Blackmoor Vituperative

(This is a compilation of my impressions of Star Wars Galaxies. It repeats parts from some of my previous blog posts, hopefully in a more coherent form.)

I am willing to give a lot of leeway to a game if it allows me to play in the Star Wars universe, but Star Wars Galaxies has so many problems it’s nearly unplayable.

• The graphics are extremely dated, like something from the mid-1990s. Compared to beautifully rendered games like Guild Wars… it’s just no comparison.
• The radar (sometimes called the compass) featured by nearly all games (other than World Of Warcraft, which has a minimap but no radar), is unavailable until one reaches roughly 10th level. That is simply absurd.
• The controls for the game make the most basic tasks — targeting an opponent and then attacking them — an exercise in frustration. Essentially, it’s impossible to simply select a target and attack them, as you can in every other game I have ever played. Guild Wars, again, is the high water mark here.
• The Player-vs-Player mechanics are utterly borked. There is no separation between areas that are “safe” and areas that aren’t — there are no safe areas. If PVP is enabled, it is enabled everywhere. There is also no separation or discouragement for players of wildly different level attacking each other, meaning that anyone who enables PVP is instantly killed unless they are at least 70th-80th level.
• The game only permits you to have two characters per server. Two. 2. T-W-O. That’s ridiculous. Every other MMO game I have played permits at least six.
• The last straw for me was the idiotic name filter.

I had played a Jedi up to level 20, and was working on another character when I ran into a peculiar error message. When attempting to create a character named “Siobhan”, I got an error message that said names of famous Star Wars characters and planets were not permitted.

Um… what? Since when is the name “Siobhan” a Star Wars character or the name of a planet?

So I went on the Star Wars Galaxies forums and asked if this was a famous planet or character that I’d somehow never heard of. The answer was… ye gods, it’s just too ridiculous. The answer was, “Because the name filter won’t permit any name that has the letters H – A – N in it.”

Ethan. Chani. Hannibal. Vaughan. Nathaniel. Siobhan. “…han…” is a very common series of letters in names. And none of those names are permitted? You’re kidding me, right? They weren’t kidding.

You know, there are so many, many things wrong with this game (I have listed only a few), but I struggled through and persevered for a couple of weeks because, by gosh, it’s Star Wars. I will go a long way and forgive a host of faults just to play in the Star Wars universe.

But that was just the last straw. Any game with that level of obnoxious, overt stupidity built into it is simply not worth my time.

I really, really look forward Bioware’s MMOG.

Finally, a word about the “New Game Experience” and the “Combat Upgrade”. A great many forum posts and reviews are nothing but bitching and moaning about these game updates from 2005. News flash: this is 2007. Get over it. Complaining about something that happened in 2005 is just pathetic, particularly when there are more than enough things to complain about in the game as it is today.

This is my final update on my evaluation of Star Wars Galaxies.

I have played a Jedi up to level 20, a spy up to around 10, and was working on another character when I ran into a peculiar error message. When attempting to create a character named “Siobhan”, I got an error message that said names of famous Star Wars characters and planets were not permitted.

Um… what the hell? Since when is the name “Siobhan” a Star Wars character or the name of a planet?

So I went on the Star Wars Galaxies forums and asked if this was a famous planet or character that I’d somehow never heard of. The answer was… ye gods, it’s just too ridiculous. Because the name filter won’t permit any name that has the letters H – A – N in it.

Ethan. Chani. Hannibal. Vaughan. Nathaniel. Siobhan. “…han…” is a very common series of letters in names. And none of those names are permitted? You’re kidding me, right? They weren’t kidding.

You know, there are so many, many things wrong with this game (I am not going to list them all, because it’s simply not worth the effort), but I have struggled through and persevered over the past couple of weeks because, by gosh, it’s Star Wars. I will go a long way and forgive a host of faults just to play in the Star Wars universe.

But this is the last straw. Any game with that level of obnoxious, overt stupidity built into it is simply not worth my time.

I really, really look forward Bioware’s game. Hell, at this point I am thinking about giving World Of Warcraft another try. I hadn’t played SWG yet when I evaluated WOW, and I think I may have been too harsh on it.

I am writing this post more or less as a note to myself, but maybe they will be useful to someone else, too. Here are the changes to the standard key bindings to make SWG playable (or least reasonably so).

Mouse Pointer Mode Default — Checked
Jump — CTRL-SPACE
Primary Action — SPACE
Primary Action and Attack — [unset]
Set Intended Target — X, MOUSEBUTTON1
Summon Radial Menu – MOUSEBUTTON2
Toggle Auto Target — T
Toggle Repeat Auto Attack — R

Note 1: you have to hit R (in this setup) to attack with, because a normal attack will just stop after you attack once. Essentially, you have to turn on auto-attack every time you attack something. That means you can’t use the same key to “use” and “attack”. Yes, it’s idiotic, but that’s how it works.

Note 2: you periodically have hit ALT because SWG has a borked user interface that changes “mouse modes”. Yes, there is a very good reason you don’t see this in any other game. It’s idiotic.

Note 3: you periodically have to hit ESC or MOUSEBUTTON2, because SWG has a borked user interface that prevent you from selecting a new target if you examined something else. For example if you looked at a terminal screen ten minutes ago, you won’t be able to click on that Tusken Zealot who’s doing his level best to kill you. Infuriating, but I see no way around it.

This is an update on my evaluation of Star Wars Galaxies.

I have discovered some tricks to make the user interface for Star Wars Galaxies a little better. There is an auto-aim function that makes it less of a click-fest, you just have to enable it. Every. Time. You. Attack. Something. Yeah, well, at least it’s there.

http://starwarsgalaxies.station.sony.com/players/guides.vm?id=80115

There are also a whole lot of guides available, which is pretty cool.

http://starwarsgalaxies.station.sony.com/en_US/players/guides.vm
http://swg.allakhazam.com/db/guides.html?guide=538

And there is a radar, it’s just not available during the entire first portion of the game. So from levels 1 to around 8 or so: no radar. That’s just stupid.

However, there is a crazy level of detail in this game, for everything from trading to smuggling to bounty hunting and god knows what else. There are so many slash commands, it’s almost like a MUD. I used to really like MUDs.

So I am still playing. It’s growing on me.

Well, I played Star Wars Galaxies for an hour or so this afternoon, and I have to say, the UI for Galaxies looks really dated. Like, mid-1990s dated. By default, there are no targeting hotkeys at all, and there is no radar/minimap, making it even worse in those respects than World Of Warcraft.

I am pretty baffled. How hard is it to look at how other games do things and implement them? I’m not talking about curing cancer, here.

Also, the animation is really crude. Very clunky. World Of Warcraft and Guild Wars are both much better.

Still, it’s Star Wars, so I am inclined to give it more of a chance than I gave Warcraft (and I still may try Warcraft again, especially after comparing it to Star Wars Galaxies). But my initial impression of the game is that if it were anything other than Star Wars, I’d be uninstalling it now.

This is an update on my evaluation of World Of Warcraft.

Well, I have used up my free trial period with World Of Warcraft. I really can’t see myself paying to continue. It’s just too much of a chore to target and attack things.

Star Wars Galaxies is even worse, at least by default. I have found a number of settings to ameliorate SWG’s worst problems, but it still requires several taps on a keyboard and a mouse click just to attack someone, and periodically the mouse will abruptly change “modes” or the attack will stop working and you have to hit Escape and then try again.

On the upside, SWG is smart enough to pivot the character when the target moves — WOW doesn’t. Instead, you get an idiotic “you must face your target” message.

You can’t see it, but I am shaking my head.

I swear, I wish the developers for these games would go play Guild Wars for ten minutes and see how a user interface ought to be designed.

Oh, well. I have some more free time with Star Wars Galaxies. Maybe something will come up that makes the game’s UI less freaking frustrating. I don’t have high hopes, but I haven’t given up yet. It’s Star Wars, for crying out loud.