Star Wars Galaxies - Jedi, Vehicles, Speeder Bike Racing 49
Thanks to GameSpy for their interview with Lucasarts staff about playing as a Jedi in Star Wars Galaxies. The article discusses the powers granted to the newly-unlocked Jedi in this PC MMORPG ("There are over fifty Force powers, ranging from Force Lightning, Force Weaken, and Force Throw, to Jedi Mind Trick, and a variety of lightsaber moves"), and the possibility your Jedi character could be lost forever ("We have partial permadeath for a Jedi. Basically, a Jedi is allotted a certain number of deaths before they lose all progress that character has made.") Elsewhere, player-owned vehicles were enabled in the game earlier this week, and the official SWG page has information on the types, including the X34 Landspeeder, Swoop bike, and Speeder bike, and even documents player-hosted races that are being attempted, showcasing an in-game reproduction of the Mos Espa Circuit from Star Wars: Episode 1.
The Grind (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:The Grind (Score:5, Insightful)
With the player cities there are more places to go and the vehicles now make it easier to travel. These player communities are where the interesting interactions in the game are. They've also (thankfully) nerfed the creature handler stuff so the game is not so much "creature wars".
Where are the spaceships? (Score:5, Insightful)
Half the fun of the orignal film was the idea of flying around in cool spaceships, having battles, but that seems to be totally missing from this game. So they finally put in the vehicles that should have been there on day 1? All you get is a beaten up hovercar and two motorbikes that the wheels have fallen off.
Get back to me when I can win a souped-up smuggling ship in a game of cards and use it to run empire blockades.
Re:Jedi crap (Score:5, Insightful)
#1 YOU DON'T HAVE TO BECOME A JEDI. Using your great pistoleer example: Be happy as a pistoleer. If you enjoyed the steps it took you to get there and the game as a pistoleer in general, stay that way. The grass isn't always greener, in life or fake life. Its worth repeating, if you aren't willing to bust arse to become a Jedi, don't worry about becoming a Jedi. I imagine it would be pretty hard to become a Jedi in Ultima Online, yet noone there is complaining how hard it is. This brings me to point #2...
#2 Becoming a Jedi should be hard as hell and generally not a good time. Though I am not a hardcore fan of the movies, most of the characters seem pretty unhappy with the situation when they decide to follow the Jedi. They leave their families and loved ones forever. They just pick up and go. This is very similar to the profession issue. You stop what you liked doing and give it up for a tough road to hoe. Great sacrifice = great rewards.
#3 Not everyone should become a Jedi. If it was easy or fun to become a Jedi, everyone would do it. The game would cease to function. It would just be stupid. Now 2 and 3 lead me to #4...
#4 All of this is very consistent with the movie portrayals of Jedi. Other game inconsistencies aside, in the time of the movies (this is the time the game is set in, correct?) Jedi are rare. Being a Jedi in general seems to be pretty miserable. One guy lives in a cave or something, another lives in some swamp. Yeah, woo, being a Jedi rocks!
Here's the deal, anything positive or desirable about being a Jedi is assigned by the individual. I do not play this game but a few guys at work do. They enjoy the game very much and have no desire to become Jedi. Turns out, the Star Wars universe can be just a pretty fun place to run around if one knows where to look.
I'd also like to thank you for perpetuating the stereotype of gamer as whiny baby who wants everything handed to them and considers themself a game design god. You should reevaluate your own priorities in the game if you think the Jedi path is too hard, and maybe in real life if this is how you present yourself in general.
Re:Jedi crap (Score:5, Insightful)
The fundamental problem with licensed MMORPGs is that everyone wants to be the canonical characters. This was a problem back in the day of text muds - those who build upon a "hot property" (usually illegally, but lets ignore that for now) found that they had unhappy players because everyone wanted to be "character X" where X is the most power, cool and unbalanced character you can imagine. Its like a kingdom made of nobody but kings.
In SWG, they *thought* they could avoid that by making the Jedi slot nearly randomly distributed. 32 skills, pick 5, means your chance of picking correctly is (5/32*4/31*3/30*2/29*1/28) = 4.9 in a million. So some clues were obviously necessary, and they could basically meter the Jedi slots. The holocrons difficult means only those who really want it are going to become Jedi. For the player who wants to be Jedi, this may suck, may force them out of the game and probably isn't worth it.
The real error was revealing the secret formula. Now that it is clear how base and arbitrary the formula is, people aren't happy. Of course not: they all wanted to be Luke, and now that possibility has been taken from them.
Re:Jedi crap (Score:2, Insightful)
How about the game designer's pick something other than a set of random events, like I don't know - a set of great quests - for the player to become a jedi. 5 random professions seems as far from the movies as possible.
Also, if it miserable to become /stay a jedi, why would I pay money to someone to continue doing it. This is supposed to be entertainment.
Re:Bah... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Jedi crap (Score:3, Insightful)
Looking at it, the movies really don't have that much in the way of how a Jedi is selected to become a Jedi. The only characters from the movies whose training has been portrayed is Anakin and Luke; Luke was mainly selected because of family lineage and events far out of his control demanding that he train AND Anakin was selected to be trainined because of his high level of forceness in his blood. Both of these situations seem quite random to me - I mean, you certainly don't pick your family lineage. Would you rather that in the game when you created a character, there was a random number generator employed to determine whether you had the appropriate inclination to become a Jedi? I mean, if you're basing it on the movies - that seems the most like the movies. Anakin and Luke both picked to become a Jedi but two events out of their control had to occur first - they had to be born with that special Jedi specialness and a Jedi had to be introduced to them so that they could be located and picked - in the Star Wars universe, Jedi are quite rare. If you make it, complete a set of quests and there's no randomness to it, then everyone would become a Jedi.
Re:Jedi crap (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:SWG must be revamped (Score:3, Insightful)
But lets, for the moment, assume that the developers are told, "You can only have a very small percent of the population become Jedi. You're not allowed to make any major deviations from what was shown in the origonal trilogy" Can't whine about it, it is what it is. So what's the best way to do that? I would agree that the requirement of random character developement is probably not the best way. As others have said, being a Jedi should NOT be easy, or the game would become rediuclous. Iif you want to play multiplayer Jedi Knight, go do that. So I don't think it's unreasonable for the game designers to have been expected to come up with a way to make Jedi difficult to obtain. And it's not totaly stupid that they made it slightly unpleasant.
But...
What others have said is correct: the game should be fun, even if not playing as, or playing to get to the point where you _can_ play as, a Jedi. The game designers were expected to make a game where it WOULD be fun to play as one of the "boring, ugly peons you see in the background of the SW universe." As the opening crawl said, it's a period of CIVIL WAR. It would seem to be an exciting time to be alive, and because the vaste majority of the people in the Rebelion, the Empire, or neither do NOT have the Force, they gotta live their lives too. Even some of the more exciting characters in the movies don't use the Force: Han Solo, Boba Fett, the 'droids, Princess Leia (ignoring her relation to Luke and Yoda's comment; for all practical purposes, in the origonal trilogy she's Force-less) and both the Rebel and Imperial armies...
So rather than bitching that the designers should have ignored canon and created a game that broke as many rules as possible until it became a fun game that was only losely based in the SW universe, you should complain because they had a responsibility to create a fun game WITHIN THE CONSTRAINTS THEY WERE GIVEN. While that's a difficult job, they're being paid to do it. And it doesn't seem an insurmountable goal. The game should be fun for everyone, Jedi or not. And fun whether or not you WANT to be a Jedi. And, in fact, the game should be fun enough that being a Jedi, while cool, isn't the ONLY fun part of the game.
I haven't played SW: Galaxies, but have been following discussions about it in hopes it will eventually appear 'finished' enough that I'll take the plunge. And from what others have said, it's not there yet. Make non-Jedi questing more fun. Allow more player-created content and events. Give people more enjoyable stuff to do! These are the complaints I hear. I hope the kinks get worked out of SW:G, I really do. I very much want to play and hope the game reaches the point where I can do so and love every minute of it.
But don't bitch about what the how the game should have a major rules overhaul. Bitch about how the developers don't seem to be using the rules they have very well.
-Trillian