Star Wars Galaxies: A Solid MMORPG
Written: Jun 11 '04
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Excellent theme, graphics, sound, and good fun!
Cons: Grinding for XP is monotonous at best, hard for the casual gamer to get into.
The Bottom Line: Though lacking in a few areas, SWG is actually a solid MMORPG worthy of your time, especially if you enjoy the Star Wars theme.
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| psychocy's Full Review: Star Wars Galaxies: An Empire Divided for Windows |
Few games have ever been as highly anticipated as Star Wars Galaxies, Sony’s Star Wars-themed massively multiplayer online roleplaying game (MMORPG) offering. From the outset people knew this game was going to be different, and they couldn’t wait – who wouldn’t want to play a Jedi in the Star Wars galaxy?
This game offers the casual gamer an overwhelming array of choices, involving career paths, factions, housing, and more. Where will you live? What will you do for a living? Will you participate actively in the wars? One of my characters is a droid engineer and master artisan who sells wares from his tent south of Coronet. He is neutral in the conflict. A second character is a Rebel lieutenant and weaponsmith, dealing out justice to Imperial scum on Tatooine and manufacturing illegal firearms, and he lives in a tiny house in a player-created city.
The graphics are crisp and fast, and there is no loading between different areas, as there was in Everquest. The character animations are excellent, and the characters themselves are highly detailed and very customizable. The amount of available professions is staggering. Almost anything you can buy has been crafted by another player.
You consistently feel like you are in a Star Wars film, with the excellent sound effects, music, and landscapes all accurately reflecting what we have seen in George Lucas’s masterpieces. Landspeeders dart around the deserts of Tatooine, banthas slump lazily in the heat, and stormtroopers patrol Imperial-held cities. Actually, all of the visuals you would expect in a Star Wars movie are here except for one thing – space! That, however, is soon to be remedied with an expansion pack adding twitch-based combat in customizable spaceships.
In my experience the staff has been fairly efficient in handling problems, though once or twice they were rather slow to respond. The bug reporting and troubleshooting processes are fairly well done.
Now for some cons. The game is occasionally buggy and choppy when new patches are implemented. MMORPGs are an ever-growing and constantly changing project, so this is to be expected to an extent. Also, the game can be too much work for the casual gamer who only has a few hours a week to play. The process of working up the skill tree makes grinding necessary. Grinding is when you keep doing the same thing over and over, say crafting rifle barrels, to get experience points (XP) in a particular skill. This is really the only feasible way to progress in skills at a decent pace, since some crafted items are worth far more XP than others. The XP system works better for combat than crafting, since combat is innately fun.
Regarding servers: There are plenty of them. There is downtime for maintenance almost every morning, about 7am EST, but it is blessedly short. I have encountered few other downtimes and have experienced server trouble very rarely.
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
psychocy
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Member: Ken Sweet
Location: Laconia, NH
Reviews written: 24
Trusted by: 7 members
About Me:
Ken Sweet is a novelist, backpacker, freelance writer, and gamer geek, amongst other things.
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