I saw that SWG has a free trial and was very happy to be able to try it after all those years it already existed.
So I downloaded, installed and played.
First thing that came to my mind: why hasn’t this been localized to other languages? I would recommend it to all my friends – but most of them don’t understand english well enough to play the game.
Second was: Why can’t I choose a european server? The server list always snaps back to the top when I release the scrollbar. As I found out later this has to be one of the hundreds of new bugs.
When I finally managed to create my character I wondered why the graphics look so “old”. It should be possible to give it a much prettier look with high class textures like in other uptodate games. This somehow reminded me of Wing Commander 3.
Next comes the interface and graphics programming. When you jump, your character continues with a running animation while in air. When you sit down, your legs go through the seat. Some objects have collision checking, others not. So you can run through several things like tables. That’s just lousy programming/design.
Worst of all: When an NPC fights with you and you run away, he will shoot – and hit! – you even when you are in another room with two walls between him and you. You can do nothing but escape into another level by elevator - or die.
When I played spy, I wondered why my first skill – smoke grenade that should make you invisible – never worked. I tested it by running into a room, waiting for a mob and pressing the right mouse button, only to get a message that I have to stand still – what I did!
I died several times trying this, then looked into the support forum to find out that this skill is buggy, like the next skills a spy gets are. So I stopped playing a spy and changed to a bounty hunter.
Strangely enough there does not seem to be any difference in fighting with a spy or a bounty hunter, whereas everyone who knows those characters from other games or movies would think that
• a bounty hunter is a weapons/fighting specialist
• a spy sneaks around, is rarely even noticed and when he fights, he stabs from behind, but mostly hides in the dark and steals/hacks.
Fighting itself is very strange. There is no lock onto a target like in all other RPG I know of but you have to constantly hover your mouse over the target. Bad luck is when you hammer your mouse to shoot and then another mob walks into your line of fire, because you will hit him and he starts attacking you together with the first one. But if you stop firing the first one will kill you, so what should you do? Fighting a certain mob in a group of mobs is nearly impossible with this kind of fighting, as you surely will hit others, too. It looks like the update tries to be some kind of ego shooter in an RPG, but that does not work for me. They even implemented a reloading of the weapons, although there is no ammo in the game! It just stops to shoot and makes a pause.
So I wanted to become a space fighter and took on the first missions, which were at the lowest possible difficulty I can imagine. The hostile fighters are dumb as asteroids and only there to be killed, so most time a mission took was to get to the enemies.
What I missed was any kind of tutorial missions. All I got was text to read, not very interesting or role playing like.
And then I got a mission to uncover a spy, hiding as a miner. I inspected the miners as told, found one – actually they are all spies :-) – and got a text stating that I should type “/dock” into the main chat to dock with the ship and retrieve the cargo. I wondered why I have to enter a chat command while fighting instead of a button that could appear when near enough, but anyway, I typed the command – and got the response “ship denies to dock”.
I tried this with several of that spies, it never worked. With most of them I could not test it though, because they are flagged “red” – enemy – and several other players shoot them into pieces as soon as they spawn.
I had to land withouth fullfilling the mission after 20 minutes of testing only to hear from the mission giver that I had “run away”. The bad thing is I cannot go on until solving this mission, so I have to forget about my career as a pilot.
From my experiences in the first two days I have to say that I am not very impressed of the game. And from what I read about the recent changes I believe that I would have liked it without the changes.
Now the complete skilling process seems to have been deleted, all I get when leveling is a “you are now a bit stronger”. Where are the beloved skills points and trees from other games that make my character so special?
I won’t pay a dollar/euro for the game as it is now and I don’t think that many will.
Speaking of many…. I tried to chat in the game but only once got an answer when someone stood right in front of me. When I was in space I saw about 10 other player ships killing my spies – but they never replied, when I asked them to just say a word.
Regards
Thomas