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Teabagged By Star Wars: A Second Look At NGE
azhrarn
Member Posts: 817
Okay, I was weak. I was seduced by the determined nagging of friends and my shameful desire to have my game back. Save your condemnation. It had to be done, as distasteful as it may be. It's been a few days now and I have a far better idea of what's going on in the game I used to love which is now the game I hate to hate.
As the title suggests, I'm less than thrilled. When starting up a new character using the new player tutorial, one is LITERALLY teabagged with Star Wars. Not immersed. Not steeped. Not dropped into the action. Slapped in the face with main characters who would, in the Star Wars Universe, have NOTHING to do with you and no interest in anything more than your credits. The entire set of sequences carries an impression more of "hurry up, noob, let's get it over with" than of excitement and adventure.
As much as I felt my intelligence insulted with my first brush with the NGE, this second look at it was every bit as disgust-inducing and exasperation-laden. If I had the hands and relfexes of the teen aged kid they are obviously aiming for, this would have been not merely ridiculously easy, but laughable to boot. Combat in the NGE really should strike up the Benny Hill Show theme instead of Star Wars music. Because that is exactly how NGE combat feels. Overclocked, silly, laughable, comic and unengaging.
I've run thru the first 10 levels on a jedi, a bounty hunter and a smuggler and my prognosis on their "individual profession quest lines" isn't a good one. The differences are negligable. I shouldn't have been surprised, really. SOE and LA are much better at making bold claims and big promises than carrying through on delivering the goods to back their big talk. It puzzles the living hell out of me how making such minor quest deviations for more than these nine stripped-down professions could possibly be all that challenging for their current dev team. I suspect the answer is the same one that applies to New Jersey's free roaming shopping cart mystery -- mindboggling laziness.
Of course, me being me, my very first go at this whole ill-advised expedition was with an entertainer, sans tutorial. All I can say is... WOW. I honestly don't know if they could make the profession any less appealing. The NGE experience from the perspective of an entertainer player is basicly expensive Star Wars skinned visual chat. Where the fighter classes appear to have a lengthy quest path that just rushes them along willy-nilly from one irritating task to the next while being annoyed by the ugly face and pathetic threats of Bib Fortuna via commlink (oh yeah, gonna threaten you on the phone, peon! be afraid!), the entertainer does two 30 second performances and then is packed off to the entertainer mission terminals for their income. The rewards are... well let's just say that inferior is a word that falls far short of the actuality.
The lack of any real actual iconic or Star Wars-esque feeling to the game verges on painful. I don't know what the boys at SOE and LA were thinking, but they couldn't get much further away from what they're advertising without actually stripping away the Star Wars skins. They have mistaken busywork and tedium for action, speed of movement for excitement, slapping characters into places, situations and times they wouldn't actually be for iconicness and shallow, unpolished banality for fun. Anarchy Online characters seem more alive than a SWG character in combat, and that's just plain sad, considering AO is old enough to be SWG's mother in game years.
The new ui is nothing short of irritating. The awkwardness of the interface alone was nearly enough to make me give up before having even started. I'm getting mighty sick of being forced to either be able to move or be able to see more than the ass-end of my characters. Communicating is a constant frustration, as the chat options are dreadfully limited and outright impossible while one is trying to do anything else.
Now I understand that the devs might have found the previous systems to be difficult to manage, but REALLY, if they can't do anything better than this, they don't need to be developing live code for any MMO. They should pack it in, go back to DeVry and learn to answer phones instead.
If this had been my first experience of SWG, I'd NEVER have gotten hooked. Smed seriously understated the situation when he admitted that his game hadn't yet "hit the baseline for fun". I really think the man has played less NGE in the last 5 months than I have. I also think that he needs to lay off playing ANY other game until SWG becomes worth the price of admission again. That goes double for his dev team. I suspect if that crew of arrogant knuckleheads had to actually PLAY the live version of this game that positive changes would come down the pipe a lot more quickly than we have been getting them.
Frankly, I don't expect these airheads to take the sensible course of action and reinstate the old systems while taking the nge to test until it is at an acceptible state of completion, though such an action might give this game a life expectancy. Inexplicably, while SOE and LA are obviously, like all companies, driven by profit; neither one seems to be too interested in making this joint venture of theirs succeed. Every choice they have made in the last year has been a poor one and every communication with their customers has been arrogant and antagonistic. This isn't the behavior of professionals who have their eye on the green, it's the behaviour of rank amateurs who are doomed to failure.
I don't know what else to say.
Wait, yes I do... and it's going to blow your minds. Chillastra has players. I now know why Obraik was bragging about population. HIS server is populated. God knows why or how, but it is. This is not true of Naritus, Bria, Ahazi or Starsider though. Those galaxies are ghost towns. So if you're going to be a tard like me and try this POS again... remember: go to Chillastra.
Okay NOW I'm done.
As the title suggests, I'm less than thrilled. When starting up a new character using the new player tutorial, one is LITERALLY teabagged with Star Wars. Not immersed. Not steeped. Not dropped into the action. Slapped in the face with main characters who would, in the Star Wars Universe, have NOTHING to do with you and no interest in anything more than your credits. The entire set of sequences carries an impression more of "hurry up, noob, let's get it over with" than of excitement and adventure.
As much as I felt my intelligence insulted with my first brush with the NGE, this second look at it was every bit as disgust-inducing and exasperation-laden. If I had the hands and relfexes of the teen aged kid they are obviously aiming for, this would have been not merely ridiculously easy, but laughable to boot. Combat in the NGE really should strike up the Benny Hill Show theme instead of Star Wars music. Because that is exactly how NGE combat feels. Overclocked, silly, laughable, comic and unengaging.
I've run thru the first 10 levels on a jedi, a bounty hunter and a smuggler and my prognosis on their "individual profession quest lines" isn't a good one. The differences are negligable. I shouldn't have been surprised, really. SOE and LA are much better at making bold claims and big promises than carrying through on delivering the goods to back their big talk. It puzzles the living hell out of me how making such minor quest deviations for more than these nine stripped-down professions could possibly be all that challenging for their current dev team. I suspect the answer is the same one that applies to New Jersey's free roaming shopping cart mystery -- mindboggling laziness.
Of course, me being me, my very first go at this whole ill-advised expedition was with an entertainer, sans tutorial. All I can say is... WOW. I honestly don't know if they could make the profession any less appealing. The NGE experience from the perspective of an entertainer player is basicly expensive Star Wars skinned visual chat. Where the fighter classes appear to have a lengthy quest path that just rushes them along willy-nilly from one irritating task to the next while being annoyed by the ugly face and pathetic threats of Bib Fortuna via commlink (oh yeah, gonna threaten you on the phone, peon! be afraid!), the entertainer does two 30 second performances and then is packed off to the entertainer mission terminals for their income. The rewards are... well let's just say that inferior is a word that falls far short of the actuality.
The lack of any real actual iconic or Star Wars-esque feeling to the game verges on painful. I don't know what the boys at SOE and LA were thinking, but they couldn't get much further away from what they're advertising without actually stripping away the Star Wars skins. They have mistaken busywork and tedium for action, speed of movement for excitement, slapping characters into places, situations and times they wouldn't actually be for iconicness and shallow, unpolished banality for fun. Anarchy Online characters seem more alive than a SWG character in combat, and that's just plain sad, considering AO is old enough to be SWG's mother in game years.
The new ui is nothing short of irritating. The awkwardness of the interface alone was nearly enough to make me give up before having even started. I'm getting mighty sick of being forced to either be able to move or be able to see more than the ass-end of my characters. Communicating is a constant frustration, as the chat options are dreadfully limited and outright impossible while one is trying to do anything else.
Now I understand that the devs might have found the previous systems to be difficult to manage, but REALLY, if they can't do anything better than this, they don't need to be developing live code for any MMO. They should pack it in, go back to DeVry and learn to answer phones instead.
If this had been my first experience of SWG, I'd NEVER have gotten hooked. Smed seriously understated the situation when he admitted that his game hadn't yet "hit the baseline for fun". I really think the man has played less NGE in the last 5 months than I have. I also think that he needs to lay off playing ANY other game until SWG becomes worth the price of admission again. That goes double for his dev team. I suspect if that crew of arrogant knuckleheads had to actually PLAY the live version of this game that positive changes would come down the pipe a lot more quickly than we have been getting them.
Frankly, I don't expect these airheads to take the sensible course of action and reinstate the old systems while taking the nge to test until it is at an acceptible state of completion, though such an action might give this game a life expectancy. Inexplicably, while SOE and LA are obviously, like all companies, driven by profit; neither one seems to be too interested in making this joint venture of theirs succeed. Every choice they have made in the last year has been a poor one and every communication with their customers has been arrogant and antagonistic. This isn't the behavior of professionals who have their eye on the green, it's the behaviour of rank amateurs who are doomed to failure.
I don't know what else to say.
Wait, yes I do... and it's going to blow your minds. Chillastra has players. I now know why Obraik was bragging about population. HIS server is populated. God knows why or how, but it is. This is not true of Naritus, Bria, Ahazi or Starsider though. Those galaxies are ghost towns. So if you're going to be a tard like me and try this POS again... remember: go to Chillastra.
Okay NOW I'm done.
_______________________
Kote lo'shebs'ul narit
Comments
{(RIP)} SWG
To quote Threepio, "We're doomed."
_______________________
Kote lo'shebs'ul narit
Wow! A most excellent report! Too bad you had to give money over to SOE to give us that report but I'll forgive you.
Not having seen SWG since just after the CU hit, I have always been wondering what the game "looked" like now. Thanks to you, I now know. And it seems dreadful. One of my accounts I had a dancer/musician giving bot buffs in the Rebel Outpost on Rori on the Ahazi server. She did pretty good getting tips. From what you're saying, it seems that character would no longer be useful.
Its too bad that the game seems so shallow now. One thing I loved about the game was how "rich" the experiance was. From your report, that "magic" is gone. Too bad there will never be a rollback of anykind.
One of the things I've noticed in the MANY flaws by SOE was consideration for all the people who had multiple accounts. No, not that SOE cared about them. I mean from a subscription standpoint. If all the professions are pretty much the same, the need for multiple accounts would be useless. I had five accounts and I think that after the NGE hit, 4 would have been cancelled (assuming, of course, I would have liked the NGE enough to keep the 5th account). Not a great business decission on the part of SOE. I guess they're SOL.
edit: I can't type
I played UT for quite a while. Favourite weapon: sniper rifle. Headshot accuracy: 78%.
But the NGE UI is a disaster. It's not about aiming. It's about clicking, just like flash games. When you aim, you aim instinctively *ahead* of target. This is where the twitch in twich combat comes from. You aim at target, but when you want to shoot, you twitch in the direction the target is moving. Through practice, this twich becomes perfectly aimed. In SWG, it's click on the bounding box.
Inability to miss is another immersion breaker. If you click on the box, you hit. But you cannot strafe, you cannot simply shoot an area, it just doesn't work.
The main problem here is, it will be ok mostly for those, who don't play FPS, or don't have much experience with action games. But anyone who has, will be disapointed.
And this simplicity of combat makes it predictable and boring. Add to that the defensive nature of combat, and you get a completely unimersive feeling. And after realization that this is all there is to combat, yes, it's so ridiculously easy that it instantly becomes boring.
I played UT for quite a while. Favourite weapon: sniper rifle. Headshot accuracy: 78%.
But the NGE UI is a disaster. It's not about aiming. It's about clicking, just like flash games. When you aim, you aim instinctively *ahead* of target. This is where the twitch in twich combat comes from. You aim at target, but when you want to shoot, you twitch in the direction the target is moving. Through practice, this twich becomes perfectly aimed. In SWG, it's click on the bounding box.
Inability to miss is another immersion breaker. If you click on the box, you hit. But you cannot strafe, you cannot simply shoot an area, it just doesn't work.
The main problem here is, it will be ok mostly for those, who don't play FPS, or don't have much experience with action games. But anyone who has, will be disapointed.
And this simplicity of combat makes it predictable and boring. Add to that the defensive nature of combat, and you get a completely unimersive feeling. And after realization that this is all there is to combat, yes, it's so ridiculously easy that it instantly becomes boring.
LOL. So, if SOE was not marketing the game for Action gamers (and we all agree they were not margketing the game for US), who in the heck were they marketing this game to?
SOE =
Say hi to Obraik for us
SOE =
Reflex challenged twelve year olds it would seem.
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<ahref="http://profile.xfire.com/aetiuslonginus"><img src="http://miniprofile.xfire.com/bg/sh/type/2/aetiuslonginus.png"; width="450" height="34" /></a>
Nice post Azhrarn. Remind me to reread it if I bang my head on something and get the urge to resubscribe.
EnB Exiles
GuardiansOfOrion.com
Nice post and good clarifications of the things you tried and didn't try. Sometimes a fresh perpestive works and or remains the same.
When i first tried enteratiner with nge i could not get the /start dance to work ( old old bug) cannot skill animate while running , then the floursishes would not excute correctly nor could i change dances and this was a Master dancer then I discovered some of my favorite dances did not make it in to nge.
As I was fiddeling with how to's as nge launched old quests were spawning in the cantina for high end quest and killing the few folks that were there at the time. That nixed that
I have since leveled a main to 90 an alt from 1 - 90 and another alt on bria to 80- 83 the one on bria I had to do the ole fashion way of grinding due to already completed musty and wookie planet quests.
The first two I did before holes were plugged up and did them during double experaince.
The 80 -83 was very slow going. Few things I figured out. There were times specials did not go off heal not responding and client server information seemed not to match.
I learned even at 64 meters away a mob could time warp on top of you if red on up one hit and you were toast. If you kept moving stayed out of range much of the time you could get the higher end mobs.
I never figured out how to deal with baby mobs "hurton pups" or savage quankers quick speedy and with having to aim and target hard with current ui set up the ui got in the way of the very small critters.
Both of my still active guilds on starsider and bria in one weekend a few weeks ago during the developer posting that Friday marathon all gave up at once, so tells have been quiet friends list now empty and not having anyone in game to chat with is a huge let down, and is empty.
I take things more slowly with the bria alt but things are still bothersome, at times using a range weapon instead of animations shooting in front of you it comes from behind the shoulder or from behind you. If you swing around to look you lose target and still end up toast. The mission termanials are different if you go to different player cities. Finding mobs at higher levels is not the same as it was before.
Normaly i would have serached out folks for pals again or landed into another pa but most are re organzing or just not recuriting at the moment.
Today in one of the player cities on bria I saw folks coming and going and in old days folks would have stopped chated and said hi. The social side now seems to be gone depending on where you are
I was excited though to see other players actively grinding though.
Walk away, the NGE is here to stay.
_____________________
I am the flipside of the coin on which the troll and the fanboy are but one side.
Hey, each revamp has done nothing but improve SWG so i say bring it on.
_____________________
I am the flipside of the coin on which the troll and the fanboy are but one side.
/sigh
I don't really know why it was I let my friends talk me into trying it again. It really is as awful as all that. The only comfort I get out of the entire ordeal is that you seem to have some very sweet people on Chillastra. The Chimaera people can be sweet too, what there is left of them.
But at the end of the day, community isn't enough to make a shitty, broken game worth paying $15 a month for. Even one as good as Chill's. I thought I could hack being confined to a cantina at first, but I have begun to remember all too well WHY my characters were all hybrids. I need more than what the NGE offers any of its professions. MUCH more.
I'm not a buffbot. I'm a curious, relentlessly questioning person who needs the freedom to roam, explore, conquer (or to die trying), to evolve and become unique. NGE removed any possibility of this satisfaction. They morphed challenge to chain-quests, freedom to predestined paths, uniqueness to enforced conformity... they stole the Star Wars from the game and filled it with this huge yawning nothing. I know this all sounds so overly dramatic, but the changes ARE dramaticly bad.
Even the starter quests, these things that people speak so glowingly of when they praise the game, are so unchallenging and BORing. I had more fun grinding surveying (my least favorite grind pre-CU) than I had with the space station. I could feel my brain leaking out my ear by the time I found my way off the station from being repeatedly slapped in the face with Star Wars characters I shouldn't have even seen until weeks from now, after doing something either staggeringly heroic or mindbogglingly stupid. A person can get jaded quickly when forcefed so many main characters in such rapid succession.
And what comes after that? How do you keep that up, much less escalate it? Does the Emperor invite you to teaparties on Sundays and regale you with tales of seducing Anakin? Of course not. You get it all at once and then it's over for you. No sense of accomplishment or achievement. There are no new frontiers and the old ones came so quickly, easily and in bulk that they become chalk in your mouth. Worthless. Banal. Boring.
You know how badly I feel? I named my smuggler Onoes (o noes!) and her ship was the Unicorn Giggles. That's how bad it felt. And even that stopped being funny before she hit level 10 in less than an hour (WITH my taped mouse and singular lack of coordination).
There are only so many times "Onoes! They've ordered you to power down the Unicorn Giggles and prepare to be boarded" is funny.
I'm sorry, Obraik. I wanted to be proved wrong. I love your galaxy's people. Susie at the cantina and Bullet-tooth Tony the hallway lurking jedi are good company. It's a shame we all met in this time and in this game rather than two or three years back in the real SWG.
Sometimes being right sucks major ass.
_______________________
Kote lo'shebs'ul narit
_______________________
Kote lo'shebs'ul narit
Hey, each revamp has done nothing but improve SWG so i say bring it on.
It also killed half the population. So I guess you and Obraik are the SOE's target population. After 3 more revamps, you'll be last two people playing your absolutely perfect game.
He's a great guy. Old vet community Euro who refuses to go away because he doesn't want his guild (GOLD) to die. He's so sweet that I forgave him his preference for Strip Club Barbie (you know the one -- sloppy medium length hair hanging over half the face, minimum wieght, maximum chest, medium height, leather bag brown skin and the bare minumum of clothing) female skins.
_______________________
Kote lo'shebs'ul narit
Get a hobby, find a new game, join a new community or just lay in bed all day and stare at the cieling. Anything is better then wallowing in self-pity.
_____________________
I am the flipside of the coin on which the troll and the fanboy are but one side.
Surfing the internet and posting on forums IS a hobby, dude (you know, the same thing that YOU seem to have done 921 times thus far). And, having worked my way in position at my job, I now have time to surf the internet and post on forums while working. I'm sure others here have similar advantages...
If SWG is still as fun as some claim it to be, why aren't you online, playing SWG right now? Why are you here posting? If the game is still as much fun as you say, why are you here and not not playing?
Because you were weak, you have to bring cookies AND pie to the next meeting.
Shayde - SWG (dead)
Proud member of the Cabal.
It sounds great, so great in fact, I pitty those who canceled
I don't like it when you say things. - A Vanguard fan who does too.
09f911029d74e35bd84156c5635688c0
/pie
/cookies
/cake
/noogies
Much love to the Shayde. Happy holidays, man. I'll be back to piss and moan on Monday.
To everyone, have a safe, fun holiday weekend.
_______________________
Kote lo'shebs'ul narit
You only went through lvl 10 of 90 and you make your observations on what you see in the noob lvl's ? LVL 10 can be reached on the space station fairly fast . Hell in less than an hour , When you say you were doing the profession quests do you mean those you get on Ord mantell ? There are also quests specific for each class through journals , yet i don't think you played long enough to find out .
Was it also necassary for this long winded of a post ? You really could of said "I hate the game " and saved yourself the trouble . I don't see many facts in this post only opinions .
For every minute you are angry , you lose 60 seconds of happiness."-Emerson