Star Wars Galaxies

Ultima Online, Everquest, Dark Age of Camelot, Sims Online and countless other games have been created to whisk the gamer into some fantasy world or another and allow them to be an active participant in the creation of an online world. Now there is Star Wars Galaxies.

Set in the Star Wars Universe, you create an alter-ego and start playing. There are hundreds of players on-line and hundreds of non player controlled characters in the world. Your goal is to learn skills and go on adventures. I tried this game for a 14-day trial period. I won't be buying anymore time.

The problem with all these types of games is that the really cool stuff, you can't do right away. On the surface, this isn't really a bad thing. Afterall, it took a few missions to be able to access the light saber and jedi powers in the last Star Wars game I played, Jedi Knights 2. But that wasn't an online game in the MMO genre (Massively Multiplayer Online). I payed one price, played at my own pace and eventually I got to the cool stuff in the game. And I knew that I would get to it, as it was only a matter of time. That's where MMO's are different.

"Only a matter of time" means you're going to be shelling out cash. The 14-day trial I received was for just that, 14 real world calendar days. How many days did I play? Maybe 5 days for a total of 10 or so hours. This is hardly enough time to give the game a fair shake review but therein lies the problem. I could only devote 10 hours of time to play this thing over a 14 day calendar period. Because I was not able to play extensively, I have pretty low skill/ability in the game. Because my skill/ability is low I can't do any of the cool stuff in the game. Because I can't do any of the cool stuff, I think this game sucks. Do you see the problem here?

Obviously, the 14-day free trial is a gimmick to try to lure more casual people into the game. After all the diehard fanatical fans are into this just because of the Star Wars name. They don't need a trial, they are buying as soon as it hits the shelves and will be playing every waking moment. I wanted to find out what this was going to be like; tough to do in only 10 hours. My point is that a 14-day trial ought to be 14 days of logging in to the game.

The game environment looks great. You can travel to many familiar Star Wars locations like Tatooine. All the major Star Wars races are there from the Wookie to the Tuskan Raider. Imperial Soldiers patrol some of the cities and various critters lurk outside the cities.

The interface is mostly point and click but there are also hot keys available. The help system is good and comes in the form of an R2 droid that follows you around. You can choose not to have them visible if you like. It is kind of funny watching twenty different R2 droids chasing various players around the environments.

Your purpose is to build up your skill in one of several categories. There is pretty much everything imaginable here. From Scouts to Marksmen and Artisans to Entertainers. You build your skills by completing missions given to you by NPC's or accepted from mission terminals scattered throughout all the cities.

The missions are catered to your character's abilities so there is some risk but not a huge amount. This is another area that makes it very difficult to judge whether the game is something I would want to keep playing. Most of the missions available to me were going out and killing a set number of bugs or similar critters or delivering a package to someone. Doing this over and over became tedious and I still don't know if the missions get more complicated, or dangerous because I didn't get to see any. It would have been good if I was at least teased by a future mission when selecting from the mission terminals.

From a technical perspective, the game ran smoothly even with large numbers of players and characters on the screen. The only jumpiness I encountered was when I entered new areas and the game engine had to render the new environment. My only complaint in this area were the very long initial load times when you first logged onto a server. Traveling via shuttle from city to city or planet to planet also caused long load times. Hopefully they can optimize this in the future.

Other cool stuff I wasn't able to do (but I saw others doing) included riding vehicles like speed bikes and landspeeders as well as animals (none of which I remember names for). I've also seen screen shots of light saber battles. I know I only scratched the surface of this game. It's too bad there wasn't a better trial system in place.