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We were Exploreres, Adventurers and Soldiers
RobbHood
Member Posts: 58
If anyone has an active account for SWG, search RobbHood and copy that post with the title above. It speaks to all that was and that which was lost.
I was explaining the game to a guildie tonight and man I miss the original game.
Comments
AHH Found a way in. This was the best of times. A game where we created the content on the fly and there was plenty.
The game was just out of beta and 40 of my guild started playing. I was one of my group’s “Planet Side” testers/players, having beta tested it. We are 200 strong spread out now over 8-10 different games.
I would tune in the SWG channel on TS and listen, it was amazing to hear the accounts of things across the galaxy as seen through the eyes of noobs. Everyone was a noob. I had to be a part of this.
I got the game and away I went. There were people everywhere. Cantinas were jammed, star ports as well. People running across Dath, no speeders yet. Fighting rancors and nightsisters. Squills and Tuskin Raiders were things to avoid on our home planet. The Corellian plains and the swamps of Talus, filled with big cats and their babies was a great place for the CH, but a dangerous one as well.
The crafting was amazing as well, folks dedicated themselves to mining, harvesting or buying the best resources, looting or buying skill tapes, and the items they made were top shelf. We knew who they were and we haggled for the best price. Weapons, armor, BE clothing, foods, drinks, etc…
The fighting classes would hire out to protect crafters as they tended their harvesters, or just paid us to bring home the best meat or bone, when ever it would be located that month at various places across the galaxy.
The player cites became sophisticated and well thought out. We would hunt in groups to fund the treasury. Recruit top crafters to place their vendors so traffic in town would increase.
Entertainers formed troupes that would travel around and perform at events for hire. Towns would have celebrations, music, fireworks, dancing. The socialization was at its peak.
Bases became focal points for the GCW, defending and attacking, when one went “hot” hundreds of players would be on hand. Theed was a kill zone as was the Bestine-Anchorhead corridor.
Jedi were rare and as the game progressed, more found their way to the Force. But through perma-death, saber TEF and eventually visibility and the BH, showing off with a LS was a bad thing. Removing the BH gank squad made us Jedi more brazen and may have been the first sign of the down hill slide. Jedi should have remained in the shadows.
I remember traveling across many planets and stopping off in camps on a regular basis. Players just out and about were never hard to stumble across. The Master Ranger camp was a sight to see. If they had a dancer, it was a chance to heal up a bit and move on. Before leaving you could often barter for a new pet or some food or drink. Few knew I was a Jedi, it was much safer that way. Regular clothes, carrying a rifle or carbine, with my LS in the tool bar just in case I was not as careful as I thought I was.
Back to a big city, get your speeder, armor and weapon repaired. It was always nice to find a smuggler and get those new items sliced. Stop by the local cantina and enjoy some music and get a mind buff, hit a star port and have a doctor buff you up. Then back out to the open spaces, never far from action.
Player run night clubs sprang up, rented juke boxes, exotic dancers, beauty pageants and just a place to hang out, waiting for the next assault on the enemy or hunting party. At one pageant, with about two hundred in attendance, a beautiful young Jedi was competing, when a BH attacked, the fight spilled out into the street and raged on for 20 minutes before she managed to escape. I cannot imagine a more “Star Warsy” scene then a fight breaking out in a Star Wars bar.
You didn’t have to run around to find PvP, it would always find you if you were not alert. NPC’s could unmask you as well, and many times you would have to fight your way out of town. For a Jedi, that meant visibility for sure. Time to be extra careful. But if laying low was your thing for the moment, there were 100 places to go and things to do. Tend to your factors, restock, shop, socialize, hunt, the Vette, Theme Parks, The Warren, Black Sun Bunker, etc… The server forums served as After Action Reports that made the slow times at work more enjoyable.
New players would seek help, and many did help. Taking them under their wing, showing them the ropes, forging bonds, weaken by the tears of this dying game, and friend’s lists evaporated as gamers left for greener pastures.
You really carved out your own existence, the greatest Star Wars saga ever told, yours… and if you ran the course and wanted a change, you could start over, 31 more times if it suited you.
Many of us have moved on, others stay and pray that the greatness of this game will return. Still others, like me, pay for a month here and there just to check in and see for ourselves.
For me, there is a soothing, surreal feeling when I hear the opening music. I stand above my home on Tatooine, in Storm’s End, a town we forged from the sands in a place called The Valley of the Wind. I watch the twin suns set over the mountains and remember what the game was like. It truly breaks my heart to think of the friends lost and the good times we had, gone forever, like the sands in a storm. I wait a bit longer, check my empty friend’s list and log off.
Yes, we were adventurers, explorers and soldiers, and it was the best of times.
A moment of respectful silence.
I remember reading this on the SOE boards probably when it was first posted. It truly captures the spirit of adventures shared. To whoever initially wrote it, and to the person who copied it here, thank you.
Arc
Total time played: 9125 Days, 21 Hours, 29 Minutes, 27 Seconds
Time played this level: 39 Days, 1 Hour, 24 Minutes, 5 Seconds
Very good post. Reminded me of how much fun Star Wars really was. I bought it after beta as well, and I made my carbineer in Tatooine... and the first thing I ever did was enter the famous Cantina. The first three hours was spent just talking and RPing and revelling in the bar.
I miss that sort of thing. You don't see that anymore in any MMO. I'm playing Vanguard now, and although it is a decent game, it just doesnt' have the feeling of old-school SWG or old-school UO.
The doll would surely say, "I do not want to be human!" although her master wants her to be even more.
I wish we were still just debating things like jedi in the game or the strength of a TKM in melee combat. These issues for me are now like grains of sand in a galaxy laid waste by things like the NGE.
The original SWG game was a great experience, and I have lots of good memories and friends to show for it.
Arc
I put this post in my scrapbook. So ya, I like it
Well. I liked this post from the very first time I read it, I hope the Original Author does'nt mind, but I reposted it on the SWG boards. I still play EQ2 so I can still post. Big Thanks to the OP for a great story...
nice post, i miss it so much
That post is the best reveiw Ive ever read about a game, and now there is no game similar.
Very sad, I mourn the lost players and exciting times. Im left feeling I missed something great, something we will never see again.
The old star wars had everything I wanted in an MMO, and now that Ive missed the boat, I cant help but feel left out.
Maybe Im relieved that I did not spend a year playing this game just to have it swept out from underneath me...
Im speechless, this is how games should be.
Your original piece is the first post on MMORPG.com or pretty much any forum to "move" me
I wasn't in the beta, but I was there in the beginning. Day 1. It was a great game. So great. My brother and I would sit for hours and hours sometimes as our entertainers in some cantina or another. Just dancing and playing music. I don't really know why it was so fun, but it was.
I remember finally getting my first speeder, my first pistoleer and smuggler skills... I remember when I first gained access to Jabba's throne room, I took like 56 screen shots of me with Boba Fett...
I quit because they killed the game I loved. With Jedi holocron grinding and every patch there would be a new "perfect" cookie cutter mold you had to be in order to compete. It's not that they care-beared the game.. it's that they just made ALL the wrong moves from day one. How many "good patches" were there? How many didn't break something?
I miss old SWG.
I keep trying different MMOs looking for something that will really get me interested, but I can't find it... because what I am looking for is the original pre-Hologrind SWG, and that is gone, and will never be replicated.
C
Great write up. Lots of memories. Damn I miss it
Great post Rob- I remember not wanting to be a jedi because I was a Master Droid Engineer and I was traveling the galaxy selling my droids living freely. And every cantina was full of prospects. Now...they are empty. It makes me sad to see what has happened to this game. I quit after the JTLS due to real life and came back before the CU. I could not believe how improved the game had become. Sure there were bugs- but it was a better game. In fact I was ok with the CU. But the NGE came & it was done in a twisted way- and it stopped the progress that SWG was making. Rob thanks for a great post. Thsi old gamer feels a tear swelling up. Oh well- off to my anark studio I go.
I played a bit pre-CU. I absolutely detested it.
EVERYTHING was way over priced and if you didnt have 10mil for a suit of armor well tough luck. You just had to go without armor completely. I don't like sitting there crafting. I wanted to play and adventure in the Star Wars universe. The reality is, you really couldnt. Then lets not forget that due to the combat interface the macro people used to go the the area and macro xp. I have seen that quite a few times. In fact they didnt even care if it was an area that you would be in, they would just run in and start the computer on the auto attacks. If your gear wasnt up to theirs, obviously mine wasnt, they would waste the whole area and even KS . Hmm...made me feel real good.
My experience at the time was so bad I lasted umm...1 month before saying heck with it. When I read all the things for jedi, I was like ok who took out the crack pipe on this deal. What did mastering multiple professions have to do with jedi?
In my personal experience when NGE first came out, I really liked it. I was having fun. The game play was great. I had so much fun. The biggest problem with the game at that point was the constant whining of the "jedi elders" who felt they should be elitist and everyone else should still kiss the ground they walked on. I would imagine today if I went to look at the boards they are still there whining about everything and bad mouting all the NGE jedi.
Star Wars Galaxies was ruined by players in at least 2 era's of the game for me. I have met a lot in the times I played that shared that sentiment. Everyone talks about how good the community was, but choose not to look at the negative aspect of it as well.
Just some thoughts for those still posting about the change of the game that in reality made it better.
See, people don't pay $25,000 a year for golf club memberships because the grass there is so much greener.
You just wanted to play golf. That can be done for $100 at most golf courses. What SWG offered was above that. A game build around community, with community rules. Unless you got into it, and simply looked at the grass, you said, hell, it sucked, the grass at my club is greener.
And it was. But as said before, it didn't matter. Now, all that's left is the grass. And that grass is still just as green as it always was, but much less than the grass in WoW.
Community is people. People have good and bad sides. Today's MMOs have taken away people - everyone is playing alone, together. SWG put community into your face, whether you wanted or not. To many, this didn't apeal. So they removed the community, and all that was left, was a low quality, broken and unfinished game.
Unlike other games, where communities keep people playing, in SWG community was the Star Wars and it was the game.
And yes, you just sat there in a camp and it was fun. That's all there was to it.
/cry
Wow I really miss SWG. I started playing the same day the Shadowfire server came out. Everyone was standing around in Mos Espa in their beginner clothes, I would run around asking people what to do and where is Jabba's Palace. So I started walking over the sanding hills of Tatooine heading for Bestine...halfway there I saw a huge structure on a hill that looked like a temple. So I started running towards it until I had the need to attack a nuna. Well I almost killed it....until a gang of Squills came along and killed me. It was my first MMO so I was horrified, I thought the game was over or I had a couple lives left, so I cloned and before I realized it there were stormtroopers saying move along....I was in Bestine.
I stepped over the hill and met another player hunting, so we grouped up. We became friends in a couple hours, and were discovering all the little things around Bestine...and soon found a huge complex...a rebel base..then a bunch of small houses with Wind generators. Unfortunatly I didn't know about the friend list so I never met him again, but I soon made a friend when I met a wookiee sitting in his little camp...in the back round a huge tower. I asked him..is that Jabba's Palace? He said he didn't know...so I walked towards it...it was Anchorhead. It was Anchorhead that enlightened me....the whole Galactic Civil War was taking place right here, in this small town. There must have been 60 people in Anchorhead and then the imps would come with their AT-STs and blow everyone up.
Anyways, I loved the game in the begining, I loved the community in the beginning, and I probably loved the community til the end last Fall.
I think what killed the game was how it suddenly felt smaller, things felt less important, there wasn't that sense of endless adventure beyond the horizen because you could reach the end with your speederbike in a couple minutes. Then the hologrind came...bah..anyways.
I will always remember SWG for the game it first was, and the community it always had. I hope they'll make another one just in the hopes of meeting my old friends that I have lost.
Wrong. It proved that SOE's management of an alpha class just didn't work. Let's not pass sentence on alpha classes based on one companies failure, or any other for that matter.
I agree with you on most everything else.
-Maz
Wrong. It proved that SOE's management of an alpha class just didn't work. Let's not pass sentence on alpha classes based on one companies failure, or any other for that matter.
I agree with you on most everything else.
-Maz
They (SOE) truley drpped the ball on Jedi and the alpha. With perma death and the like, having a Jedi ment staying low profile. Sure you could take on 5 or 6 other toons, but eventaully that kind of stupdity meant being trapped by 10 or so and then it was back to the drawing board.
Jedi should have been a reward (thus the second slot) to use in a very specific, limited fashion, rather then running around Theed attacking people. If you wanted to risk it all fine, just know there were dire downsides to that behavior.
Hey bub, do me a favor? If you find that magic, please drop me a message or something. I am currently looking a a not-yet-released (or even close to release) game called Fallen Earth.
Check out the videos of the game here: http://www.fallenearth.com/article.php?article=13
"SWG was a world, now it's just a game" -adamrk-
"When the game was good, you didn't have to ask where the population was, because it was everywhere. When the game was good you didn't have to ask which server had population, because they all did. When the game was good you didn't have to beg friends to give it a try, because they were already playing. " - Salty Pete
Seems that you misunderstood how to play the game, for one, armor was not necessary at all. And the prices you speak off?? That’s kind of high from what i recall... Even then, a good guild, with a good set of crafters would have been cheaper
, and that happens to be what SWG was all about. People. Not to mention, if you only looked in one spot.. you may well have seen 10 million credits as a price, but a few planets away you could have gooten it for way less.
But yes, seems you came into the game thinking it was EQ or somthing..and it totaly was not.Also, yes, if you were looking for something to point your way for you, that’s wasn’t going to happen, you set your own goals in SWG, one of yours could have been to gather the rare resources for armor... It seems like you were a combatant, so that would be a very valid one, and , if you were looking for the "Best" armor, that’s most of the cost. Of course, amour was never one stat, the attributes were different by type, and who made it...so, while maybe you could have taken a blaster hit to the face... a sword, or a pike would have put you on your ass. This was one of the most beautiful things about SWG.. so many combinations...
Gear, in the grand scheme of things... didn’t matter in SWG like it does in other games.
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"Anyone posting on this forum is not an average user, and there for any opinions about the game are going to be overly critical compared to an average users opinions." - Me
"No, your wrong.." - Random user #123
"Hello person posting on a site specifically for MMO's in a thread on a sub forum specifically for a particular game talking about meta features and making comparisons to other titles in the genre, and their meta features.
How are you?" -Me
Anchorheed - Bestine corridor the memories. It was a damn fine place for my medical shop "Mad Nuna Medical" on Wanderhome with regular Imp and Reb customers. Regular were the sounds of fighting and with it the business war brings.
Was also a great place for a neutral doc to sell buffs, hee hee. Right in the middle of it all
Damn my toon made a crap pile of credits in that area.