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superb!

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 7 / 76
Date: October 19, 2005
Author: Amazon User

i work in game stores in the uk and this was just sent to my store ready for launch so i decided to try it out. and it is excellent! its a 1 player version of the mmo star wars galaxies! i dont play the online version but i did try it out for a month with a 14 day free trial about a year ago. this starter kit is the same as the online one but 10 times better graphics and lots more npcs to make up all the missing players. there are some npcs that sell items that in the mmo version can only be created by other palyers. also you get 5 charecters to play so you can creat items for yourslef if you wish and you get to try out most of the professions. the other cool new feature is the henchmen system, the same as in guild wars, you can hire people from cantinas to form a npc group to help you with difficult missions. i recomend this to all who love swg and role play!

Boycott Sony Online Entertainment and Lucas Arts.

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 166 / 207
Date: November 22, 2005
Author: Amazon User

I have played Star Wars: Galaxies for 782 days according to the /getvet command. I have purchased all of the expansions out to date. I was considering creating a second account. As of 11-17-05 my account is cancelled. The New Game, also known as the Starter Kit, is the third version of SWG and it is riddled with bugs and incomplete. It is a far inferior product to its previous versions as well. The NG was released after being kept secret for an unknown period of time and allowing players only a two week notice of it being published. Even less time was devoted to it being tested by sources outside of SOE. Trials of Obi Wan and the NG were released in such a manner as to call into question SOE's and LA's ethics. As represented by the employees who post to the forums SOE and LA are uncarring, glib, and/or vastly out of touch with the player community.

Most of these are not new complaints. However, with the release of the NG these problems have escalted to such a degree that the game is no longer playable. While some are content to merely switch games I am not. Simply changing the direction of the flow of money to SOE and LA will not get their attention. I am boycotting all products created by Sony Online Entertainment and Lucas Arts. I encourage others to do the same.

I do not think my actions alone with effect SOE or LA one iota. In fact, I doubt anything will change their policies. The fan base for Star Wars and other properties is sufficiently numerous to mitigate any discontent portion. While some have predicted that the NG will cause the collapse of SWG I believe otherwise. It will lose many current players but those will be replaced by SOE's and LA's new target market. SOE and LA will later use the negative comments and future subscriptions numbers to prove that they were right all along and to dismiss anyone who opposes them as being knee jerk reactionaries who are against change just because they don't like change. Because most likely the next expansion will also bring a new version of SWG as SOE and LA attempt to copy whichever game is doing better then.

Destruction Of A Game

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 23 / 24
Date: November 22, 2005
Author: Amazon User

Never in my whole life have i seen a once loved MMORPG destroyed in such a way.The customer service from the people who make this game is the most dire i have ever seen.Be warned the game is not even finished and never has been you will be paying to play a broken beta that you will be basicly testing for the PS3
Xodust

I WISH I COULD PUT ZERO STAR

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 19 / 22
Date: November 22, 2005
Author: Amazon User

This was once the best MMORPG I've ever played, fun, interesting, innovative in its skills system (you could switch professions over and over again, just like in real life, so you could never get bored), with a lot of Role-Playing to do if you wanted, a LOT of people playing it and being happy with it, and for whatever reason that is completely beyond me Sony Online decided to kill this game.
They released what they called "New Game Enhancement" in November 2005, and now Star Wars Galaxies has just turned into another shoot 'em up for 10 year-old kids, where everybody can now be a Jedi at first level (no more quests to fulfill), which is also completely stupid because Jedi are now the weakest of their new "class" system. Yes, you are now once and for all stuck in a specific class, and you can choose between the overwhelming number of... 9 classes ! So now you see Jedi everywhere, but Jedi carrying rifles because their lightsabers and Force powers are useless against even low-level NPC !!!! If George Lucas ever plays this game, he's gonna have a heart attack.
This is totally ridiculous, as is everything else in this new stupid childish game that has absolutely nothing to do with the Star Wars Galaxies we all played and loved.
If I wanted to play a Doom-like game, I would have bought one, if I wanted to play World Of Warcraft I would have bought it (I might do now), I bought Star Wars Galaxies because it was a MMORPG like no other, and that's why we tolerated its numerous bugs, but now that it's like all others, but not as good as the others, I'm gonna play a better one.
And so is everyone I know by the way, you can now actually walk in Mos Eisley and be alone in the whole town cos noone is playing this game anymore !!!
Don't waste your time and money on this piece of crap.

THIS MADE THE NY TIMES

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 4 / 4
Date: November 22, 2005
Author: Amazon User

I got this posting from a former guild of mine when I was doing SWG. Looks like the SWG problems made the NY times

By SETH SCHIESEL
Published: December 10, 2005

For two and a half years, Emily E. LaBeff, chairwoman of the sociology department at Midwestern State University in Wichita Falls, Tex., spent 30 hours or more each week playing the online computer game Star Wars Galaxies. Not for research, but for fun.

Logging on to the game on weekends and many nights after class, Ms. LaBeff directed Athena Wavingrider, a powerful Jedi she created, through the far corners of the Star Wars universe, fighting on behalf of the Rebel Alliance against the tyranny of the Galactic Empire. Like millions of other online gamers, Ms. LaBeff, 54, discovered a camaraderie and friendship with other players that were far more important than the play itself - relationships that can be hard to replicate in "real life."

"It's replaced my television time, and I don't go to the movies anymore," she said, chuckling. "I don't keep my car as clean as I used to. But it's not because of the game itself. It's because of the people." She added, "We all had this wonderful second life together."

And now it's all gone, at least in any form that Ms. LaBeff and thousands of other Star Wars Galaxies veterans would recognize.

Last month, LucasArts and Sony's online game division, which have jointly run Star Wars Galaxies since its introduction in 2003, suddenly turned the game upside down, making the most sweeping changes ever made to a persistent online game. ("Persistent" means that the game world is constantly running, and players may log in and out as they please.) Unsatisfied with the product's merely moderate success, the companies radically revamped the game in an attempt to appeal to a younger, more trigger-happy audience.

Previously, the game was unabashedly complicated, appealing to mature, reflex-challenged gamers with its strategic combat style and deep skill system, which allowed players to carve out profitable, powerful niches as entertainers, architects and politicians. Now the game has become self-consciously simple, with a basic point-and-click combat system that is meant to evoke the frenetic firefights of the "Star Wars" films.

To Sony and LucasArts, the changes are a necessary step to help the game appeal to a broader audience. (The companies do not release subscriber figures, but many gaming experts believe that before the changes, Star Wars Galaxies had about 200,000 subscribers, each paying about $15 a month.) But to thousands of players, the shifts have meant the destruction of online communities that they might have spent hundreds or even thousands of hours constructing. Now many Galaxies players are canceling their accounts and migrating to other online games. They are swapping tales on "refugee" Web sites with names like Imperial Crackdown (imperialcrackdown.com). Ms. LaBeff, for instance, said that she had canceled all three of her Galaxies accounts and had joined a new guild in World of Warcraft, another game, with her old Star Wars friends.

"Someone might wonder, well, it's just a game, what's the big deal?" said Robert Kruck, 54, an engineer for Motorola who lives in Schaumburg, Ill., who said he had canceled seven of his eight Galaxies accounts. "But for many people it is much more than a game," he said. "It is a part of their lives where they have invested huge amounts of time building a community. And that community has been based on a sophisticated, mature game. So now, for them to take an adult-level combat and economics simulation and turn it into a mindless game for 10-year-olds is a violation of that community."

For Sony and LucasArts, the idea has been to make the game more "Star Wars-like," tying it more explicitly to the films.

"We really just needed to make the game a lot more accessible to a much broader player base," said Nancy MacIntyre, the game's senior director at LucasArts. "There was lots of reading, much too much, in the game. There was a lot of wandering around learning about different abilities. We really needed to give people the experience of being Han Solo or Luke Skywalker rather than being Uncle Owen, the moisture farmer. We wanted more instant gratification: kill, get treasure, repeat. We needed to give people more of an opportunity to be a part of what they have seen in the movies rather than something they had created themselves."

Ms. MacIntyre said Galaxies had lost "significantly more" than the 3 to 5 percent of players who typically leave any online game every month. She said she expected the game to return to its previous subscriber levels in six months, a process she hoped would be accelerated by the introduction of a new television infomercial hawking Galaxies later this month.

"We knew we were taking a significant risk with our existing player base, but we felt so strongly that we needed to make these changes for the sake of the game's long-term future that we all held hands, LucasArts and Sony, and went forward," Ms. MacIntyre said.

It may, however, be a rocky path, because the revamped game is receiving mostly horrible reviews from players. On Gamespot.com, a leading game Web site, about half of the more than 600 players evaluating the game have rated it "abysmal." Some 14 percent have called it "terrible," and 6 percent have described it as merely "bad." The game is described as "perfect" by about 12 percent and "other" by 18 percent.

"We just feel violated," said Carolyn R. Hocke, 46, a marketing Web technician for Ministry Medical Group and St. Michael's Hospital in Stevens Point, Wis. Ms. Hocke said she once had as many as 10 separate Galaxies accounts but has canceled all but one in the last two weeks.

"For them to just come along and destroy our community has prompted a lot of death-in-the-family-type grieving," she said. "They went through the astonishment and denial, then they went to the anger part of it, and now they are going through the sad and helpless part of grieving. I work in the health-care industry, and it's very similar."

Now, then it looks like that Smedly his very hell bent on staying the game's exisiting course-looks like they would rather see the game stopped then attempt to save it or give into player pressure. There is a possible date of Feb 2006 when LA and SOE are going to meet and rather decide to keep this going or stop it totally.

It is about time SOE stop living there dream world and face up to reality. SWG should not be turned into something it isn't. It was find under the orginal system. But to make sudden changes without player support is plain insane. They can make all the changes they want, just dont except the general public to pay for crap.

As for the YAY sayers, the SOE defenders go a head and defend this crap-just realize that SWG days are now getting numbered.

Use to be a good game.

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 138 / 180
Date: November 23, 2005
Author: Amazon User

This use to be a very good game full of depth. They just did a massive change to the game, hoping to get some of the market share from WoW. They tried to make it feel more "Star Warsy". What they did was tear it apart. It is no longer an RPG. It's also not a first person, or third person shooter. It really is nothing at all now. For anyone that has ever played a decent shooter, you'd laugh at just how bad this is. To speed up combat they just sped up the game. Animations look terrible now. Crafting and entertaining basicly has been taken out. They went from some 30 professions to 9 (7 if you take crafting and entertaining out). A major reason this game was so enjoyable was that you could do anything you want. Now, you're stuck into a profession darn near forever. You can't mix and match like you use to...ext.

This game lost a lot of players after the combat upgrade a few months ago. And, again they are leaving in droves. I see this game getting shut down by early next year. Don't put a lot of time (or any) into this game, it's about to go down the drain.

More misleading/deception from Sony.

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 29 / 33
Date: November 23, 2005
Author: Amazon User

Ever heard the phrase "the third time is the charm"? Well, that doesn't apply to SOE's handling of Star Wars as a MMORPG.

Sony Online Entertainment has essentially released Star Wars Galaxies three times already in just over a two year time span. Each time, they pushed the game out before it was ready; meaning, paying customers were forced to endure a game riddled with bugs, which should have still been going through beta testing, and relying on SOE's promises of future fixes. Fixes which in each previous incarnation often took over a year to materialize, if ever. Most did not.
SOE's record of managing this portion of one of the most famous franchises in history has been abysmal. They've had a steady track record of broken promises and poor customer support/relations throughout. Add to that the deceptive marketing of its most recent expansion, The Trials of Obi-Wan. Gamers were encouraged to purchase this item, only to learn 2 days later that the game as a whole would be changed completely in just 2 weeks; something that had not even been hinted at any time prior. In fact, the game had just undergone a complete revamping only 4-6 months ago. With this newest incarnation, some professions, which they had only a short time prior announced revamps for in order to fix what had been broken in them since the game's initial release, as well as to make them more interesting and fit more completely within the milieu, were going to be completely removed and negating some of the rewards within the expansion.

The "New Game Enhancements" are really just a dumbing down of the original game and converting it from a MMORPG into a first person shooter in order to try to market to the console gamers. One of the features that had made Star Wars Galaxies unique was your ability to pick & choose your skills according to how you wanted to play. Want to be a Jedi Musician? How about a Dancing Armorsmith? Or, if pure combat was your cup of tea, how about a Bounty Hunter Carbineer? All of these were possible in the old system. Even in the second, Combat-Upgrade, version. Not any longer, however.

Crafters in the game have had virtually all individuality removed from them. In the old system, the quality of the resources used in crafting an item could greatly enhance its capabilities. This is no longer true and any items purchased is virtually identical to any other, regardless of the quality of materials used. Another issue, prior to the original launch of Star Wars Galaxies in 2003, Weaponsmiths were promised by SOE that there would be no lootable weapons that would be able out perform crafted weapons; otherwise, why bother buying weapons from weaponsmiths when you could get a better one for free by doing some quest. That promise was broken with the release of named quality weapons (Exceptional, Legendary, etc) and weapons with had various sorts of Damage over Time properties (poisons, fire, disease). This led to a rush of players all trying to find what sort of creature/NPC dropped this sort of loot and then camping them in order to obtain these items.

In addition, all the quality items and resources people had spent 2+ years acquiring in order to provide the very best merchandise for other players to buy were just negated virtually overnight.

If you have a masochistic desire to be abused by a company with no concern for its customers issues, who regularly make/break promises, who force a broken product on you with the nebulous promises of fixes down the pike, then Star Wars Galaxies is for you

Huge Ripoff, HORRIBLE game.

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 27 / 31
Date: November 23, 2005
Author: Amazon User

I have been playing this game for about 2 years. But now, it's totally changed and is a total ripoff.

Don't buy it. Don't even think about it. Save that $15 or go buy WoW. This game is dead. They screwed their player base. Lied to them about where the game was headed and then basically told all of us to shove it when we said we were unhappy.

If you looked at the forums for this game, you would see how bad it is.

In a couple months, they'll close the doors on this game anyway. No reason to waste your money

Poor Support/Poor Design

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 20 / 24
Date: November 23, 2005
Author: Amazon User

This game, as it curently stands, is a very poorly designed and executed first person shooter. The controlls are clunky and non-intuitive, the interface is ridiculous, and much of the game is buggy and simply broken. Scanning the forums for this game indicate that customer service and support for the game are incredibly bad. I reported a problem I was having using the Customer Service ticket system (took quite a while to even figure out how to access this) and received an obviously cut and paste response that had very little to do with the issue I was pursuing and simply indicated that the reps were "aware of the problem".
Sadly, although I love Star Wars, and love the idea of playing a character in a Star Wars universe, this game simply isn't very fun.
Instead of this game, I would recomend Star Wars Battlefront 2 or Knights of the Old Republic 2. Both are significantly better games.

If you love bugs and poor customer service, SWG is for you!

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 19 / 21
Date: November 23, 2005
Author: Amazon User

The combat makes me sick to my stomach. It's absurdly fast, and you have to keep your enemy targeted. The enemy runs much faster than you do, and they tend to congregrate together, so you run the risk of aggroing all the enemies at once. And then dying. I can't seem to stay alive. And did I mention the movement makes me sick?

The game is now a level-quest. You quest, you kill, you level up. End of story. End of game.

This used to be a diverse, multifaceted game with 36 professions. You could mix and match skill sets to come up with what you wanted. This was one of the selling points of the game, originally. But now it's all gone. Pick from 9 "iconic" SW professions, like TooOneBee (21B). You know, that iconic medic droid who healed Luke. Uh huh. Oh, and Jedi used to be sort of rare, because it took forever to get there, rightly so. Now you can start as a Jedi! Not that you can do much though.

If you are seven years old, and like first person shooters and are a rabid Star Wars fan, then get this game.

If you are intelligent and even remotely mature, and like to immerse yourself in a well thought out SW universe, then pass on this. It's too bad that's it's gone so downhill.

Oh, the new player tutorials and the first 10 levels aren't bad. They did add some good stuff to it, mainly to hook all those new players they will need since all the vets are quitting. But once you get past that, there's not much else to do but kill kill kill.

It's very much a downgrade. If you *have* to get it, try the free trial before you waste your money. Or go look at the SWG forums.

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