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.