I remember the lag and the grinding. I remember standing in line for an hour waiting for a buff and wishing a game like SWtOR would come along.

I got around that by having two accounts.

First, they were "Holocrons," not "Datacrons."

 

Second, you, like many people, think fondly of unlocking a Jedi. Me? I said it back then, and I will say till my dying day: The day the first Jedi was unlocked was the day the NGE became inevitable. The introduction of the Jedi introduced an alpha class into a system that was already nearly impossible to balance. Jedi made the NGE inevitable, and the "Hologrind" was the bus that took us there.

 

The game was supposed to be about being a citizen in the Star Wars universe. You took professions to fit into that theme, professions you wanted to play. Even without the imbalance caused by adding an alpha class into an already precarious profession balance, Jedi had no place in the game because of the time line. Adding them was damaging enough to the game, but the hologrind to unlock them caused a mass abandonment of professions people actually wanted to play in favor of grinding up professions people did not want just because some holocron told them to do so. Of course, as soon as they mastered that profession, they abandoned it to grind up another one all because the ridiculous system told them to. And once they did unlock a Jedi, they then, mostly, abandoned their original character to play the Jedi.

 

This completely destroyed the game. For instance, before the hologrind, crafters actually worked to find the best resources to create better equipment than their competitors. After the hologrind was introduced, crafters largely abandoned all that in order to unlock a Jedi. The only people crafting at that point were churning out garbage just to gain the XP needed to master a profession they were just going to abandon as soon as they opened a new holocron. People who kept crafting on their non-Jedi character largely just did it in their spare time playing their Jedi as their main.

 

People like to look back fondly on unlocking their Jedi. As far as I am concerned, whoever decided to add them to the game basically put out a contract hit on the game, and whoever designed the hologrind system administered the poison that killed it. Everyone who participated in it aided and abetted the crime.

 

I can only assume those responsible were Sith, because this whole thing could have only come from the darkside.

Winner! I always thought adding Jedi was a mistake...especially considering when SWG was. I also viewed player cities as a double edged sword.

At launch, everybody hung out in the cantinas. This is how SWG got such an amazing community. Then when player cities took off, there was no need for cantinas, everybody pretty much stayed to their own cities. It was fine if you were already established in a guild, but for the new people, they didn't have that meeting place. I remember Mos Espa being crammed, then after player cities it was empty.

I do miss being able to kill merchants.

Being a jedi with feign death and lol at bounty hunters who in vain tried to kill you. Having another account with a bh who would pick up your main account's jedi bounty. Thus, limiting the number of bounty hunters who could pick up your bounty. I think it was limited to three or four missions for any given jedi. Leaving your jedi inside a house in a remote part of dantooine afk all day in order to deter any play bh from taking your bounty. The purpose being to waste bounty hunter's time by forcing them to travel long distance and having your jedi online all the time made it impossible for he/she to distinguish when you were afk and when you were leveling.

Um... Sorry, I mean no offense by saying this - though I realise it probably will - but the thing you miss about the game was exploiting it? o.0 Fascinating.

I played SWG right at JTL launch, so I've no idea what came before. I primarily got the game for JTL, because the idea of a space sim with MMO aspects really, really appealed to me. I loved the system. I also liked the idea of crafting until I tried to use it. Until I tried to upgrade my ship. Until I tried to build a house. Until I tried to do pretty much anything. In all my time in SWG, I stepped foot on a planet maybe a few times, and rarely willingly. Some may have enjoyed the game, but it was too much of a career to be fun.

It required more credits than I could accumulate doing what I wanted - space. It required more time than I had to advance to a point where I could get and do what I wanted. All the 'cool' stuff was end-game(ish). The start was a grind. The middle was a grind. It wasn't a game, it was a second life. Some of you clearly want(ed) that, and that is great. But I didn't enjoy playing it.

Having said all that, their character creation, the space sim aspect, the community/social aspects, and (though i really, really hated it) the sheer scale of the crafting system was fantastic. I would gladly take their level of customisation, and the space sim - though I would also keep TOR's rails-fighter, cause it's fun, too - and a little more of the community/social set-up.

Days of looking for Datacron to hope to get your 1/4 then 1/6 then 1/8 professions to get you on way to jedi

 

Days of being a smuggler and feign dead under players feet who are afk aoe grinding when u have brough ackley up from the geno cave.

 

Days of force bowling rebels on Dant Imperial station seeing who could knock the most down.

 

Soling Nightsister Elder with concealment rifleman.

 

Krayt Dragon Hunts with friends.

 

Cononel rank Imperial Creature handler with 3 Bio-engineered Rancors and 2 AT-ST's

 

Taking player Bounty on rebel jedi and seeing them cry in tells to you cause you cost them a perma death or lose a skill box.

 

Standing in Theed Spaceport overt waiting for rebels to load in to start a mass war.

 

Loading into Theed Spaceport solo surrounded by 15 rebels and calling in for help.

 

PVP battle that spaned the planet

 

/botran .. lol

 

Exceptional Weapons that took a long time to random farm adn were truely exceptional

 

Too many fun times to list.

 

Soo disapointing this is not SWG2 and dont know why i hoped it was when i read forums adn realize its QQ's who say everything is to hard, too random, too long or they cannot beat XXXX that CU and NGE happened.

 

Holding out for hope of a pvp system and rare loot that is random but rewarding, Exceptional.

 

R.I.P pre 9 SWG

 

List some of your memories and of corse QQ's who couldnt figure out to make a /clearque macro to stop the 20 qued attacks to heal yourself.

 

/salute either way, was best time i ever had in a game.

Perma Death was removed from the game very early on... Pretty sure it was removed before the 1st Jedi appeared in the game...

SWG was fun at first but then boiled down to standing in line for hours waiting to get your Doc buffs so you could get your composite armor on, Grinding the same mobs over and over and over and over and over again, although thanks to macros you didn't have to hang around while you auto leveled...

Heck all the Dancers, Musicians and Docs were ran with Macro's so that pretty much killed the social aspect of SWG.... Trying to craft that ultra rare perfect weapon with mats that took forever to get only to get a fail and lose all the parts....

Sorry but SWG was falling apart before the NGE came about... PvP'ing was a joke thanks to Combat Medics who's dots could kill you in seconds...

Gotta stop looking at SWG through rose colored glasses...

I played SW:G from launch until about a year after, long before NGE.

There were some things that I liked about it...

*My two character builds were a lot of fun (Teras Kasi/Chef Wookiee and Pistoleer/Dancer, Ballgown wearing Rodian) and unique.

*The best housing system of any MMORPG to date. My Gals had fun places to live in... My Wookiee had her diner on a remote lake (next door to her Teras Kasi/Engineer Wookiee spouse) and my Rodian had a small place on a cliffside.

*Good side (only) of crafting: vendor at diner to sell products (when anyone was out that way... which was before any type of vehicles were even in the game...). Planets were huge when you had to run everywhere...

*The cantinas were lively and fun. Could always find a RPer or two in 'em.

Examples of things I didn't like:

*One character per server. Way too limiting.

*Bad side of crafting: having to log in every single blasted day to keep the stupid blankity blank blank harvesters going AND half of the chef recipes called for milk which was a blankity blank blank rarest of rare drops. And, no, I couldn't collect milk from creatures in the wild myself or have a pen of 'em behind the diner, even though that would have been more logical. Grrrrr!

*Although I had no desire to play a Jedi there, I found the whole "unlocking" process to be a big slap in the face to roleplayers/conceptual character creation. Master a skill, unlearn it "just because" over and over again. Blech. One of the worst ideas ever.

Overall, it was a good game and had its bright spots. I'm just not as nostalgic for it as many seem to be...

I'd rank it at #6 for the MMORPGs that I've played through the years. Nowhere near as good as DAoC (pre-Toa) which I'd rank at #1, but better than WoW which I'd rank at #8...

I do understand where your coming from. The open sandbox nature to really create an experience that was in your hands must have been really something. In comparison SWTOR must be more like a shallow movie than some epic universe. SWTOR=Prequals?

But this is not SWG. I think it really sucks that SWG was shutdown. I think it's really too bad that LA forced it to shut down. But you must have played any kind of Bioware game and realize what you should have been expecting.

SWG was the creation of memembrs from EQ/Verant team and Ultima Online. Of course it was going to be a hugely indepth masterpiece before SOE and LA hacked it apart. But Bioware is coming in for a first MMO after the a long successfull run of WoW. Let's face it with SWG being shoe horned to be WoW. Did anyone expect LA not to make sure that a new SW game wasn't just going to be core of WoW then some more.

I understand your nostalgia. I'm sure the next SW game will be the one. It will probably be about 10 or so years. But in the mean time if your enjoying this game. Play it.

No matter how good or bad anyone thought SWG was, there are many many good ideas from that game that would vastly benifit this one.

I dont understand why so many people are bashing on the endless mob grind either. What the hell is different in that aspect between these two games? I had to reroll another server because the guild I was in on the first server lost all 22 members to boredom. I now find myself grinding all the same mobs I did the first time around.

Anyhow, I would like to see some of the better SWG ideas make their way here eventually, like the 3D spacefightng > rail and things like Krayt dragon grind the OP mentioned. Also making cantinas actual cantinas instead of the obscure buildings you go in and out of and then never see again. Id even go so far as to say having the entire player baser on one server but I think that would result in disaster tbh.

No matter how good or bad anyone thought SWG was, there are many many good ideas from that game that would vastly benifit this one.

 

I dont understand why so many people are bashing on the endless mob grind either. What the hell is different in that aspect between these two games? I had to reroll another server because the guild I was in on the first server lost all 22 members to boredom. I now find myself grinding all the same mobs I did the first time around.

 

Anyhow, I would like to see some of the better SWG ideas make their way here eventually, like the 3D spacefightng > rail and things like Krayt dragon grind the OP mentioned. Also making cantinas actual cantinas instead of the obscure buildings you go in and out of and then never see again. Id even go so far as to say having the entire player baser on one server but I think that would result in disaster tbh.

I agree there are sandbox elements that would help this game big time... but I was just bringing up the point that SWG was not even close to a perfect MMO, it never reached 1 million subscribers and hovered around the 300k mark for a long time before the NGE came along and sent half it's player base packing...

But player housing, plan ran cities, crafting system are a few things that would help this game keep people around... Although keep in mind that decay was what made the crafting system necessary, without it crafting would become pointless again and I doubt the player base would except a decay system so any hopes of SWG style crafting system is a pipe dream..

I do understand where your coming from. The open sandbox nature to really create an experience that was in your hands must have been really something. In comparison SWTOR must be more like a shallow movie than some epic universe. SWTOR=Prequals?

 

But this is not SWG. I think it really sucks that SWG was shutdown. I think it's really too bad that LA forced it to shut down. But you must have played any kind of Bioware game and realize what you should have been expecting.

 

SWG was the creation of memembrs from EQ/Verant team and Ultima Online. Of course it was going to be a hugely indepth masterpiece before SOE and LA hacked it apart. But Bioware is coming in for a first MMO after the a long successfull run of WoW. Let's face it with SWG being shoe horned to be WoW. Did anyone expect LA not to make sure that a new SW game wasn't just going to be core of WoW then some more.

 

I understand your nostalgia. I'm sure the next SW game will be the one. It will probably be about 10 or so years. But in the mean time if your enjoying this game. Play it.

SWG failed at being a star wars wow but for some reason you think swtor will be a successful star wars wow?

Also I do believe many of the original SWG devs were on the swtor crew (I could be wrong but I thought I read from a reliable sorsce that they were. So take a crew that was ib SWG and saw what happened to the game when it was turned into a WoW copy and I dont know why they would think another game would be able to beat wow by copiing it. Yes this game is a copy of wow. It has a few changes but 99% of the game is a copy of wow. If someone liked wow they would not want to play this game with all the problems instead of wow. So why try to copy.

I agree there are sandbox elements that would help this game big time... but I was just bringing up the point that SWG was not even close to a perfect MMO, it never reached 1 million subscribers and hovered around the 300k mark for a long time before the NGE came along and sent half it's player base packing...

There is not 1 MMO that could be neglected by its owners as much as SWG was and have 300k players for as long as it did.

Neclect this game like they did and it wouldnt have 50k players. The reason other MMOs have done better is because they were updated and taken care of.

There is not 1 MMO that could be neglected by its owners as much as SWG was and have 300k players for as long as it did.

 

Neclect this game like they did and it wouldnt have 50k players. The reason other MMOs have done better is because they were updated and taken care of.

To be fair, there was no wow back then so you couldnt really fall back on something like that like everyone did with Warhammer, conan, RIFT and so on. It was kind of like how wow has been for the past few years. Stale, but nothing else quite compares in such a well rounded fassion (ie. most players dislike different aspects to some degree but the huge amount of other aspects that run smooth make it decent enough.)

To be fair, there was no wow back then so you couldnt really fall back on something like that like everyone did with Warhammer, conan, RIFT and so on. It was kind of like how wow has been for the past few years. Stale, but nothing else quite compares in such a well rounded fassion (ie. most players dislike different aspects to some degree but the huge amount of other aspects that run smooth make it decent enough.)

WoW was back then. I think it came out less than a year after SWG. Or close to it. WoW is the reason for the CU/NGE so it had to be alive back then.

I think the CU was a step in the right direction for SWG, personally. I hated the HAM system, but the skill tree was the best idea I'd seen in an mmo ever. It was far superior to the talent tree most use today. Such a diverse method of character creation and evolution should be the industry standard, not the exception.

 

The NGE, however, was 5 steps backwards. And everything seemed to be sacrificed for some semblance of class balance.

 

which reminds me, i need to check up on the emu and see if they have improved it any.

The CU is what got rid of the skill trees and made it the talent tree system. Giving people levels takes away the freedom to use the old style. Now instead of the old style you get respecs so you can change around your trees and not have to learn the skills while you play.

Its been a long time but the ham is just 1 more bar than what they have now. Now its just whack a mole till either you or the one your attacking loses his red bar as the winner. Being able to incapacitate someone from fatiuge is unique. Was it perfect? Probable not but it gave you options to different ways to defeat someone that could heal themselves.

The CU is what got rid of the skill trees and made it the talent tree system. Giving people levels takes away the freedom to use the old style. Now instead of the old style you get respecs so you can change around your trees and not have to learn the skills while you play.

 

Its been a long time but the ham is just 1 more bar than what they have now. Now its just whack a mole till either you or the one your attacking loses his red bar as the winner. Being able to incapacitate someone from fatiuge is unique. Was it perfect? Probable not but it gave you options to different ways to defeat someone that could heal themselves.

Nope. The CU kept the old skill trees, and gave you a "level" based on how you had spent your points. The talent trees didn't come into play until NGE.

Also the HAM bar was 3 bars. Each of those had 2 substats.

I know SWG wasnt perfect, but you know what, neither is life. I think thats what was so charming about galaxies. the randomness of every login. The never ending possabilities of customization, decorating all my houses, choosing a neighborhood for the kidos to grow up in. Galaxies was the ultimate social experiance. Rather it be a raid mmo like all the cookie cutter WoW's where its all action and little social gathering. instead, galaxies was the game that stood out from the crowed. Most people would call it borring and broken, and to be honest if it werent set with the SW universe then yeah, it sucked. But it allowed all who played to live in the SW universe as best as you can in the digital world of today. I do enjoy TOR for its nature, unfortionatly unlike galaxies, i can see the end of the tunnel for this game. Gameplay is solid, best ive seen ever. however, i cant help but feel this is a single player game.

{thats right!!! i dont use spell check}

Although SWG did a lot of things wrong, it did do some things that no other MMO's have ever done as good.

Devs, if you are reading, here are some things SWTOR could use.

The open endedness was great, planets actually felt like planets, not like the tiny sectioned-off areas we get here. The planets in SWTOR could benefit from this, bigger in size and the creatures scale in danger the further you go from civilzation.

Crafting, well, enough said, SWG had the best crafting system ever, just copy that.

True world PVP, on PVP servers open up every planet to true world PVP apart from the four starter ones.

Atmosphere, this was something SWG had by the bucketload, the reason for this I think was because it was set in the original trilogy era, this helps greatly because every Star Wars fan knows it, if you base a game on TOR era then sorry, but you will have to work harder to make it Star Warsy (this is a bit lacking to be honest).

Incidental and combat music, far, far superior in SWG than TOR.

Background noise, how great was it to be in Mos Eisley and hear TIE Fighters passing by overhead in SWG? I have not heard a single thing in TOR that makes it sound like Star Wars apart from the token "droid bleeps" coruscant traffic and my lightsaber.

I do like TOR, but there is MUCH work to be done, I do not find it that "Star Warsy".

Games like SWG are extinct guys.. Today's players prefer easy games with standard grind systems like WoW and TOR.

Most people don't care about the social parts of MMOs because their selfless nature dictates the idea they have about themselves and how much better players they are from everyone else.

The only things you could label as social in games like TOR are the raiding, which is in essence a "dance" that you have to learn and repeat as someone stated above and premade pvp teams that offer you nothing more than a game like DoTA or League of Legends could give you.

Other than raiding and pvp, games like WoW and TOR offer nothing else, but I guess dumb people prefer dumbed down games just to fill the empty hours of their lives with endless grinding...

My absolute favorite aspect of the very early days of SWG was the fact that its factions were intentionally unbalanced.

I LOVED the "Imperial Crackdown" update that came just a few months (I think) after launch. The Imperials had some serious advantages, which made playing a rebel extremely fun. You could be walking along and an Imperial would stop you, inspect you, and if you were hiding any contraband you were immediately outted and attackable by Imperials.

I'm not a PVP player in MMOs and I'm about as casual as it gets (my main on this game is just level 28). I normally hate PVP, but in SWG during that first year, being a rebel was one of the most intense and fun gaming experiences around. You felt... well, like a rebel.

Actually, SWG was unsuccessful, thats the whole reason the CU and NGE were created. It was 6 months of SWG before the release of WoW. Plus SWG players have Nostalgia. The game wasnt as good as people say it was, stop acting like it was the best game of all time.

 

It had OK Crafting, the social abilities were all there was.

If SWG was so unsuccessful, how did it last 8 friggin years?

At the current rate, SWTOR will be lucky to last 8 months. For SWTOR launch being such a huge success, the server populations really suck (even at peak times) at two months after release.

Those of you who quit SWG because of CU and NGE and never played the game again, have no clue how much the game evolved.

I played SWG till the end. Honestly, pre-CU was a steaming Bantha Turd when compared to SWG at the time that the game ended. SOE should have implemented features that they added during the last 6 months much sooner.

I think the atmospheric flight was more ground breaking than the stupid voice overs in this game.

There were numerous players I met over the last year of SWG who hadn't played since pre-cu and all of them stated that it was like playing a different game. They had came back to SWG because they were tired of waiting for SWTOR, but they were surprised how much SWG had changed and how much content was added.

Yes, SWG still had it's flaws and bugs, but with every update / patch there will be additional bugs that can be exploited and as they are discovered they can be fixed.

No game will ever be perfect, you can't please everyone. I find it very amusing that pre-cu lovers who bash NGE because it resricted professions. Yet these same people will defend SWTOR which is much more profession resricted than NGE version of SWG.

The heroic instances in SWG were much more challenging than the heroics in this game.

When both factions would build at city GCW invasions, they were a blast and many people who normally didn't participate in PvP would go overt for the invasions. Win or lose they were fun battles and everyone had a good time.

I honestly don't see myself playing this game as long as I played SWG. Once I get through all of the storylines I want to see, there will be very few reasons to continue subscribing.

This is a great single player game, and that's all it will ever be unless Bioware does something miraculous with it, but I doubt that will happen. Since when does EA care about what happens to a game after the initial box sales are over. I wouldn't be surprised if SOE takes over SWTOR in a month or two. They'll probably host it on refurbished SWG servers and make it free to play like Pirates of the Burning Sea. OMG, if that happens I will ROFLMAO.