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PC - Windows : Star Wars Galaxies: An Empire Divided Reviews

Gas Gauge: 73
Gas Gauge 73
Below are user reviews of Star Wars Galaxies: An Empire Divided and on the right are links to professionally written reviews. The summary of review scores shows the distribution of scores given by the professional reviewers for Star Wars Galaxies: An Empire Divided. Column height indicates the number of reviews with a score within the range shown at the bottom of the column. Higher scores (columns further towards the right) are better.

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ReviewsScore
Game Spot 75
Game FAQs
CVG 67
IGN 80
GameSpy 60
GameZone 90
1UP 70






User Reviews (161 - 171 of 434)

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SWG RIP

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 7 / 7
Date: November 17, 2005
Author: Amazon User

The first exodus occured after the legendary Combat Downgrade. Now the NGE update has left most cities a wasteland. When I started playing there were so many people outside the spaceports you could find groups all the time. It was fun. Every character was different. I had maxed out all my skill points with no advanced professions. I could do a bit of crafting, medic and kill most medium level critters. It was fun. Then came the CU. I could no longer use any of my weapons. This forced me to specialize a bit but still not too bad - I even got glowy (on my way to becoming a Jedi). Now becoming a Jedi used to take months of grind (16 weeks to padwaan absolute minimum) but I started. I was about halfway through. Now that is all wasted. The elimination of professions and replacing them with character types is just dumbing it down. The new combat system will appeal to some but not those who want to keep their mouse from breaking. Each downgrade they apply to this game loses them more players. People were crying out for bugs to be fixed. But instead they keep throwing the code away and introducing new ones. Expect to see some server consolidation, at the rate people are leaving most have only a few weeks live.... I used to enjoy this game but now SOE have acted like school yard bullies and taken all the fun out of it...

UPDATE 11/18
After playing the NGE for a few days or should I say trying to play it, the game should now have negative stars. The controls are totally crazy. They have tried to speed things up, but with the controls being moved from the mouse to the keyboard it makes movement crazy. The function keys seem to have been lost, oh wait does the PS3 keyboard hve F Keys? It is clear that is where this is headed... I really tried to like it but it just gets worse. I have a couple more weeks on my account, but I am not renewing....

Update 2006
Ok so I stayed a few more months, but my account was cancelled in June. I nearly sold my character on ebay but I could do that to anyone. I so wanted it to work. But you now rarely see anyone else. Gone is all the interaction. Gone is the fun. If you want to fight with a lightsaber get one of the Knight games. Do not even think of buying this.

Too bad SOE does not care about its customers!

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 7 / 7
Date: November 06, 2005
Author: Amazon User

You would think that a company would take into consideration the thoughts of its players. Unfortunately, this is not the case with the designers of the Star Wars Galaxies team (SOE= Sony Online Entertainment). They will charge you for expansions and then turn around and remove 80% of the professions that you have spent months developing. They do this with NO warning and will not refund money. They do not support the needs and desires of the playing customers. If there were ever an example needed of what not to do with your online customers, SOE could write the book.

SWG - New Game Experience Blows

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 7 / 7
Date: November 17, 2005
Author: Amazon User

Beta 2 tester - November 16, 2005
SOE ignored all it's loyal customers and pushed a huge turg out their a$$es call the New Gaming Experience,

A post from my Guild site

Lucas Arts and SOE have decided that the game needs to be taken to a new market - The console games market. They pushed all their veteren players out with a revamp of the game to something resembling a cheap nintendo game for Star Wars, at least this is my opinion. I am sure some will come to embrace the new game and the market they seek to capture, but not this old gamer.

There was an expansion pack released called trial of Obi One and a subsequent refund for anyone who purchased that expansion as their legal department realized that the expansion could not deliver what was promised after the NGE is launched.

For any of you that were around since this game's launch, thing back to November 2003. Two years ago this month SOE introduced vehicles and player cities to SWG. This was a very exciting time, and arguably the pinnacle of this game's existence. CS city was established and I road a mount for the first time that day, my best day in SWG hands down. As I recall I looted 2 gurk king hides the night before the patch.

The day the player city and vehicle publish was to go live was very intense. There was a lot of excitement. Many of us were on the and wishing each other luck on getting our spots. Many had architects lined up to make city halls. A lot of us had our would-be mayors logged out right by where the politician trainer would be located when the server came up. A LOT of people did not go to work or school that day hehe.

Player cities actually came to define this game early on. It gave guild's a sense of pride and ownership. It gave folks places to gather. Gave us territories to defend/assault. This gave us rise to the GCW and the massive PvP that ensued. Crimson City on Talus eventually drifted to Lok and all but a few faithful followed Zion after the masses departed for World of Warcraft. Syth PA was born shortly after, Stevai, MHB, MrRight, Sti and a few more I can hardly recall . Syth Isle was born and we forcably took over the Corellian Island just west of Coronet. Months later the city lost more of it's players and was sold to an outsider who did keep the city alive for almost a year as Syth Island. Syth Fire Base was started and flourished into Corellia's only Imperial base of operations. Bases abounded and spread for miles in every direction.

But while all this was going on, there were many underlying problems that were creeping up slowly. See the game had only been out for a few months. People had not fully realized to what extent things could be crafted. We had not had many good resource spawns, and not substantial quantities either. Almost no crafters had any experimentation tapes, nor did they fully understand how the intricacies of the crafting system worked.

But over the next couple of months, people realized they could make armor that would resist 90%+ all damage. Or that they could make MIND poison that would kill everyone within a 30 yard radius in three ticks. Or they could make buffs that would more than DOUBLE our stats.

These were all items that for some reason or another were never capped before the game went live as they should have. This was a direct result of SOE's short-sightedness. They underestimated the resourcefulness of their player base.

Combine those factors with bugs and exploits (faction bases had MANY that took MONTHS to patch), unbalanced classes (TKA, CM, Rifleman) and eventually the revelation of HOW to unlock Jedi (effectively taking a huge part of the player base OUT of the game as they pursued the grind) - and you had the begining of the decline.

Before all this, the GCW was super addictive and I would say in November 2003 the majority of players were actively involved somehow. Not sure how many remember the battles at CS town. Only reason it ended was because people had to leave to go to work or school lol. The game was FUN and MUCH more addictive then. Faction meant something. We had a LOT less faction hopping back then because the war was in full swing.

Well, the game kept deteriorating so SOE came up with the plan to fix it - originally called the Combat Revamp, later to be known as the Combat Upgrade. That was the upgrade where I found myself in other games, specifically WoW. Now we have the NGW. There are SO many things I find wrong with this I do not even know where to begin.

First off, SWG never has been known as having a substantial amount of content. To be honest, I think that half the content in this game WAS the professions - being able to build a unique character template for YOU. Bored of tailor? Try droid engineer. Bored of pistoleer? Try carbineer.

Now I see these nine classes folks will be pigeon-holed into and I think that SOE just took it's BIGGEST strength for this game and turned it into a weakness. Character classes in SWG will now have even less diversity than WoW because in WoW at least they have the talent system to offer some diversity within a class.

Sure, this will be easier for them to balance, and easier for players without a clue, but it seems to me that this is a cop out and a slap in the face to anyone who has been loyal to SOE through it all.

I am sure the NGE will be fun for a little while, but unless SOE plans on adding a LOT of content, the NGE will become boring FAST.

Where did SOE go wrong over the past few years? Well here is a quick list of major issues that they either never addressed or took too long to address or just flat out screwed up:

- Mind Pool
Making the ONE unhealable pool explicitly targetable by only a few classes automatically made some classes better than others. Morsky's Rifleman/TKM was sweet, then Jackal's one handed headhit2.

-No Caps
Having no upper-limit caps on DOT's, buffs, food&drinks, armor effectiveness, weapons, etc allowed for game-breaking items to be crafted. Had there been better testing in beta with MAX resources they would have discovered this before the game even went live.

-Jedi
Making an alpha class in an MMORPG is always going to be a failure. Who would NOT want to play the dominant class? Nerfing Jedi was wrong too. We want Jedi to be like canon and strong. SOE should have NEVER allowed player Jedi, except Jackal, lol. To my understanding this was a HUGE internal debate before the game went live, with LucasArts weighing in to push Jedi. BIG mistake. Fact is the game had MORE paying subscribers before there were Jedi. Fact - after DOT's (often pointed out by Jedi as the true death of the game) the game had even LESS subscribers. I hardly think all those people quit because DOT's were nerfed Point? People got sick of Jedi, and sick of seeing more and more of them. Less diversity among players = less fun. When SOE devoted two huge publishes all to Jedi instead of fixing other long-standing issues this was a sign of things to come. And the original holo-grind killed off a LOT of the PvP we had since so many became reclusive and devoted all their time to grinding.

-GCW bugs/exploits
Once people discovered that you can shoot through walls of player bases from the inside out but not outside in things went downhill. Once people discovered you could abort a base countdown even while DEAD of feigning death it was game over. How long did it take for SOE to fix this bug? FOUR months. What about people being able to attack turrets from out of range? SIX months. It was not like these were secret tricks either. They were well documented on the forums. For some reason though, they were extremly slow to respond. Instead of spending eight hours fighting back and forth between cities, people just got rid of their bases and the GCW died. With it PvP died off in a big way.

-Content
At one point they promised us new PvE content every other patch. Well, we got the corvette (which was a BLAST for about 3 weeks) and the Geonosian cave (which was so bugged it became a favorite place for grinders) and eventually the DWB which was the most challenging and fun, but then it was not until the expansion that the game actually got additional PvE content.

-Wasted Space
Land area in SWG is immense. If you did the math and figured it out and compared it to any other MMORPG out there SWG has MORE explorable space than any other game by far. But you know what? It is USELESS. Take Talus for example. Big beautiful planet with NOTHING on it. We have these little mini-dungeons, or doodads on each planet that serve minimal to no purpose at all. What is their answer? In the expansions they actually have invisible fencing to keep you in the few areas they actually have content. Instead of having the whole huge area filled with stuff of use, they close off areas to the player. This is an area where SOE could learn a LOT from WoW where all the land is not only explorable, but most of it serves a purpose and/or has unique mobs.

-Character customization
SOE made characters so customizable that this actually becomes one of it's biggest weaknesses. The more unique features the game has to track, the more queries clients have to make to the server in order to properly render a toon on your screen. 20 players no problem. 50 players? Slowdown time. 200 players? Server go kaboom. Too much load for the system to handle. Basically epic battles become near impossible.

Thinking about all of this it seems to me that in SOE's rush to get product to market in the first place they dropped the ball bad, and instead of making things better, they constantly seem to make the wrong decisions.

Stop f'ing around with focus groups, and fire the marketing suits and hire some good, competent developers and people with vision. Unfortunately at this point I think it is too late. No one trusts you anymore SOE and their experiences here WILL likely make them think twice about trying other SOE games.

So I can safely say Morsky, Jackal, Backwoods and Virus will never return to SWG, at least not with me at the helm, chances are my eight year old could find himself with an old Jedi to play on his console if the game survives that long.

In memory of the great times and a toast to the game at it's peak I will make these forums and website stand as a reminder that once upon a time it was this game Star Wars Galaxies, that kept us up all night and provided us with an avenue to relax and entertain.

Rest in Peace SWG

SOE can't see the forest for the trees

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 7 / 7
Date: November 23, 2005
Author: Amazon User

This game has been out for around two years. In that time, SOE has implemented huge, massive changes to the game, TWICE. In each instance, the first CU (combat upgrade) and now the NGE (new game enhancements), SOE said they were implementing things that the players wanted. However, existing players did NOT want either of these "upgrades." The problem is there have been loads of bugs since day one, and SOE has never bothered to fix them! Almost everyone I've spoken to or played with agrees that the way the game is now is like a beta test. After two years, and SWG is STILL in beta? And there are bugs that have never been fixed? SOE is also notorious for its terrible customer service.

I played the game for six months. It was pretty fun, something I would have continued, though I don't like combat. I liked the social and crafting aspects of it. But now I am severely limited in what I can do. Plus, the new combat system is unwieldy and makes me nauseous.

This is a completely new game. It's like SOE keeps changing it. They should have just kept the thing in actual beta this whole time.

I'm a very disappointed former SWG player. It's just not very fun anymore. All there is to do is kill stuff, level up, and go kill more stuff. If you're seven years old, are a rabid SW fan, and like first person shooters, then this might be the game for you.

Otherwise, pass on it.

Stay away

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 8 / 9
Date: May 12, 2005
Author: Amazon User

Unless you enjoy paying to beta test a 2 year old game, stay away. if you want to try it at some point wait a few months at least(as of may 11th).

get WoW

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 8 / 9
Date: January 10, 2006
Author: Amazon User

This game sucks, NGE made it a wannabe console game with crafting. If you want real customer service and a real game get WoW, stay away from anything made by Sony. Played from july 03 to nov 05 and enjoyed every minute up to NGE. if you buy this, you may as weel just get KOTOR 2 its far more fun.

The Jedi?

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 8 / 9
Date: May 02, 2005
Author: Amazon User

This game was great up until a few days ago, when the combat upgrade hit the live servers. Now it has gotten so bad that a Swordsman can take on 2 Jedi Padawan at once, and it be an even fight. This swordsman had no armor, and both Jedi ran out of force power near the end of the battle. Thanks SOE great job ...... yeah right!!

Good game gone bad...

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 9 / 11
Date: May 19, 2005
Author: Amazon User

I began playing SWG in the Beta period of late 2002. The game began as a great, original and diverse experience. As of April 28th, 2005, the core game that was Star Wars Galaxies no longer exists. I do not recommend this or any other product put out by Sony Online Entertainment. Save some money and time by passing over this game. Maybe try Guild Wars as an alternative.

Just a note

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 9 / 11
Date: May 28, 2005
Author: Amazon User

It really is pointless to retype everything that has already been said. When it comes down to it, the issue isn't whether or not the game is good or fun, the real issue is how the customer base is treated by the people who run the game. The fun thing about MMORPGs is that because it involves so many people and so many possibilities, that it is usually a joint venture by the developers and the fans to improve the game. I'm not an MMORPG expert, but other MMO's I've played like FFXI and AC were extremely fun because you always knew big concerns or issues would either be addressed or be fixed. And although it is impossible to please thousands of customers, the point is that other games' customers never turn on the developers and cancel the product because in the end they still do believe it is a good product.

Star Wars Galaxies has been the complete opposite. I began playing 2 days after launch(one of the worst launches since Anarchy)and all I remember were all the promises by the developers. Interactive Galactic war scenes, endless quests with characters from the movies, and the extremely rare and random chance of becoming a Jedi. None of these promises were delivered, ask anyone who plays the game. In the end SWG may be a fun game, Pre-CU or even Post-CU, but the real fun in MMORPGs comes from knowing that the game will be BETTER from when you started. The point of MMORPGs is they are supposed to evolve. Other MMO's give expansions/content with classes that work, items that work, armor that works, QUESTS THAT WORK. SWG has never done this, from day one it has basically gone backwards into the days of beta. If you buy SWG, will you have fun? Probably. But when you have an issue that you'd really like solved or addressed and find out that the developers will not even look your way, it becomes very disheartening. In the words of Yoda: "That is why you fail."

I Have a VERY Bad Feeling About This....

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 9 / 11
Date: April 25, 2005
Author: Amazon User

I wish this game was good, I've owned it for a long time, this is the first 1 I've given a game. Some people say this game is great, and, I don't really want to be rude, but they were either high or freshly released from the looney bin, or it could have been the first MMO they played, I have to be honest, I liked this game when I first played it, it was the first MMO I played, but after playing GOOD games like WoW or CoH or Ragnarok (yes Ragnarok is better) I was disgusted at the game, it should not have been made. I have to admit that it could have been more, but it isn't what it should have been, buy WoW or CoH... or Ragnarok, just DON'T play this game...


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