Star Wars Galaxies 2.0?
Not quite, but it might as well be. I figured I’ld post this here since a few of you used to play SWG, way back when. Here’s the Letter to The Community as it was released to the players yesterday:
My name is Julio Torres and I am the Producer on Star Wars Galaxies for LucasArts. We wanted you, the great members of the Galaxies community, to be the first to hear some exciting news about the current and future plans for Star Wars Galaxies!
Over the past year we have been working hard to respond to feedback we have gotten from players, fans, focus groups, and other research. This feedback has ultimately centered on one key area: the game does not feel like a heroic Star Wars experience. Currently, the early game has a steep learning curve and there is no clearly defined path of advancement or adventure. Many of our fans who bought the game did not see enough Star Wars style action early-on and ultimately left our world. It is our goal to change this and improve the experience for all players.
We are introducing a series of game enhancements to Star Wars Galaxies this month that include both significant enhancements to the live game as well as a completely redesigned experience for new players. The primary areas of focus include combat and profession and character development. The combat depicted in the Star Wars films, fiction, and canon that we have all come to know and love is fast-paced, action-packed, and visually intense. In order to stay true to the Star Wars fiction as well as to make the combat system more engaging, we have shifted the turn-based paradigm towards a much more engaging fast-action combat system where you control every move! After receiving feedback from members of the community, conducting extensive focus tests, and evaluating the combat systems of other games in the genre, we are confident this new fast-action combat truly delivers what players, fans, and gamers have come to expect from a Star Wars experience.
As mentioned earlier, combat is not the only area where we decided to focus our improvement efforts. We have also improved and brought more clarity to the profession and character development system.
Changing a live game is never easy. We realize that players do not like to have their experience altered. These enhancements will take some getting used to and for that reason we lined-up some incentives for the current players to enjoy as our thanks for your loyalty to our game.
We value our community and want you to stay with us. Our goal is to continuously improve the Star Wars experience, the one we all know and love from the films and fiction; action-packed, story-driven, Star Wars fun. With these features and enhancements we are setting the stage for incredible things to come for Galaxies with more announcements happening in the coming months.
I’d like to thank you all for your continued support of Star Wars Galaxies and for making it one of the premier gaming experiences online today.
May The Force Be With You,
Julio Torres, Producer – LucasArts
Later in the day they released a STAR WARS GALAXIES NEW GAME ENHANCEMENTS – GENERAL FAQ, formally dubbing this the “NGE”.
So what’s changing? Short answer: everything. Instead of the previous 35+ professions, now there’s just 9: Bounty Hunter, Commando, Entertainer, Jedi, Medic, Officer, Smuggler, Spy, and Trader. All the crafting professions have been merged into “Trader”, and all the entertainer professions have been merged into one. Melee combat is basically gone, except for Jedi which is now a starting profession. Ranged combat is scattered amongst the remaining classes. Just like in EverQuest2, you choose your character class when your character is generated, and you can never change it, just grind up to lvl90. So wave buh-bye to multiclassing. Unfortunately, they’re still restricting players to 1 character per server, unless you’re one of the lucky people to have unlocked your extra slot before the NGE goes to live. Combat is getting dumbed down to Left-click fires, right-click for special. Professions like Creature Handler, Bio-Engineer, Scout, Ranger, Teras Kasi and others are simply vanishing.
So how do I feel about this? Well, I’m reserving judgement until I test it out. Given that now so much of the game is “twitch based” (Read: First-Person Shooter personal-skill, not character skill driven) balance becomes a completely new beast. Without multiclassing, balance should be simpler. But now you’re gonna have the “l33t” counter-strike kids capping everything in sight, and whining when they can’t. SOE claims that it won’t be like that, and is kinda witholding any information until it hits Test Center. When is that, you ask? Well, supposedly it will be rolled out to Test Center tomorrow, and on the live servers November 15th. And that’s what really ticks me off about all this. For a change of this magnitude they had to have been working on it for 6months to a year, minimum. So all the talk in the last 6 months about the Ranger Revamp and other things was just a lie. I feel especially bad for the Creature Handlers, the changes mentioned for Rangers at least went into the Spy class, but the changes mentioned for Creature Handler were simply a lie. Also, they’ve developed this entirely within a bubble, with no player feedback. It goes live in less than 2 weeks, and it’s never been tested outside Sony’s studios.
