After getting past that amazing loading screen, I found myself back in the town hall, all ready to get involved in some space politics. I decided that as monotonous as this game already was, that trying to campaign for a NPC was probably not the best course of action. Instead, I went back to the Imperial pilot trainer, and got another space quest. I’ve only talked about these in passing in the past, so let’s get a bit deeper today. Every quest that I have encountered so far, whether it be just a kill X of Y quest or an escort quest has 5 or 6 waypoints that you have to travel to, either killing shit or escorting something while killing shit along the way. These waypoints, at least in the starter ship (and these are starter missions), take forever to get to, so what most of these missions end up being for me is selecting a waypoint, turning on autopilot, and alt-tabbing out, the absolute apex of entertainment and fun. These extremely long transit times also mean it’s faster to calculate a hyperspace jump to land at the planet you are already in orbit above then to actually land on it.

Landing back on the planet I got a little pop-up message notifying me that the Imperials were about to try and retake Bestine, you know, the town that I’ve been getting Imperial missions in. Anyway, I go outside to see the overwhelming attack of the mighty Imperial forces… one guy. Yep, this guy was apparently the only person to care at all about this invasion thing, and was fighting a ton of rebel guards all by his lonesome. I played the part of the annoying tourist by snapping a ton of screenshots, and continued on my merry way.

Reading my next mission on the way to the spaceport, I discovered I was lucky enough to be the recipient of a space escort quest. I tried imagining how much more terrible you could possibly make the escort quest, but it turned out I was far underestimating its capacity for boredom. First I had to check 5 checkpoints for pirates (there weren’t any) then I had to escort a freighter all the way back to the planet. The freighter moved at half my top speed, prolonging the agony. Eventually I delivered the frigate to its destination and returned to the surface.

As it turns out, while I was doing my escort mission, a large number of people had beome involved in the battle for Bestine. Granted, the majority of them were NPC stormtroopers, but there was more than a single person, so good for them! Looking around I noticed that for some inexplicable reason Darth Vader was just standing there directing troops, not getting shot at or getting involved in the fight at all… just standing there looking like a badass. (Which, coincidentally, Darth Vader is really good at) After turning in my escort quest I decided to end it there for the day.

Logging back in, I was extremely pleased to see that I was no longer being bombarded with an endless streams of group invitations, and since I didn’t have anything too pressing going on, I decided to hang out for a few minutes and check out the community, something I hadn’t really bothered doing up until that point, as I had played with my blinders on, ignoring everything but the game itself. Surprisingly enough, business seems to continue as usual in the game’s city hubs, without the pervasive morbidity that I expected. While there is no single unified “trade” channel, at least not that I could find, people seem to gather in groups inside of major towns and cities to socialize and trade loot. The chat is still filled with people organizing Sith duels, and the more standard practice of buying and selling… and they’re selling some odd things. From the Mos Eisley chat, you can acquire anything from “Anakin’s Cybernetic Arm” to “A General Grievous Wheel Bike”. Turning one-of-a-kind items into collectibles that any player can get just reeks of pandering to an ever-shrinking player base to keep them subscribed.

Getting back to questing, I went through the quests that weird stranger wanted me to do, learning to use the bank and the bazaar (auction house). Here I have to give Star Wars Galaxies somewhat of a nod. Most MMOs don’t bother themselves with familiarizing their players with the base mechanics of the economic system, and as a result new players have no idea how to make money in-game, and usually must have it explained to them. On the other hand however, I was never directed to this tutorial, and just happened to stumble upon a quest giver in the corner of a town that just happened to have some teaching to do. After completing his set of tutorials, I was told that both the Rebel and Imperial navies were recruiting. By this point, I really wanted to get back into the space combat, so I hopped in my starfighter and started making my way over to the Imperial Recruiter in a town called Bestine. On my way over there however, I stopped by yet another nod to Star Wars fans that I happened across, a crashed escape pod out in the middle of the desert…

The first thing I noticed when I arrived in Bestine was that, while the City is hailed by the game as the capitol of Imperial operations on Tatooine, it was controlled by the Rebels when I got there. This led to some pretty great situations, like the Imperial recruiter being next to a Rebel guard, so that when I joined the imperial military, the rebel guard immediately began shooting at me. Not the high-ranking officer next to me that recruited me, but the guy who just joined the military. Yep, I’m certainly glad I joined the Empire now. After dying to some guards and getting put on “leave” from the Imperial military, I talked to the Imperial pilot recruiter, who unlike the rest of the military NPCs, let me take misisons from him while I was still on leave, which I’m certainly not complaining about. What I will complain about however, is the fact that it seems like every time I talk to him the Imperial March plays. Is that really necessary? It certainly isn’t adding any drama to this super bland quest text that just told me to go shoot down some pirates…

I go and do a few of his errands, and come back to Bestine, which is apparently about to be under attack. At least this is what I was told by the paragraph of text that confronted me when I spawned in. This mechanism certainly takes the cake as the clunkiest possible way to teach you how something works, and to be completely honest, not much of it makes a ton of sense, but I doubt the developers really cared by the time they designed this system.

Not really interested in dying repeatedly to other players, I wandered off again and went exploring. This time what I stumble upon is the core of the prequel movies distilled into game form, SPACE POLIITICS! I get to choose a candidate for governor of Bestine that I like the best and campaign for them, and who doesn’t love being a volunteer campaign worker? Well I certainly don’t, so I took this chance to log off and end my third day in Star Wars Galaxies.

With my landspeeder colored a properly garish purple, I decided to continue following what seemed to be the main quest-line. Jabba had apparently taken an interest in me, and now I have to start doing jobs for him, or “face his wrath”… or something. I don’t know how many times I’ve been told that I’m ‘special’ by different NPCs at this point, but it’s really starting to get old.

As I was wandering around completing fetch quests, I stumbled onto a Bounty Hunter terminal. There was a list of NPC bounties that I could accept, so I figured what the hell, and grabbed one. By this time, I had realized that my landspeeder was utterly pointless with the atmospheric flight update, so I hopped in my starfighter, and flew over to the target. There was a pretty serious problem there though. While the bounty target was my level, and I killed him easily, all the random animals that were around were way above my level, which led to a rather predictable conclusion of me dying. When I died, I had to choose a location to be “cloned” at, and then I got “clone sickness” for ten minutes afterwards. Any of this will sound super familiar to anyone who has ever played WoW before, and probably shows what Sony was going for when they redesigned the game.

Almost immediately after I exited the cloning facility I was accosted by “a Mos Eisley police officer” who searched me for contraband. Since I had clone sickness anyway, I started following him while he was on his rounds. Apparently if I hadn’t been paying attention and just kept running he would have fined me on the assumption that I was running away from him since I had contraband, which seems a bit absurd for how simple and dumbed down the rest of the game feels. The whole game to me feels like this weird amalgamation of hardcore old-school MMO mechanics and the new school of MMOs built around a low barrier to entry and hand-holding.

After my Clone Sickness wore off, I went back to some more quests, and started realizing how much flying has broken the game. Every scouting/recon quest in the game can be done in a few minutes, and getting to any new area takes only a few minutes, compared to the long times it would’ve taken in a ground mount. After doing way too many tedious quests, I hit level 10, which always seems to be a pretty big milestone in any MMO. My chat log was suddenly filled with notifications about droid abilities I had just learned, which I assume is some sort of pet, but I was given no instructions about how to go about acquiring a droid or using one. I did get a sweet backpack that I could throw stuff into though, so that was pretty cool I guess.

After finishing off the Jabba series of quests, I was left with no real direction, and just started wandering. I found a new random person who wanted to tell me about how special I was. Since I love positive reinforcement so much, I decided to start his quest line. The first quest for me, the “super special savior of the universe”? I needed to go learn about money management at the bank.

On my way over to the bank however, someone decided that I needed to join their “story” and spammed me with way too many invites. I’ve made some comments about some pretty terrible stuff in this game so far, but this by far takes the cake. I got probably over a hundred invites from this guy, which I’ve arrayed in the above screenshot for effect, but they were all stacked up in one big stack originally. After I took that shot, I tried to close them all using escape, but at a point I got tired of mashing the button over and over and just logged off, ending day two.

As soon as LucasArts and SOE announced that they were shutting down Star Wars Galaxies, I started hunting down a copy. I’ve always wanted to be there at the end of a MMO, but I’ve never actually managed to get in on it, and was determined to do so with this one. I’ve decided to keep a record of my trip through Star Wars Galaxies here, day by day, mostly to try and keep myself playing it, but hey, you might enjoy my ramblings too!

A bit of background first though. This is the first time that I have ever played Star Wars Galaxies, so keep in mind that you will not be getting any sort of nostalgia for or comparisons to the old version from me. These are simply my impressions as I make my way through the game as it is right now, not as it was five or six years ago. This is not to say I have never played a MMO before, as I have played way too much of the genre, and you’ll probably see a ton of comparisons to other MMOs.

The first thing I had to do was pick a server. This choice was made extremely easy, as all of the servers had a population of ‘very light’ or ‘light’ except for one called Starstrider, which had a population of ‘medium’. Then I had to create my character. Of course, I began to make my character look as silly as possible. I picked the Sullustan race (Lando’s co-pilot from Return is one, for the uninitiated), tweaked the sliders to their absolute extremes, and went to the next step, picking a class. Originally, I wanted to be an entertainer so that I could have the “true” Star Wars Galaxies experience, but then decided that if I wanted to even have a remote interest in the game, I needed to pick a combat class. After watching the class videos (which are terrible representations of what gameplay is actually like), I settled on rolling a bounty hunter.

After the standard opening Star Wars crawl I got dumped into an Imperial space station, where I was apparently in the process of being rescued by Han Solo, Chewbacca, R2D2, and C3PO. There were explosions all over the place, the screen shook, and while you could tell that it was designed to be awesome, it just felt boring. It’s almost like the designers of the opening sequence got together in a room and threw together all the “It would be so awesome if...” scenarios that Star Wars fans have come up with over the years into a single scene. After I fought some super-evil explosive crates and a few stormtroopers, I hopped on the Millennium Falcon and the game transitioned to an on-rails shooter, which was really jarring, but also sort of fun. Too bad it didn’t last for more than a few minutes, and I was thrown into the starting zone.

While the game up until this point certainly hadn’t been the most exciting thing I had ever played it had been, at the least, playable. The starting zone went a long way towards convincing me otherwise. When I first arrived at the station, I was very quickly ushered over to my class trainer, which, since I rolled bounty hunter, was Boba Fett. At first, it felt like I was going to do quests that were actually appropriate for my class, running around the station and killing targets that were assigned to me, you know, bounty hunting. Then, Fett decided he was done with me, and I was handed over to a receptionist with a few dozen homogeneous quests to choose from. None of the quests I did on the station were interesting enough to mention here, standard kill X of this creature and gather Y of this item type stuff, but I did discover a few things while doing them. The first thing I noticed was that the combat is laughably easy. I just click on any enemy a few times, maybe press a button for one of my abilities and they’re dead. Even quests several levels above me were extremely easy. While the majority of the quests were tedious, there were a handful of quests that kept me slightly more entertained, quests in spaaaaaaaaaaace.

The space quests are probably the most fun I’ve had with the game so far, as the game in space plays very similar to old space sims such as X-Wing or Freelancer. There are no weird RPG-like elements here, just a straight space sim. Is it as good as X-Wing or Freelancer? Absolutely not, but it’s infinitely better than the rest of the game, or at the very least what I have experienced of it so far. You can use mouse and keyboard, which works surprisingly well, but you can also use a 360 gamepad or a joystick setup, which delighted me and my way-too-expensive joystick to no end.

After doing enough quests to get me to the requisite ‘get me the fuck out of the starting zone’ level, I talked to Boba Fett and he took me to Tatooine, where I actually got to see real players for the first time, and something a little bit more on the crazy side. Apparently a recent patch has allowed pilots to fly their starships in the atmosphere, which of course means that as soon as I arrived in Mos Eisley I became witness to ships dogfighting in the skies, or more commonly, plunging into the ground. While I was taking this new development in, all of a sudden Han Solo pops up again and guides me through getting my mount, a speeder that I can color myself…Yay? I decided that this was as good of a time as any to log off, and did so.