Star Wars Galaxies: An Empire Divided
Interplanet Janet, She’s a Galaxies Girl…
By Susie Vee

PLATFORM: PC

PUBLISHER: LucasArts

DEVELOPER: Sony Online

GENRE: MMORPG

ESRB: Teen

SCORE:

The online RPG has always been a genre that both appealed to girl gamers and held them at arm’s length. On one side, the sense of community and the ability to hold real conversations with other players, as well as the real-life dynamics of an economy and social structure, appealed greatly to our instincts. But the teenage griefers [those who cause trouble for other players], arcane RPG rules and overwhelming geekiness of it all made the online RPG a tough sell or women.

But as the pinnacle of modern game development, MMO’s (as massively multiplayer online games are called) combine the connectivity of the Internet with gigantic-scale games, and offer a lot of potential. The genre is in its infancy, to be sure, but once you’ve spent some time playing with thousands of other real live gamers, playing an offline game with computer-controlled NPCs seems a little stale.

What the genre really needed was a high-profile, general interest game that would appeal to the casual gamers who could never muster up the enthusiasm to play Everquest or any of the other sword & sorcery MMO’s out there.

So when LucasArts and Sony decided to team up and produce a Star Wars themed online RPG, we (along with almost every other gamer on the planet) were sold. While still a bit on the nerdy side, Star Wars had enough mainstream credibility to finally break through and take MMO’s to the next level.

The gaming public waited impatiently through several years of development, and when the game was finally released in June of 2003, we were right there, logging on with the masses (ok, we waited a few days to avoid the sign-on rush that swamped the first day or two of gameplay).

Ever since then, as the 800-lb gorilla on the bock, Star Wars Galaxies has quickly become the second-largest online RPG, next to Everquest, with over a quarter of a million subscribers. It has also become whipping boy number one – with all the advance publicity leading to an inevitable backlash.

Even though all online RPG’s go through growing pains, and have almost constant fixes, tweaks and patches, Galaxies was singled out as being everything from a public beta to totally unplayable. Many major game publications gave it lukewarm reviews, and to read the official forums, you’d think that no one was ever able to log on to the servers – and that when they did, all their items had vanished and their characters had lost all their experience points.

While there were doubtless lots of bugs that only tens of thousands of simultaneous players could reveal, the game is no where near the undercooked mess some complainers have made it out to be. In reality, it’s tremendous fun, and even at this very early stage, there’s never a lack of things to do or places to go.

In more than two months of playing, we and our online friends have run into almost no serious bugs, aside from a few missions that vanished along the way. We’ve never had trouble signing onto our server, and out inventories, bank account and skill trees have always functioned just fine. We’re not saying no one’s had problems, but they clearly are not as common, or as serious, as some have made them out to be.

We’ll cover much of the specifics of day-to-day gameplay in GameGal’s upcoming He Said/She Said feature about life in Star Wars Galaxies, but here’s a basic rundown of how the game operates.

You start off by picking a server or “galaxy” where your character will live. There are 12 or so servers, each with identical planets and features. So if you’re playing with friends, make sure you’re all joining the same galaxy.

Then you get to create your character. The creation system is one of the high points of the game – and its most impressive technology. You pick a species, Human, Wookie, etc., and gender. From there you can customize almost anything, from the length of your nose to your eyebrows to your height and weight. It simply has to be seen to be believed. Our only gripe was a lack of hairstyle selections. We would have liked to see more choices for such a visible feature.

Once in the game, you choose a starting profession – marksman, scout, entertainer or one of several others. This gives you some starting skills and equipment and puts you on the path to building up your character. The skill trees have lots of branches, and you can switch tracks any time you feel like it.

Surprisingly, it turns out that tons of people shy away from combat and set up shop as dancers, musicians, crafters and medics. That’s all a bit passive for our tastes, but it adds a high degree of realism to the online world.

Gaining experience to get new skills and abilities can be a chore – hardcore gamers refer to it as “grinding.” But the game is designed to encourage you to form groups to go hunting or take on missions. Playing with others is tons of fun – you communicate through word balloons over your heads.

Combat is true RPG style, where you select your weapons and attacks, but don’t do the actual aiming and shooting, as you would in an action game. The mechanic takes some getting used to, but works well enough, as long as you don’t overreach and try to fight enemies who are too tough for you.

Should that happen, you’ll likely have to “clone” at the nearest cloning facility that you saved your data at. In layman’s terms, that means you’ll respawn back in town.

We’re only scratching the surface of the depth of the game here. There are banks and stores and even a system of e-Bay-like terminals for buying and selling. Over the course of two months, we’ve barely managed to explore a small chunk of even one of the nine planets you can visit.

There seem to be a large number of female characters in the game – but we have to admit, we’re pretty sure many of the scantily clad dancers are really guys. That being said, people generally behave in a mature, responsible way, and we haven’t heard anything too offensive. Female characters have exactly the same abilities as guys, and in a skill-based game, people tend to invite you to group with them based on your abilities, not the size of your biceps.

As an online RPG, the game is constantly changing, with new content and new features, as well as regular fixes and patches -- so any analysis could easily be out of date in short order. In this one review we’ve barely been able to outline the most basic components of the game. But trust us, if you can handle the commitment to building a character and working with and against other players, then Star Wars Galaxies could easily start taking up a good deal of your free time.

One technical caveat: Galaxies takes a robust machine to run. We'd recommend lots of RAM, at least 512MB, to avoid lag in the heavily populated cities.