Anery and I have decided to give SWG a go, just because we can. So here's the diary of our experiences.
Day 1:
Downloaded the client, with SOE Station Launcher. More bloody shiteware, but needs must. At something around 5Gb, that took me easily 24 hours.
Day 2:
Nice Star Wars intro, and a delightful character creation system. Choose from about 10 races and about 9 professions, and then play about with their face and body. It's on about the same level as AoC, although I don't know if it has a boob slider. Anyhow, I went with PCG's max face theory* and created Dogfish Speedo, a fat Mon Calamari smuggler.
I took Speedo on a run through a space station. After some fiddling with the resolution in the launcher it became less ugly, and after creating a dummy launcher I got xfire to pick it up too. It feels like Tabula Rasa, control wise, but I'm not letting that put me off and am getting the hang of it a bit now. So, I'm now about level 5. I've shot a few thugs, all of whom waited patiently for me to kill them, only attacking after I did despite me murdering their mate who they'd just bee talking to. When they died, the simply appeared on the floor. No death animations then. I also ran through a lot of scenery.
Day 3: Spacked around doing missions. Not particularly inspired stuff, but not tedious. A few levels in and I have some nifty abilities that mean I'm far more effective with a pistol. I like that my blaster isn't made obsolete as soon as I pick up a rifle. I also went for a bit of a fly in space. At first it seemed a bit unwieldy, but I'm getting used to it now.
Day 4 is in progress and will involve beer tonight. Also, I can confirm that this game has a boob slider, and Anery has created a fat Twi'lek dancing girl. Truly hideous.
The more used to it I get, the more I like it. It's still confusing as hell, but I can see so much potential for silliness - including players with (ROLEPLAY) above their heads. I'm sure the likes of us would wind them up no end.
Day 4: After a slow start this game is now ramping up the levels of awesome. Earlier I realised that I had a skill that killed entire swathes of bad guys. This means I can sit and watch some cocky bounty hunter pound on one guy, then I can kill five of his mates with one shot. Watching them all fall over at once is very satisfying. Later I found that you can equip any piece of clothing for appearance, while wearing a completely different one. This means I can use all the items that give me nice bonuses, but make it look like I'm wearing my pink shirt and trousers, and Crazy Frog flying helmet. This should be done in every MMONG. Even Eve.
Tonight, so far, I've made a car and painted it pink. Took me ages to work out (well actually Anery had to tell me) how to get out of it, so I disrupted a lot of people in the centre of Mos Eisley by joyriding through the middle of them in the Star Wars equivalent of a Smart Car. Then Anery showed me his party boat. It's a big spaceship with a bar in. There's a computer room with conveniently urinal shaped bits in, and a big black hole into space that I can only assume is the shitter.
This is us sat in the cockpit:
Or it will be once Dreamhost's FTP comes back up...
Having had a SW:G account before I had a few perks waiting for me when I finally got out of the newb starting area. Unfortunately when I did play it all those years ago all I did was try and pull stunts on my freebie speeder bike before declaring the game full of star wars nerds and logging off. So I have no i-fucking-dea what is going on. Fortunately neither does Mr. Pants so I don't look too bad.
Among these perks is a nice shiney new spaceship that can hold many peoples, and it has a bar! so I am devoting most of my time to turning it into a party boat, not found the local strippers yet but pole dancers are on my wants list - oh, and its fucking huge.
Hadn't heard of that, but it's essentially how I created my delightful Saints Row 2 avatar:
Yes, the boob slider works on men with green beards and pink combovers. MMOs could learn a few things here, too. Even Eve. Imagine spaceships with tits!
Day 5: I took some time out to try playing a Trader today. In doing so I confirmed that some particularly ugly characters can be created, this one being a fat, chinless, squinty-eyed Sullustan. Things started off promisingly - the crafting system, which is what Traders specialise in, seems extremely diverse, and my initial tutorial quests had me levelling without having to shoot a single thing. Choosing to skip the shooty quests, I went into the game and followed a similar quest chain which taught me how to scan for then mine various minerals, and then craft them into stuff to scan for different things such as chemicals, gasses, plants and energy sources. By this point I thought I might have found a new and peaceful way to play the game, which appealed to me a lot. Alas, it was not to be. Once I'd completed the initial chain I found myself clueless as to what I had to do next, and found myself faced with doing shooty quests as a distinctively unshooty character. Furthermore, I was being increasingly filled with a feeling that the complexity of the crafting system would mean that I would have to spend months grinding to come even close to making anything that could make me money.
So, I went back to my Smuggler. Now, I spent half of last night wandering around a bank looking for stuff on a kind of wild goose chase. A bank populated by hostiles who respawned in something like 30 seconds. Luckily they only seen to take exception to you if you run right through them for the most part. However, now I found myself blasting my way around the complex again looking for a single bloke to kill. Round and round I went, being forced to fight maybe one in five guards. Eventually I relented and googled the quest. The guy was in the control room apparently, which I'd been through at least twice before. This time I was taking no chances, and I entered the room and killed everything in there. Still no bloke. Until I turn round and find him standing right behind me, appearing out of thin air. I killed the fucker and left, with an ineffective string of guards following behind.
Finally I'd left the annoying mission behind. I could get back on with interesting quests. But wait, my quest log is empty but for something about looking for two commanders. Didn't seem like anything to do with my previous, but off I went. Five minutes and about 4km later, I find one. Turns out he's a rebel and he wants me to join the Alliance. I don't, and I tell him that, assuming I can then go to the other guy and become aligned to the Empire. Personally I'd prefer to do neither, but if I have to choose a side it's the one with the best uniforms. However, it seems the Rebels won't take no for an answer as the quest has now vanished from my log.
Taking a shuttle back to Mos Eisley to avoid another 5 minute drive, I find myself back where I started. I'm surrounded by high level roleplaying characters, but this time I have no indication whatsoever as to what I should do next.
buzzmong wrote:It's tempting to aquire a copy of the original CD's via ebay and play the open mod before the NGE version you're playing.
Because SWG back then was brilliant.
I am interested in more about this. Are you saying you can still play the origonal game somehow.. SWG was my first MMONG and i loved it before they bonked the crap out if it.
Find a player made town, terrorise, get banned from said town then rinse and repeat
Don't expect too much of a helping hand, SWG was all about living out the life of your character not just going from one quest hub to another. I preferred it when it was skill tree based and you got exp for doing specific things (shoot a womp rat with a rifle, you get rifle exp)
Morrill wrote:I am interested in more about this. Are you saying you can still play the origonal game somehow.. SWG was my first MMONG and i loved it before they bonked the crap out if it.
Yes, if you've got the original disks (or sweep them).
The http://www.swgemu.com/ team obtained the client code and were given the bare bones server code from the first release, and have gone and reverse engineered the full up to date (pre NGE of course) server backend, they've even made their own version of the SOE launcher you have to use to make it easy to connect and use.
Killavodka wrote:Don't expect too much of a helping hand, SWG was all about living out the life of your character not just going from one quest hub to another. I preferred it when it was skill tree based and you got exp for doing specific things (shoot a womp rat with a rifle, you get rifle exp)
Fair point, I'm maybe too used to my Warcraft addons giving me things on a plate. Some kind of journal entry or other hint as to what I could do might have been nice though. At any rate after playing this I can see a lot of potential in TOR, so long as they keep the good and learn from the bad.
fun times...
Hadn't heard of that, but it's essentially how I created my delightful Saints Row 2 avatar:
