The Video Game Revue

Star Wars Galaxies

My first "MMO-like" experiences were with BBS door games back in the mid-90s. Some of you will remember the likes of Legend of the Red Dragon, Usurper, Hack & Slash, Trade Wars, Barren Realms Elite, and so forth. These sorts of games eventually evolved into MUDs, which can accurately be summed up as text-interface MMORPGs. I've played one or two MUDs casually, but I was never deeply into one. My first "true" MMO experience was with the 3-month subscription that I had to Star Wars Galaxies within a week of its launch.

I've played three MMORPGs over the years: Star Wars Galaxies, World of WarCraft, and Guild Wars. I was never deeply into any of them, although there is still a glimmer of hope for WoW. There were times when I seriously considered getting Ultima Online, Everquest, and Dark Ages of Camelot, but I was always held back in figuring that I wouldn't have enough time to properly get a good experience out of them. I very, very nearly cracked with Final Fantasy XI for obvious reasons (Final Fantasy!), but it was the Star Wars themed game that eventually broke me down.

SWG proved to be far too "hardcore" of an experience to hold my interest. My character was a smuggler, and I quickly discovered that completing quests didn't provide much reward and gaining levels took a very long time. I also discovered that by setting up automated mining installations and selling the raw minerals at auction, I could make a lot of credits. Pretty soon I was running around maintaining a fleet of massive automated miners and making tens of thousands of credits per day. Occasionally I'd see something cool or get in a tense firefight with some hostile wildlife, but for the most part, I gradually began to find that SWG was boring the shit out of me. Some of the work that I did in SWG was less interesting than my real-life job, which just goes to show how much of an escape SWG wasn't.

One aspect of SWG that I really enjoyed was exploration. It was fun to travel to new areas and explore the make-shift towns that other players had set up. But the world of SWG just didn't feel interactive enough. You could sit in an authentic Star Wars cantina and watch the entertainers, but nothing really happened--it was just a bunch of geeks grinding their characters and bitching about the game. You could travel to exotic planets, but really you were just using SWG as a model-viewing app; the online portion of it isn't even strictly necessary just to see the terrain. Perhaps what really killed the game for me is that I didn't interact socially enough, which is a problem that I've frequently had with online games over the years.

After about 10 weeks, I threw up my arms and vowed never to play SWG again. For a while after that, I would get small cravings for it, but nothing serious. Eventually I came to loathe SWG as an MMO, and I ranted about how Neverwinter Nights had better MMO potential than SWG. I still think that sometimes.

Then came World of WarCraft, which may very well be the very best RPG that has ever been made--perhaps even the best game known to history so far. WoW seems to me to be impressively balanced; whether you're hardcore or not, and whether you're a social butterfly or not, WoW is fairly accomodating. What dissapoints me about WoW is that the world is far less dynamic than an game like SWG where players can errect their own buildings and such. As much as it has the potential for abuse and other technical challenges, I think that player-created structures and towns in an MMO add a lot to the depth of the game. Other than that, though, there isn't much from SWG that I miss while playing WoW.

Guild Wars is, of course, WoW "lite." Orginally I got into it simply because my GF plays so much WoW that I don't often get to spend any time with WoW myself. Guild Wars is not as fully fun and addictive as WoW, but it is definitely similar. It takes some technical shortcuts (eg. you can only meet other players in towns--not out in the wild), but I like the game's art style (still not as impressive as WoW, in my opinion) and the fact that there is no subscription fee is a huge plus. WoW is a better game than Guild Wars, hands-down, but Guild Wars is arguably a better value simply because it is so comparitively cheap. I also like the fact that Guild Wars has a story campaign that feels a lot like the kind that you would find in a single-player RPG, and that there are henchmen that you can add to your party if you prefer to try and avoid having to party up with random idiots online.

Anyway, that about sums up my MMO experience. Sometimes I still kind of wonder if I could have gotten into FF XI; I definitely should have tried that in place of SWG. I should also probably note that I did consider trying SWG again after the Jump to Lightspeed expansion pack game out (I love the old X-Wing and Tie Fighter games), but in the end it didn't sound like enough fun to draw me back into the fold. Anyway, that's my ramble for today.

posted by Parappa @ 12:40 PM