After a 9 month hiatus from SWG I decided to reinstall it and give the game another try. Now that the expansion is out, I thought that it might be worth it for me to get my character up to a respectible rank and buy the expansion and do some star fighting. When I began to play almost a year ago, it was still a new MMO, with plenty of bugs but plenty of charm. You could sense the potential in the game, and could see around the rough edges with the hope of having an awesome gaming experience once the little things wrong with it were ironed out. Unfortunately, not much has changed about the core game in the past 9 months. If anything, the game has become even more needlessly complicated, and many of the year old bugs remain. Graphics remain average and needlessly bloated and piggish. My top of the line rig only averages 22fps in cities, compared to the silky smooth rates I get in other more graphically intensive games like Doom3. The game requires huge amounts of memory to play and huge amounts of hard drive space. Loading times are still long between zones. Audio is basically non existent once you get past the handful of looping environmental sounds and the weapon sound effects. Many skills remain broken, or just plain useless. It's not that skills have been nerfed, they just no longer work as intended, or never have. Documentation remains sketchy, and skills often say you'll get a bonus that either doesn't correctly apply, or it doesn't make a difference. Other gameplay mechanics have become been needlessly complicated, like the Stat Migration process. You used to be able to change your attributes slowly over the course of a few days, now you need to find another class to do this for you. The player search engine remains useless, because there are hundreds of titles and hundreds of mix/match class combinations. So, if you needed an Image Designer to help you migrate your stats, but all the Image Designers in the game happened to be using a different title (which people often choose arbitrarily because they sound cool, like "Hunter" or "Iron Chef"), you wouldn't be able to find someone to help you. The Stat Migration change doesn't make the Image Designer class more useful, it just makes life for the other 20+ classes in the game more frustrating. There are even entire professions that serve little to no use in the game, or are still hopelessly bugged. The politician track in the game is a good example of this. It may sound like fun to be the mayor of a city filled with other players, but the game doesn't give you enough control over the city itself, nor do you have any ability to enforce rules other than appointing city members or setting taxation. Even if you're the mayor is personally responsible for sinking a million credits a week into a Metropolis sized city, the game gives you no ability to even find out who owns a building in your city! As a final insult it's impossible to even step down as mayor, as citizens auto-vote you back into office unless they specifically go out of their way to choose a different candidate. Seeing as cities are a giant money sink, nobody ends up running against you, so your only option is to let the city decay into nothingness. It's complete lack of foresight in professions like this that really ruin the game. The politician is just one example of possibly 25% of the game's professions that have borderline-unplayable problems with them. Another 25% of the professions have serious balance issues with them, and contain bloated skill trees that are mostly filler that give you only tiny rewards for skilling up into them. Crafting remains a strong point in the game, and it's fun to survey for resources, create harvesters, and skill up on the crafting professions. However the end result of crafting remains dubious because SOE has STILL not implemented a player merchant search function. The only way to find items is to either go to a local Bazaar, which only sells newbie items under 6000 credits, or wander aimlessly through the hundreds of player run "cities" that sprawl right outside every major NPC city. Most of these cities are ghost towns, filled with tons of empty houses and player merchants that promise huge deals and giant inventory but have nothing in stock... or, nothing you want to buy. Seeing as the only way to search for an item is to go from house to house you'll quickly grow sick of this procedure. Likewise it's useless to attempt to sell your own crafted goods for a profit, because you'll be selling most of the items at a huge loss to the 6000 credit-capped bazaar. Sure, you can spam your personal merchant's location on the Auction channel and the chat channel in heavily trafficked areas like starports, but those are both generally ignored and if you're annoying enough, you'll be manually /ignored by individuals anyway. You have no idea on how to set prices for your items unless you constantly shop around, and even if you remain competitive there's no way for other players to find your store unless they're also wandering randomly. This brings up combat, which in the end, disappoints as well. I still found it a fairly boring and automatic process (you just target and select specials during the actual fight). The first few skill levels in a combat profession can be exciting but they quickly turn into the same mindless grind as crafting does. Before you know it, you've capped the combat experience, because you'll eventually figure out that a medic can buff you for 15000 credits and those buffs will let you take down huge amounts of monsters in the 3 hours they last. Your end result will be credits, which eventually pile up, but in very short time you don't have anything to spend them on other than a crafting career. See above for the problems with the crafting system; all your combat credits will be spent mastering crafting professions which you will have a very hard time finding customers for. The other sides of the game, such as Jedi training and faction points and the few instanced "dungeon" like missions that are available, are really just some extra stuff tossed into the game and far from an incentive to keep playing. Jedi skilling is a very long, boring route, requiring massive amounts of time skilling up on everything in the game, which you immediately throw away once you obtain Jedi status. Then, when you're a Jedi, your life consists of killing mobs again and avoiding bounty hunters - which due to the lame game mechanics, isn't half as exciting as it may sound. With the "new" crop of released MMOs such as City of Heroes and World of Warcraft, SWG really isn't much to look at, or much to play. It's often confusing, usually frustrating, and starts being a mindless grind way too soon into the play experience. SOE has been promising changes to just about every aspect of the game, over and over again, throughout the past year. However in lieu of fixing the core game they instead release an expansion pack, which introduces even more problems. Both CoH and WoW have superior, streamlined interfaces, better graphics, and interesting story arcs. It's fortunate that SWG has the Star Wars license, because if it was a generic sci-fi universe or a random fantasy setting I doubt people would continue to play it as long as they have.
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