lol, starwars

[Ed Oscuro]

Recently I reinstalled Star Wars Galaxies (lol #1) to try out the emulation server (which Sony hasn't shut down for whatever reason). Just as broken and headache-inducing as ever, except now with additional bugs over 2003-05.

Anyway, reading around the Forums for that emulation guide I came across this picture.

Lol

Yes, this is going to be a hardcover (not a trade paperback, which if you ask me is the usual format for these things, lol highbrow horror) by Joe Schreiber. Info on the Random House page (with a link to Joe's blog). Dunno about comparing his work to The Shining, but otherwise it's pretty interesting.

It's probably an improvement over what Galaxies is right now, although knowing Sony you'll end up with just a zombie version of that.

[ncp]

vanilla swg was probably the second best mmo of all time second only to UO

[GaijinPunch]

What's up w/ the zombies?

[Ed Oscuro]

From the second link:

When the Imperial prison barge Purge–temporary home to five hundred of the galaxy’s most ruthless killers, rebels, scoundrels, and thieves–breaks down in a distant, uninhabited part of space, its only hope appears to lie with a Star Destroyer found drifting, derelict, and seemingly abandoned. But when a boarding party from the Purge is sent to scavenge for parts, only half of them come back–bringing with them a horrific disease so lethal that within hours nearly all aboard the Purge die in ways too hideous to imagine.

And death is only the beginning.

The Purge’s half-dozen survivors–two teenage brothers, a sadistic captain of the guards, a couple of rogue smugglers, and the chief medical officer, the lone woman on board–will do whatever it takes to stay alive. But nothing can prepare them for what lies waiting aboard the Star Destroyer amid its vast creaking emptiness that isn’t really empty at all. For the dead are rising: soulless, unstoppable, and unspeakably hungry.

vanilla swg was probably the second best mmo of all time second only to UO

I feel you're right but...I have my doubts. I never got much further than the requirement not to get my ass totally kicked by A Timid Vur Vur or A Capper Spineflap on Naboo or Corellia, but I discovered too late that you can't really have a character simultaneously be good at combat and also good at crafting (for instance). You should be able to by using previously (hard-earned) points at the trainers, but I often had few enough credits on my person to keep a few little plants and a speeder in operation, let alone taking constant 1000+ credit jaunts through the starport system. The end result? Locked into a role for days at a time, unless you build multiple characters (which is fine to do but I find it saps my feeling of having made any progress). It was a good idea to keep things balanced but it collided with the way I wanted to play.

I left around the time of the creature handler nerf, and I think before Jump to Lightspeed and definitely before the big "combat upgrade" foul-up, although I can't imagine the combat got any worse than it has been.

For testing, the emulation server currently gives everybody 100K credits both in their bank and on their person (200K total), and you can actually master any profession by hitting up A Gungan Trader in Theed on Naboo (there's two of them), though my current character got bugged up when swapping a bunch of times. Nobody is really going to the outer reaches of space right now (which means anywhere but Theed, mostly), and those that do are in danger of falling prey to one of the monsters that isn't broken (monsters that say "I have nothing to say to you," how interesting) without any way of healing properly. There's an amusing bug where the respawn mechanic spawns you right back in place and you get killed again.

[Lordstar]

I did hear some legnedary tales about this game back in the day. They should (some ones going to chirp in now and say they are) just reboot the whole game and start again. Knights of the old republic type thing I would imagine? If the reviews were ok I would pick it up and give it a go. I want to play games online with my mates again not just XBL.

[BulletMagnet]

What's up w/ the zombies?

These days adding zombies to anything and everything is the way of saying "we're completely out of ideas, but people will still buy this."

[Mortificator]

I haven't read Star Wars novels that have come out in several years (though I've read the comics), but I'm kind of looking forward to this. As long as Han acts like a pragmatic asshole instead of being noble and letting the zombies bite first, it could be good.

I didn't know the book was going to have the "Galaxies" brand on it. I'm sure that'll draw in a multitude of readers from an MMO that has barely anything to do with Han or Chewie.

[dtdg]

I did hear some legnedary tales about this game back in the day. They should (some ones going to chirp in now and say they are) just reboot the whole game and start again. Knights of the old republic type thing I would imagine? If the reviews were ok I would pick it up and give it a go. I want to play games online with my mates again not just XBL.

[Ed Oscuro]

Heh, I thought that was a WoW screenshot. D:

[ncp]

I feel you're right but...I have my doubts. I never got much further than the requirement not to get my ass totally kicked by A Timid Vur Vur or A Capper Spineflap on Naboo or Corellia, but I discovered too late that you can't really have a character simultaneously be good at combat and also good at crafting (for instance). You should be able to by using previously (hard-earned) points at the trainers, but I often had few enough credits on my person to keep a few little plants and a speeder in operation, let alone taking constant 1000+ credit jaunts through the starport system. The end result? Locked into a role for days at a time, unless you build multiple characters (which is fine to do but I find it saps my feeling of having made any progress). It was a good idea to keep things balanced but it collided with the way I wanted to play.

Ah... there were missions on (oh god the planet names escape me) well, one of the really un-civilized planets that gave tons of money per mission and were pretty quick, so money wasn't a huge problem once you were Master (or close) in a combat profession. I switched profs a few times. My most vivid memories are of being a commando pre-nerf where the fire DoT was practically doom in pvp. That, and dodge-stacking pistoleer+fencer that was almost un-hittable before they capped dodge. Combat medics were insane, too, best described by "Combat medics are like nukes, both sides have them but neither wants to use them because once one side uses them the other side uses them and everything just goes straight to hell". Hahaha. Then there was the Teras Kasi KNOCKDOWN OWNAGE COMBO that drove people nuts.

Jump to Lightspeed was not all that bad since it didn't change the on-planet game much at all, but the space part of the game was basically like an entirely different game... it didn't fit well. But then the "Combat Upgrade" you've heard about hit and the game took a sharp descent downhill. It was still playable but the magic was gone. To be honest, the pvp was probably more "balanced" after the "CU" but that's irrelevant when it's just plain not as fun, that's the most important thing. I quit during this period then came back a while later to find some weird ass FPS-RPG stuff which I played for like 30 minutes before cancelling the account again.

But... truth be told I really miss my entertainer. God, musician+dancer was so strangely entertaining at times. You could group with other musicians and play the songs together on different instruments and it would auto-sync and stuff, it was really well-made. That Coronet cantina with like 100 players in it all the time was just good times, haha.

I could reminisce forever about SWG but I'll stop, haha.

[Ed Oscuro]

Yeah, the main thing I'm looking for on the emulation server is just to see some of the stuff that I never could survive in '05. Unfortunately not even that works properly, and exploring same-y caverns with no enemies in them (or enemies sticking out of the floor at strange angles, running really fast, and so on) is pretty horrible. Hopefully they'll get that fixed up though.

Inventory, dialogue boxes...all that stuff strains my eyes now, playing at 1600x1200. There's also not really a point to trying to build stuff the "old-fashioned" way on the emu server, even aside from the apparent occasional database wipes and freebies given out by Gungan Merchants.

I want to see how Deathtroopers plays out in SWG, but SWG except even less fun = lol