SOE/LA took a great PC game and turned it into a console game and expected everyone to just live with it.
I've been playing SWG since the day it launched june 26th 2003. And although its had bugs and has seen changes during that time, they never did anything to it to make it unplayable till now.
The game started out with something like 30 professions(i dont know the exact number so dont quote me on this.) that you could mix and match any way you chose as long as you had the skill points to fit them together. This in itself was a major change from the normal online games out there that gave you a single profession as your template for the life of your character. then SWG went one step further with this and made it so you could sell back your skills and try different professions without having to delete your character and start over.
for me this was the life of the game. it gave us so much room to play around with our characters, it was great.
Recently behind all the players back, SOE/LA (Sony Online and Lucas Arts) did a complete redesign of the entire game. And before announcing the changes they were going to implement, they pushed out a new expansion. The Trials of Obi Wan. well the expansion hyped up all sorts of stuff like new creatures for the Creature Handlers to tame, many new quests geared towards jedi. and a ton of new quests and items. ok thats cool. we're allways looking for a new expansion and new things to do.
Two Days after the launch of this new expansion, they announce to us that they're making changes to the game. they're going to drop from the 30 or so profession paths we currently have down to 9. And certain professions like creature handler, ranger, Bio Engineer are not going to be part of the new game. they're being completely removed. So what does this mean to those players who've been playing those professions for the last 2.5 years ? it means they either deal with the changes and pick one of the 9 new professions or leave. Thats how SOE/LA feels about thier player base. These 9 new profession paths that you get to choose from are templates that you cant change around or drop and restart a different one later without deleting your character. to me, it seems like they took a step back in time.
The Controls and UI of the new version of the game are very hard to work with if you're not a console gamer. We went from being able to lock on to a target and engage combat with them to pointing a cross hair on them and constantly pressing the left mouse key to fire at them till they're either dead or we're dead. and alot of the NPC type targets run all over the place making it nearly impossible to keep them on target now. Max level Jedi are being killed by creatures 1/3rd thier own level because its nearly impossible to fight int he new system with a melee weapon. if you're not a ranged weapon fighter you're going to have a very tough time in the new game.
Graphics never changed. they're as good as they've allways been for a game 2.5 years old
Jump to Lightspeed (the space combat part of the game) is probably the only fun thing left to do int he game. its also the only thing that went unchanged. If you do decide to pick up this game and give it a try. don't forget to try out the space combat. you'll love it.
Anyways, after playing for 2.5 years and loseing most of the hours of work i spent in the game due to these new enhancements and the fact that the new controls art nearly impossible for me to play with, i've given up on the game and cancelled 3 accounts.
may the force be with you
Jarun Thaks