A review, or is it?

In this first part of the blog I will give a quick explanation of the game with I will be reviewing, and ill review it in the 2nd.

Part 1


The game which I will be talking about is ‘Star Wars Galaxies’, the game was developed by Sony Online Entertainment and was published by Lucas Arts. The game was released in April 2003.
The game is set between the 4th and 5th star wars movie ‘A New Hope’ and ’The Empire Strikes Back’
The game is about the battle between the rebels and imperials, within the first 15 levels of the game the player can choose a side that they wish to be on, either to be a rebel, imperial or to remain neutral. This would effect quest lines, world pvp, and space combat.
Within the game, players can start guilds and create player cities, to do this the player must have a guild hall and build it on one of the planets. From there the players can create a zone in which they can own, to keep it going the player has to pay taxes, along with any house or building within the zone.
The game plays on the fractions of the rebels and imperils a lot, it depends on points for doing quests and kills. If the rebels have more points, then the world would be in the control of the rebels. This means there would be rebel guards and patrols throughout major cities and in towns, if the imperils take over control of the planet, they would take it over by force and stromtrooopers  would enter the city and kill off all the rebels. The guards in the cities would also attack the opposite fraction players, even if they are higher or lower levels. (its quite a surprise when your around level 20 and you enter a city when level 80 guards would attack and kill you in sight).

The game has 10 different races, 9 professions and 12 planets which the players on visit.

Another part of the game is set in space which is set around 11 planets and there moons. Space combat has a different levels system from the characters set on the planets. The main levelling system comes from the fraction. If the player is an imperial on the ground, then in space they get to use the imperal ships. Eg Tie Fighter. The player goes on patrol missions where they usual come across the enemy fraction npc ships to destroy or escort quests. The higher level the player get to use bigger ships containing more weapons, stronger shields and more skills to use.
Using ships, players can use hyperspace to travel to different worlds or locations in short times. The image above in the bottom right shows a ship going into hyperspace.

Below are some slides about the game showing you different environments and features within the game


Screenshot of the city ‘Mos Eisley’

Screenshots from the world ‘Naboo’

A few screenshots of players homes, the top left shows a map of all the houses in the colour green, to show you how big the area covers.

Space combat and some playable ships

Points of interest. Plays can find and visits areas in the game which are taken from the film. Eg. R2D2 and C3P0’s ejection pod.

Part 2

Now you know a little bit about the game, ill get on to reviewing it.
When you first start the game for the first time, you get to choose what server you want to be on, the game is different to most MMO’s because you don’t have a choice of the normal server types, (PVE, PVP, RPPVE, RPPVP) because you soon find out, that the server is full of everyone who fits into these groups. Which I think is very good, you don’t get bored of the same thing happening over and over in the server, and if you get bored you can just visit areas in the game to join in with the Role players, or join a raid of player vs. player people without changing server and starting a new character.
After you have picked a server then you get on to create your very own character, starting with the race and name of you wish to have, around 90% of players go for the ‘random generate’ name to make it more spacey and sound more alien. Next stage is to customise what your character looks like, I loved messing around with the options, you could change the scale of everything, eyes, mouth, nose, head size and many more. The good thing about it, later on down the line if you get bored of what you look like, you can visit the cantinas in the game and ask a nice ’entertainer class’ player to change your looks, they have more of a verity and extra things added than the starting customising gives.
After your happy with the character  you get to pick what class you want it, another nice touch to the game, if you can not make up your mind, when there is a option to see around a 30 seconds video of each class explaining what they do. I think this saves a lot of time and confusion, there is nothing worse than starting off a game then realise a few hours down the line that it turns out the class is different to what you expected and have to restart again. When your happy with what you have chosen you enter into a short cut scene at the start with the famous Star Wars credits at the start telling you about what happened and what time line you are in.
You start off being awoken in a medic bay room with a droid talking to you, after a few tutorial tips (like movement, opening inventory, equipping items) you start on a mission to escape, from the start you meet some of the movie cast such as Han Solo. After fighting off some imperil storm troopers you escape on the ship ’Millenium Falcon’ where you get your first taste of space combat.
The starting area of the game gets the player involved straight away, covering the most they can within a small amount of time. It gets the player feeling they are involved with a scene from one of the films.
The next stage of the game is where you land on a new player station, where the quests range from level 1-10 and once you leave, you can never return. The station is full of different styles of quests, starting off with a class quest, where you receive some type of armour fit for your class (you get Jedi robes if you’re a Jedi, white clothes and tunic if you’re a medic). Doing these quests you start to level up fast and get the basic skills of your class, and start earning in game money called ‘credits’.
While playing the starting area you get to know the game more and start realising the a few down sides to the game, including loads of bugs. You pick a target and shoot at it and it spams the message ‘Can not see target’, or have random npc’s trapped in walls or random world objects . The image below shows some of the bugs what happened when played the trail version for a few days.

After the player reaches level 5, they have the option of joining into the main playing server, which starts off on the planet ‘Tatooine’ in the city of ‘Mos Eisley’. The first quest after this you get to own your own ’speeder’ which you can use to make travelling across the world faster. From then on, the player can start to do anything they want, buy and build there own house, which is permanently placed  on the planet until moved, join a guild and go off role-playing or just stand around the cities talking to other people.

 The best parts of the game that I enjoyed was the pvp, there is just a verity of what different classes can do, when you get them all together and using team play you can dominate over the other fraction (the biggest battle I took part in was around 100 people on each side). Another good part of the game is the player houses and what you can do with them, over the levelling up and killing monsters you start to collect collectable items over time, where you can display it anywhere in your house. You can also change your characters class anytime you want for a fee, that means if you’re a solider then you can talk to the npc and change your class to a bounty hunter, the price goes higher up the more times you do it.

Some of the bad parts to the game is most differently the bugs, sometimes you can not complete quests because you are unable to pick up the item or the npc character you have to kill in halfway though the wall. Also after a while the quests get a bit repetitive and can become boring after a while. The bunkers which you enter to do quests all have the same layout from around level 10-90, so once you work out the way around, you know where the objectives are and it takes out the fun of fighting your way to them and searching around.

The thing what impressed me most about the game was how big the planets are, and there are no loading screens when you enter each city. Each planet is the equivalent to 225 square kilometres (86 square miles) all fully textured and contains around 6 major cities and thousands of player buildings.