Star Wars galaxies : unbelievably bad

[cliffski]

Im a huge SW fan, and took the plunge and spent £35 on this rubbish.
never again
The garphics look terrible, the load times are insane. the FPS is a joke, the server is filled with NPCs that dont move or even animate in most cases.
Generally this has the look and feel of a shareware game done 10 years ago.
I simply cannot believe that more than a dozen people carry on playing this game.
Am I missing something? CAll of Duty looks awesome on my PC, so its not my system spec. If SWG looked a quarter as good Id be happy. but with a terrible control system, buggy and unstable client software, and incredibly poor (or non existant) AI for the NPCs, I can't help but feel I've been conned out of my £35 big time.
If your thinking about playing this one, please take my advice and give it a miss, its not worth the install time, let alone the money.

[scharmers]

Viral marketing :)

--scharmers
--who believes MMORPGs are the devil

[McBain]

"Rubbish."

I'd agree that rubbish is the way to describe SWG, but even that couldn't adequately convey the amount of loathing I have for that festering dungheap. A friend suckered me into buying it. He's lucky he's still my friend. :)

[tronnc]

Thankfully my irrational hatred for MMORPGS kept me from even trying this one.

[extarbags]

CAll of Duty looks awesome on my PC, so its not my system spec. If SWG looked a quarter as good Id be happy. but with a terrible control system, buggy and unstable client software, and incredibly poor (or non existant) AI for the NPCs, I can't help but feel I've been conned out of my £35 big time.


Actually, it probably is your system specs. SWG is designed for incredibly high-end systems... you basically need a 9800 to get a consistent 12 FPS (or did, it's been awhile), and it's designed for dual-processor systems.

[Ben Sones]

Am I missing something?

All the threads in this forum from when the game was released, any of which might have warned you away from it before you spent your money? ;)

Seriously, I agree with you. Galaxies was a huge disappointment.

[cliffski]

dang i should come here more often then.
I wish they had got anyone else to do that game but sony, it has "cash-in" written all over it.
if lawyers werent so trigger happy, we would probably have 2 or 3 decent low budget mmorpgs set in the star trek or star wars genres by now...

[Brian Rubin]

I stick with JG and I'm happy. Screw SWG or its upcoming "space" expansion.

[HRose]

World of Warcraft is the saver when it comes to the client engine.

I'm going to cancel from DAoC after two years of rants and fanboysm because the "New Frontiers" expansion moves at unplayable FPS. And they just announced (http://camelotvault.ign.com/e32004/e32004.shtml) a sensible increase of the polycounts on all the characters. Not for me.

SWG's art not only moved like crap (6 fps in cities for me) but I also didn't like it. Fractal generated terrain that shows a few layers (terrain, 2 grass types, trees, sky) doesn't make a world interesting. The tech is useful if it's at the service of the art. In SWG it doesn't happen, there's only tech. And tech that moves at 6 fps.

WoW here deserves the hype and more. I average at 20 FPS and the world is unbelievable, hundreds of times better than what I'm able to experience on *any* game released at this point, MMOG or not. It's a dream and beyond. And it MOVES.

I don't know what these companies think, the eye candy is surely important in a game, but: eye candy != tech. You can have all those new features of the pixel shaders and more but if you don't have talented artists the visual will simply suck. The best things I saw, from paintings to movies and games, never came from just tech, they come from the creativity and passion of a mind. And that creativity is able to do wonderful things even without all the innovations that are pushed into newer engines.

And that brings to another basic part. The performance. I really believe that the performance of a client is WAY more important than the graphic. Not for myself, for everyone. The gaming industry has a strange idea of the market but not everyone is filled with money and latest hardware. I believe that's a very small part of the whole market.

The fact that World of Warcraft will be playable on a wide range of hardware will contribute *strongly* on its supposed victory over the competition. Let's see how many will be able to enjoy EQ2 and how many WoW. And again, not only WoW is more playable, but it's also way more inspired and alive.

Tech is a way to deliver "something". "Something" is the center, the value. The way it's just a way, if you have nothing to put there you are going to fail.

To the users will be obvious who has something to offer and who just fiddles with soulless tech.

[TheWombat]

<shrug> My machine is a year and a half old and New Frontiers runs smoothly. I suppose it depends on your hardware of course but companies can't continue to design to the lowest common denominator forever.

WoW I will agree is very smooth, even on my laptop. Then again I'm not sure it has the same level of graphic detail (not quality--the textures and art design in WoW are top notch IMO) as the Atlantis-version DAOC engine.

[HRose]

I suppose it depends on your hardware of course but companies can't continue to design to the lowest common denominator forever.

UT2004, WoW and Guild Wars don't seem "lowest common denominator" to me.

They all move more smoothly than DAoC. And surely DAoC doesn't offer the same "visual quality", where visual quality is the end result of tech+art.

I really liked some of the art in DAoC, in particular the spell effects (big battles are still something unique) and the new textures and architectures they used in ToA and Frontiers. The new keeps are *amazing*. Both visually and considering the gameplay. Whover built them is a genius.

Fact is that if I'm inside a keep with a few players around my FPS go below 8. And that's not something I'm able to play, no matter how good the expansion could be (and it's not since it needs work, way too slow and boring).

Even here, the tech can be pushed if below there's a solid engine, ok? In WoW you don't have a plain engine, it has tons of nifty effects, like the light shining on the terrain everywhere, bumpmapping, the beautiful spell effects, the incredibly huge clip plane, absolutely smoothly animations and so on. Not only the art is superior here, even the tech is.

But you cannot add more and more if the engine isn't able to support that. If the FPS go below 10 the game is not playable and noone cares about the damn graphic if that happens.

As a player my first concern in DAoC is the lag, the very last is the polycount of the models. I'm the only one? Perhaps. Just venting my personal opinion.

[-Lord Ebonstone-]

I just got into AO again, and if you stick to the Shadowlands, it rocks. Nowhere near as confusing as it used to be... hell, they even sent a CSR guy in-person to greet me minutes after I logged on for the first time. Very classy.

Also, if you think SWG sucks, you haven't played Endless Ages. SWG does still suck, yes, but you haven't seen literal cream-de-la-crap til you've tried EA.

[Jon R.]

Actually, this is pretty much the genre that benefits the least from pushing the tech envelope, excepting RTSes. Gameplay considerations aside, you don't want to have your eyes mauled by 20 FPS in a game you're required to spend weeks and months staring at while you plug away on the treadmill.