Return to Star Wars Galaxies - Part Two
For the life of me I can't remember how Star Wars Galaxies started off, way back when, but nowadays after choosing your class, the game takes you through a Tutorial. You'll find yourself waking up onboard an unnamed Imperial space station, where you've apparently been held captive due to your being 'special' in some indefinable way. It could have something to do with the monthly fee you pay SOE in the real world, but I may just be cynical. Regardless, you'll find none other than C3P0 giving you hints and tips on basic actions – movement, dialogue, combat and equipping. Immediately after that, you're busted out by Han Solo, Chewbacca and R2-D2, whose presence goes unexplained.
After helping to kill a couple of Stormtroopers, you'll find yourself on the Millennium Falcon, gunning down TIE Fighters and being threatened by Darth Vader himself. It's an interesting way to open the game, but it somehow feels a little too much. I can see what SOE are trying to do here – hook you in straight away by ticking all the geek buttons. Big lore heroes, Storm Troopers of dubious marksmanship, Darth Vader and space combat in the Millennium Falcon, all within the first 5 minutes; it's just obviously transparent. Had you stumbled across any of these characters of your own accord and interacted with them in the main game, it might have been more realistic, but to run into them before your feet even touch solid ground tests your suspension of disbelief.
Next up, you land on Tansarii Point Station, where the next stage of the Tutorial begins. Here, you're introduced to the mechanics of accepting, completing and turning in quests, and interacting with Profession trainers. Immediately I noticed something that carries over to the rest of the game - it's not immediately apparent when an NPC has more quests for you. NPCs will have an icon over their head when you're able to interact with them, but the icon stays the same regardless of their status.
This means you have no way of telling if they're simply offering fluff dialogue options, or if they want you to do something for them. The game could benefit from a more immediately recognisable way of telling the difference beyond talking to every NPC you see with a dialogue icon.
Also, more than one quest I found in the game – both in the Tutorial and in the later levels – felt like it was coming out of nowhere. You're left feeling as if your character has information that you don't, and that you've stumbled in halfway through a conversation between your character and whichever NPC they're speaking with. It's not a major thing, but it's a little jarring, and breaks immersion.
One thing that did stand out for me with the starter quests was when I played through them as a Jedi, intent on embracing the Dark Side. Expecting a choice of paths early on, with obviously good or evil mission givers standing around, I was pleasantly surprised when the Dark Side opened up due to my dialogue choices. During a conversation with a guard I had been asked to talk with by the Light Side Jedi on the station, instead of calming him down I encouraged him to violence. I failed the quest, but was immediately contacted by a much shadier character who appreciated my nasty streak. Not much I grant you, but a very nice touch all the same, it's a shame that I didn't run into any more examples of this kind of thing.
Once you're done with Tansarii Station, you'll find yourself on Tatooine, which is where things started to get a little unglued. While the Tutorial does a good job of hooking you into the game with appearances from characters strong with the lore, and shows you the rudiments of combat and how to move around, it stops short of the nitty-gritty and leaves you feeling as if there are a lot of things unexplained about the game.
Once you're on Tatooine, you'll find that the Developers have implemented what's called the 'Legacy' mission chain. The chain is intended to take your character through to the mid-levels, and if followed to the end, will take you from Tatooine to Naboo, Corellia and Talus. Most of the missions are straightforward kill X-number-of-Y-mobs or Fed-ex deals. While they won't wow you with their storytelling and intricate plotting, what they will do is provide you with a steady income and useful items.
As much as the Legacy chain accomplishes, it still leaves you very much in the dark on the subject of how the game actually works. Quest rewards in the shape of weapons and equipment don't display stats or values until after you've chosen them, and there are other times where information that you'd think was invaluable just isn't passed on. For example; early on in the Legacy chain you'll be asked to make a trip to Bestine, the Imperial capital on Tatooine – but you're not told that you can take a shuttle ride direct to the city. The result of which is that you might end up driving across the face of the planet in your landspeeder – itself an earlier mission reward that you're not actually told how to deploy.
There's also no real going over the details of how combat works. While the game mentions early on that you can drag special moves to your action bar, it doesn't explain how or why different combat moves have different cooldown lengths. This means that you have to juggle which action to fire off at any given time, based on what you've just used, and what you plan on using next.
Having come from World of Warcraft, where almost every action shares the Global Cooldown, it's an interesting system, but one that takes a little getting used to and could do with some more explaining. You get the sense that if you had better instruction, you could grasp the rhythm of the combat engine much easier.
Combat feels like it's happening too fast to follow, but at the same time somehow manages to feel clumsy and unresponsive. Special attack motions fail to proc on a regular basis, leaving your character standing stock still when they should be looking dynamic. The UI makes it hard to keep track of who you have targeted at any given time, and attacking multiple mobs often feels like an exercise in guesswork and luck, rather than a real challenge in managing incoming and outgoing damage. You can enable scrolling combat text above your character, which should give you an idea of what's happening to you. Instead, the text scrolls up and fades out too fast to follow, given that you need to keep a constant eye on your attack bar to monitor your action cooldowns.
Ranged combat fares a little better than melee. The simple fact that you've got some distance, and therefore breathing space, from your targets does make things a little easier to handle. The difficulty in tracking targets results in you frequently pulling mobs you didn't mean to. Even if you've made sure you're targeting the correct mob, accidentally moving your cursor over another while you're firing will result in your shots hitting them, instead of your target. While this does make it easier when you want to pull multiple mobs, it makes careful and controlled ranged pulls extremely tricky. Sadly, not all of your enemies will have the decency to stay at range, so when they get up close and personal, things fall apart again. It's just as difficult to control multiple mobs with a ranged weapon as it is with a melee weapon, and with limited crowd control techniques at lower level, you'll be punished harshly when a pull goes South.
Return to Star Wars Galaxies Part Three - Crafting, Starships and Conclusions.
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