NationStates Jolt Archive

So I've been looking at screenshots and the site for this game, and it actually looks awesomely awesome. Of course, it's supposedly got loads of bad press, and everyone seems to hate it. Although that was apparently due to changes that screwed up the early game, and are therefore moot now. So, simple question: any NSers ever played Galaxies, and what did you think of it?

I played it for a while using a friend's account before Jump to Lightspeed came out and liked it quite well. Interesting skill system, great guild possibilities like founding your own city, and overall nice game play.
However, I have not played it since, and said friend mentioned that a lot of the changes implemented after JtL broke the game, leading him to delete the account he held for over a year. And that guy was a true SW nerd, thus I guess SWG sucks, now.

I've played it before and after "THE CHANGE" and it's a pretty fun game.

It used to be that you applied XP points to increase your skills in a variety of areas like marksmanship, medical, Armorsmithing, etc. It allowed a lot of flexibility in customizing your character.

Now, it's a lavel-based system where you choose a character class and rise in levels, similar to EverQuest.

I have a friend who, in the early game, spent months developing a Jedi. He had to gain skills from all skill areas, perform a buch of difficult quests, grind a LOT of XP, and eventually, one day he became a Paduan. Later, a fulll fledged Jedi.

Shortly after that, they changed the system to classes and now anybody can be a Jedi at level 1.

So, if you like class systems, and PvP, you will enjoy SWG.

They made it a lot more PvP with the changes, and it's much easier and fun for a new player, not so much for the old ones. It used to be that you could have a truly unique character, but now they are confined to classes, although they're bringing back the skills system for certain classes.

I used to have lots more fun before because you didn't have to spend hours and hours completing a mission, you could just go on a hunting expedition with your guild or solo and still get lots of experience points. There was more freedom to do your own thing.

I played it for 3 months (need to pay again), and I liked it a lot. I don't see what everyone was bitching about...

It's nothing like the game it was when it was released.

When released, it was nothing like the game it was when I first entered beta testing (beta 2).

SWG is an example of a MMORPG that was designed to be an immersive world without much of an internal game structure. Another example of a game like that would be EVE Online.

Most MMORPGs aren't like that. Games like EQ and WoW are all about the internal game structure, and the world exists solely to serve that end. There's not a lot of random exploration - simply being somewhere defines your level within the game.

Let's call the first group WORLDS and the second group GAMES.

GAMES are hugely more popular than WORLDS. GAMES attract many more casual players, they tend to attract younger players than WORLDS, and they attract players more balanced in gender.

WORLDS tend to attract men 20-35. As such, Sony realised that the game they'd designed had no chance to be as successful as they thought the license warranted (and wouldn't provide the sort of light entertainment LucasArts wanted), so they changed it. They started trying to make incremental changes just before release.

First, they cut the introspective professions. Anything that didn't involve killing stuff or dealing with people was out (Goodbye Industrialist and Miner). Then they gutted the crafting system. Plus, they had to fix an XP system that they'd apparently designed to avoid the tradition group of 3-6 players grinding for XP, but had actually created the perverse incentive for a tactic resembling a Zerg Rush from Starcraft. Dozens of lowbies would rush a creature vastly more powerful than them, and 80% of them would die every time. But the survivors would receive insane XP.

After more than a year of their half-broken WORLD, they redesigned the entire thing into a GAME and made it more accessible to 14 year old boys and their moms. And it barely resembled the original concept, which had actually been really cool.

Shortly after that, they changed the system to classes and now anybody can be a Jedi at level 1.
This was also a cool thing about their original design. At launch, there were no Jedi. Not one. And no one knew how to become a Jedi.

Which was good. Star Wars requires that Jedi are extremely powerful. In order to avoid grossly unbalancing the game, Jedi couldn't be common. Or long-lived. If you did finally become a Jedi, you were always PvP+ and you were subject to permadeath.