community we had built was fun to hang out with. But with overt Rebel Jedis running around Theed and spamming the chatbox by calling everyone a "N00B", only to be sliced down by 15 covert Imperial Bounty Hunters, the whole Star Wars Universe collapsed around itself and was sucked into gamer's hell :(

Antilochus

All I see ahead for Galaxies is a series of shark tanks which it continues to jump over.

hemlock_martini

Parsifal

As others have said, this concept isn't new only the way you go about it is.

I guess I'm one of the only people here that still play it. WOW just wasn't deep enough for me and the crafting in it stinks. SWG is still fun and they add new content constantly. IDK, to each their own I guess. . .

Lachoy

Total rewrite. This one is dead anyway. Rewrite the game and re-introduce it all WoWified.

JackOnTheMap

criminallyinane

The only thing IMO opinion that SWG had going for it was probably that it had the best community system in any game i played. Guilds, making cities and towns with other fellow players and then having mayor elections and stuff. In a way i kind of miss SWG, i probably would have gone back to it for one month if they hadnt already messed up to the game even more.

The biggest thing that let it down at he start though was the lack of content. It promoted player crafting which was a good thing, but i expect to get more loot from a locked box at the end of a dungeon containging one CDEF Pistol and 1 resource unit. (CDEF is the weapon you enter the game with, and one resource is useless since you need 1000's of units to make anything and the chances of find the same resource again are nil)

Cirrus

BTW there was a Creature Handler in the Star Wars films: Malaki the Rancor trainer from Jabba's Palace. The guy who got really upset when luke killed the rancor.

Mawdsley

Anyway, that's all I had to say. I only played the game for 30 days or so back before it started getting really terrible.

Nekojin

elevenoverzero

Just recently I tried to install a 14 day free trial of the game. Bad Idea....It took 4 hours to install....Then almost 50 more hours to update...

I shit you not almost 50 hours. I left it on over night and came back and the time just kept going up.

So I said fuck it

RagingTowers

Wernstar

And now I am almost furious. This cannot possibly be making SOE any money, and it comes off as nothing more than mocking those who loved what SWG once represented.

Bobby McPresscott

Once Jedi arived, it destroyed any sense of balance or any attempt to create content for other classes. Call me bitter, but the last thing I'd want to play is a Jedi Knight II MMO, where everyone is really a Jedi and the only non-Jedi are the NPCs. Because if you make Jedi realistic, then playing anything else is nearly impossible. Make it equal and you lose the Jedi fans.

SWG had it near-correct. Rarity was the key. Personally, I think they should have done three types of servers-- No Jedi, Rare Jedi, and Full Jedi, with Jedi as a starting class.

Now if you take Jedi and only Jedi, they had some things right. I liked the classes of Jedi they had. Enhancer, Healer, Defender, Lightsabers, Powers. All they needed to do was have a system in place where each branch had two types of skills for each box. As your character went light side or dark side, there would be modifyers that made your character stronger in some acts and weaker in others. Some would be neutral.

I still hope Bioware makes a Star Wars MMO, but I hope they take their experience in making content where you're not a Jedi (a good chunk of each of the last couple games) and realize that not everyone wants to be a Jedi. Some people really do wanna be Uncle Owen. Some, like myself, just wanted to RP a Ranger. An Antarian Ranger, at that.

*sigh* That game brings up a lot of wonderful memories and outside an EMU, I doubt I'll ever have as much fun in an MMO. Jedi poodoo. =P

Phenix

ninjarr

give it to someone else and let them do it right!!

metallicorphan

Sadly agree!

EnigmaNemesis

Sounds like some kind of underarm deoderant or a feminine hygiene product.

Atheist Jew

About SW:G... Wookie ERP. Do you still yarn for some good ol' star wars MMO? Something are better left in the dark.

NotSoCool

O.k.

"Han Solo, I choose you!"

Ghede

A part of me wanted to get excited about this. But, looking at the SWG box sitting neglected and abandoned in the corner by my desk, I just can't bring myself to do anything more then sigh sadly.

ColbyWolf

Lu-Tze