Return to Star Wars Galaxies - Part Three

If you choose a combat profession in Star Wars Galaxies, the crafting system is completely bypassed in the Tutorial. While you do have the ability to craft items, you're apparently supposed to figure that out yourself. You're told how to open your Inventory and Datapad, but not given any real instruction on either. Considering that you'll be using the Datapad to store Waypoints, Pets, Vehicles, Ships and Draft Schematics (assuming you figure out the crafting), it would have been nice to have a little light shone on the subject. There is of course a New Player Guide for Galaxies on the official site, but that's beside the point really – you shouldn't have to Alt-Tab and search the Internet just to get information on the basics systems of the game.

The Legacy quest line is in place for Trader characters as well; it just doesn't really go anywhere. The first few Legacy quests for Traders explain how to use the various crafting tools in the game and introduce you to the basics of crafting, but things just fizzle out after that.

The crafting in Galaxies is split up into two parts – surveying for resources, and then crafting those resources into structures or items. Before you can begin crafting anything in Galaxies, you have to have resources. The best way to obtain those resources is to survey the landscape, and gather them yourself. Accomplishing this requires a jaunt into the wilderness to hunt down concentrations of the resource you're after. Firing off your Survey Tool brings up a small map on-screen which lays out the various concentrations around you. Initially, sampling means that you'll have to park your character on the node and wait while he/she gathers manually, but you'll soon be able to place an automated extractor to do the work for you.

Crafting isn't as simple as it is in WoW, for example – it's not a case of simply having the resources for a particular recipe or blueprint. Resources are split into two categories – Organic and Inorganic, and from there are split further into a variety of smaller sub-types, giving 816 distinct resources in total. Lower level items might simply require a certain number of generic 'Metal' or 'Gemstone', for example, while high-end items will be much more particular regarding the resources required. Also, resources have their own stats, meaning that if you want to craft high-quality items, you'll need to find high-stat resources.

Trader Experience seems to be an arcane formula that I couldn't quite crack. Although it's easy enough to see how much Experience you've gained after you've created an item – predicting how much you'll get before you've used your materials seems a little more difficult. Grinding Trader Experience is a matter of finding an item which gives good return on investment, and making it over and over again – a good macro is key here.

Player housing was a high point of the original game, and still remains a feature to date. Traders choosing the Structures speciality receive blueprints to create player houses at an early stage of the game. You'll start out with small houses at first, but eventually gain access to more impressive buildings like guildhalls, cantinas and hospitals.

I mentioned earlier the badly-rendered versions of Han and Chewie, and I'm sad to say that the same impression remains whenever you bump into any of the characters from the movies or Expanded Universe. While the graphics may have been good at the time of release, they haven't aged well, and now look functional, but uninspiring. It's certainly not ugly, but given the strength of the character customisation, it's worrying that NPCs somehow give the impression of all looking the same. Regardless of race, it seems like a series of templates were being used again and again, instead of NPCs being generated randomly. NPC movements and emotes come across as robotic and inflexible and fail to convey any sense of emotion or urgency in their actions.

Above the ground, things fare a little better. The space combat in Galaxies was always great fun, and I was pleased to find out the same is true now, so much so that it's almost worth paying the monthly fee for it alone.

Clearly taking its cues from X-Wing Alliance and its prequels, there are few greater pleasures to be had in the game than jumping into your fighter of choice and going dogfighting among the stars. Some core tenets of the original Jump to Lightspeed expansion remain, in that you need to pick a faction to fly for – Rebel, Freelance or Imperial. Each faction gives access to different ships, so you need to think carefully before you choose, and if you leave that faction later, you lose access to their ships. Your 'ground' profession and your space profession are almost completely separate – you can be a Master Pilot, but still have barely started your ground profession. That said, any Starship Experience earned in space also gives a fraction of XP towards your main profession.

It's not all good though, as the space game suffers some of the same problems the rest of the game does. While you'll be looting new pieces of equipment for your ship from enemies you shoot down, you're never presented with the information to accurately judge what the stats on each item does. This makes it hard to gauge items against one another. This info is available on the Internet, but see my earlier comment about Alt-Tabbing. Keeping track of how much Starship Experience you currently have and how much you need to reach the next tier in your profession isn't easy either, resulting in several wasted trips planet-side to be told by your trainer that you're not ready for him yet.

All in all, I enjoyed going back to Galaxies. While much of the game remains the same, so much has changed that it really is like playing a different game – whether it's better than it was or not is a difficult question to answer. It's hard to judge any MMO with 100% veracity unless you've spent a decent amount of time with it. There's a chance that a lot of the flaws I've mentioned will fade once you've spent more time with it. Certainly the lack of information about certain parts of the game will become less and less of an issue as time goes by.

Is Galaxies worth playing? Yes, if you're willing to put up with its flaws – and some of them are pretty major. Will I be returning to Galaxies for a longer stay? No, I'm going to stick with World of Warcraft, which doesn't do everything that Galaxies says it does, but what it does do, it does them a damn sight better.
It probably isn't fair for me to bring up the spectre of what Galaxies used to be before the NGE. Having been part of the game and the community in its original incarnation though, it's unavoidable.

Star Wars Galaxies, pre-NGE was, to me, a flawed masterpiece that hovered just on the edge of being truly great. While it's definitely still a good game, the simple truth is that it's never going to reach the heights it was at once upon a long ago. It's telling that the part of the game I enjoyed the most – the space combat – is the one part of the game which has been meddled with the least, which is heartbreaking, to be honest.

Along with so many other people in the world, Star Wars been an inescapable part of my life from childhood. Part of the reason Galaxies gets so much flak is not because it's a terrible game, it's because we see how good it could have been – how good it should have been. In our hearts, we know just how good a Star Wars MMO could be, were it done right.

Unfortunately, until someone cracks and makes the KoTOR MMO we're all waiting for; Star Wars Galaxies – flaws and all – will just have to do.

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