"Get aboard the Falcon kid. This place is gonna blow!"
To begin, Sony took the free form, totally open-ended Profession system featured in the original game and has scrapped it in favor of a completely generic level-based character development system that does no justice to the game. Now to begin, you must select between nine dull starting Classes like "Officer" or "Jedi" (yes, for some bizarre reason, Jedi is a starting Class now) with stale, linear progression paths that do nothing except turn you into a clone of everyone else.
It is also worth noting that two of these nine Classes are broken at the time of this review. Apparently, Commandos are unable to use their tag line heavy weapons and Jedi are outrageously underpowered. When was the last time you saw a Jedi Knight getting shot to death by a Stormtrooper?
It appears that the entire new newbie zone is a poorly planned work of deception. You are subjected to a painfully brief tutorial aboard some nameless Imperial prison before being rescued for no apparent reason by Han Solo and Chewbacca. You then make your laughably easy getaway from an entire Imperial fleet and take refuge on some nameless space station that just happens to be overrun with legions of thugs, malfunctioning droids, and small, flying lizards (yes, lizards). The station is infested with famous Star Wars characters like Boba Fett and R2-D2 just standing around with forgettable, broken missions for you to undertake. The whole area is missing the open-ended sort of wandering nature the rest of the game has, which means that the entire first few levels are designed to lure unsuspecting players who try the free trial (in which you can only access this structured newbie zone) into a different game then they are really going to be paying for. This makes the entire first few levels feel like a half-baked, ugly, broken Star Wars mod for World of Warcraft with goofy-looking combat.
Speaking of which, Sony created a new combat system for the game. Instead of the traditional turn-based MMO system, Sony has tried to code a Diablo-esque point-and-click combat system. This might sound cool, but in essence it simply doesn't work. The game was created with turn-based combat in mind, and you can't simply make an MMOs combat system do a 180 in about two weeks. The result is a patched-together, sloppy clickfest in which the winner is the one who holds his mouse cursor the steadiest. Also, for some bizarre reason, Sony chose not to implement the same system for NPCs, which results in characters running along at about 40 km/h, skipping happily through solid walls, and firing blaster bolts that seem to home in onto your heat signature and go through floors. To put it plainly, the combat is broken.
Also, the new interface looks like it was designed in MS Paint in about two days. For some reason, none of the windows are resizable, which makes for a lot of squinting for those who have weaker vision. There is now only one generic ability bar, and to use an ability, you have to use a button to bind it to the right mouse button, a la Diablo II. Due to the now extremely fast-paced combat of the NGE, the interface is clunky, slow, ugly, and bewildering. It seems as if Sony took as many intuitive interface ideas as they could and coded the opposite of each one.
Everyone knew that the Galaxies engine wasn't getting any younger, and before the NGE the graphics didn't look so hot. It had lots of sharp edges, bland textures, and generic objects, but with the NGE it seems that Sony has managed to destroy what graces remained. There are now countless graphical glitches, such as flashing objects and skipping character animations. I don't know how, but Sony managed to take an outdated graphics engine and undo it almost completely. I was amazed.
The only vestiges of a saving grace here are the sound effects, which is unsurprising since any game coming from Lucas Arts is bound to have great audio. But Sony even managed to botch that with poor attempts at voice acting and audio glitches. Certain sounds are way louder than they should be, which leads to a constant readjustment of volume. But the game never sounds right. In addition, the voice acting in the newbie zone (which is the only point in the game that it shows up) is grating and annoying. The lame stand-in for Han Solo is particularly bad. This culminates with annoying repeating sound bugs and boring cantina music. The blasters and explosions still sound fair though.
Even after playing this NGE update and writing this review, I still don't quite understand what happened. Sony took a venerable MMO with an exceedingly strong community and tried to make it into a World of Warcraft clone in the span of about two weeks. Even a retarded five-year-old understands the concept of not fixing what isn't broken. Sony is taking a lot of flak for the NGE, and they deserve every twisted bit of hot metal that has lodged itself in their sides. With players leaving in droves, Sony has to do something fast, and I would be suprised if Star Wars Galaxies: An Empire Divided survived to see 2006.
In short, don't buy this game. Don't play this game. Don't touch this game with a ten-foot metal pole while wearing a hazardous chemical suit. Hell, even thinking about this catastrophe can cause insanity. Make the jump to lightspeed and get as far away from this game as possible.