Some weeks, I wonder what the hell it is about these damn games that makes me like them so much. Some weeks I just want to turn off my PC, sit in the living room, and play Halo. Then, there are weekends like this past. I had fully intended to write more about Sigil’s Future or the formation of Colony Studios (which sounds fascinating) … but instead I just played a game.

I played one Massive game essentially from the moment that I got off of work on Friday until I went to bed on Monday night. This past weekend, a Massive game reminded me quite painfully how powerful these things can be if the right combination of circumstances present themselves. For the first time in a long time, a MMOG picked me up by the lapels and shook me like a dog with a chew toy. It was freaking awesome. Last week also marked the first week that Netflix decided to gift me with their Watch Now feature, and I spent the time whiling away the hours questing and watching Red Dwarf via streaming video.

I’ve been studiously avoiding saying the name of the game, and I’ll admit it: there’s a certain element of shame here. I couldn’t even tell you if I think the game is any good today, but I have to cop to playing something like 30 hours worth in the last three or four days. It’s not LOTRO; my Minstrel is still sitting at the edge of the Shire waiting for me to move on to new lands. It’s not WoW; my account is actually cancelled at the moment. It’s not EQ2; I really only play that on Wednesdays other than the occasional crafting fit. No, it was my achilles heel acting up again: This weekend I put back on my fish suit and played a ton of Star Wars Galaxies.

I know. I’m sorry, I really am. Someone was nice enough to say they enjoyed my writing this past weekend, and I can only imagine what you think of me when I cop to playing a game that is still in many ways a giant mess. I mean, I’m just some git on the internet, but I do try to go for a little bit of credibility. Sure I swear, constantly contradict myself, misspell things, engage in conjecture, rail against things I have no control over, and generally make a spectacle of myself. But umm … at least I try?

Anyway, I want to be clear: I haven’t drunk the kool-aid. SWG is still a massively flawed game. But it is a massively flawed game that finally has things to do in it. And, it will have things to do in the future. I initially popped in just to get ready for the new pet system and the Structure Destruction event. I spent all weekend working my old Mon Calamari Tailor / Pistoleer / Rifleman / Creature Handler / Commando Amak through the main quest in the game, called ‘Legacy’. Over the course of the last several days I’ve come up with a bucket of complaints and thoughts on how to really get this game moving in the right direction, but for the time being I want to concentrate on the positive.

As much as I have fond nostalgia for the heady early days of the game, there were a number of problems to be addressed as they went into the CU/NGE timeframe:

1. Too Many Samey Professions – When the game launched there were far too many things to be, and most of them were not combat-oriented classes. As much as I found the non-combat classes interesting, this did a disservice to the majority of gamers who want to kick ass and take names. Worse, there was a lot of duplication and eccentricity: the ‘Smuggler’ wasn’t a smuggler, there were whole professions devoted to non-lightsaber melee combat (never that big a part of the movies), and a lot of the crafting classes shared roles. It was hard to know what you wanted to do, let alone understand how someone else was specced out.
2. Boring Combat – I loved the queue, and the HAM idea was really really cool. Beyond that, it was sort of a weak-sauce EQ in space. Hit A, walk away. With almost all players able to use the highest-end equipment from day one there was very little differentiation. Everyone used the ‘best’ armor and the ‘best’ weapon for a given archetype, and no one deviated. As you may remember from the derisive calls of ‘Pokemon’, everybody took a little bit of Creature Handler so that they could play in the Pet Wars. Post-CU Pre-NGE was even more EQ in space, so this problem has been around most of the game’s life.
3. Not Star Wars-y Enough – With all these interesting weird ideas running around, very little of the actual personality of the fiction got through. Sure, you could talk to Leia. But they cut so much back at the end of development that there were no mounts, vehicles, Jedi … you couldn’t go into space. In a game with the word star in the title. The infamous You Only Die a Bazillion thread from back in the day summed it up quite nicely.
4. Too Much World, Not Enough Game – This, of course, was the one that killed it for a lot of people in the early days, and still keeps people away today. Content. Even before WoW made it obvious that people wanted things to do, folks knew they needed more direction than SWG initially gave them. To say there was no ‘there’ there when the game launched would be an understatement. When content finally did begin to go it, it was either nerfs (pets), stuff that was supposed to be in at launch (vehicles), or ass-backwards (dungeons). More than anything else, I think the lack of something for people to specifically do was what drove players away. It’s all well and good to give people a blank slate, but it’s hard to start with absolutely nothing and have that be ‘fun’.

I’m happy to say that for the most part, a lot of these problems have been addressed:

1. Nine Professions – It’s very, very clear what you’re doing when you sign up to play a class. Entertainers and Artisans are still kind of wonky, but otherwise everybody has a role to play in combat, and it’s a clearly delineated role. Moreover, there’s only a moderate amount of overlap. The profession streamline has made SWG a much more approachable game.
2. Twitch Combat – Okay, it’s not really twitch … but it’s more twitch than most Massives. It’s certainly got more engagement to it than the original combat system did, and that’s all that needed to happen: it needed to get better.
3. Star Wars-y-ish – This is still probably an area that people can take exception to, as for some player it will never be Wars-y enough. Just the same, the addition of Kashyyk, Mustafar, space combat, and an improved GCW have made a number of the ‘Bazillion’ complaints moot. Especially the Jedi one. Bah.
4. More Game – The Legacy quest series takes players from level 1 to 40 in a straight line, visiting most of the places on Tatooine, a good part of Naboo, and some parts of Corellia. It’s chok-a-blok with questy goodness, and (thanks to the expansions and the odd standalone once in a while) there are other things to do as well. It’s not WoW, to be sure, but there’s a ton more to do than at launch.

I know a lot of people still hate it, but the NGE has certainly carved a definite shape out of what used to be the game’s messy fatty surface. I still agree with Raph’s ‘you stay with the community you wrought’ statement; springing it on the players out of the blue was a shitty, shitty thing to do. That, though, was a community/marketing problem. Looking back on it now, the NGE seems to have addressed the game’s issues, and made ‘what the game is about’ more obvious to players. As I imagine those were the primary goals of the designers at SOE and LucasArts, they’ve succeeded.

Of course, the game still has a lot of ways it could be improved. Luckily, I have no experience making games, little shame, and a website on which to post my ideas. Oh internet, is there anything you can’t do?