You're only meant to blow the bloody doors off!!

"Help us Restuss Event, You're our only hope..."
If this is the devs last ditch rally to try and save the game (and let's face it, they're not exactly shouting about MORE stuff acomin') then I hate to say it, but we really are in a bad way.

It's a very different game from SW:G now. It is SWBattlefront with a bit of an MMO twist. Is that good or bad, well, that's a whole other debate.

• Was it fun. Yes.
• Was it immersive. Well... yeah, kinda...
• Was it consistent/coherent withteh SW:G world vision? Hell no.
• Would I log in and play PvP Round the Houses every night? I'd rather practise dentistry on myself with rusty tools.

Folk are going to be well disappointed when they see how little is actually in this 'expansion that isn't an expansion'.

• There is some lvl35 combat stuff (kill 40 troops).
• There is some crafting. (make blasters and other items)
• There is some space mining (remember, that generates NO xp and is in the Kessel zone so, hah, newbs, stay home)

There's a LOT of collecting of 'commendations' to be done (earned by doing the above, over and over and over again) and you DO get rewards when you hand in the commendations. But we're talking 800 commendations for one piece of armour (at 40 faction kills per piece, go do the math).

The phrase MASSIVE TIME SINK and 'thin experience' spring to mind.

The problems:

No real tools for group/squad/battlefield management.
The simple lack of a planet chat makes if blimmin' difficult to coordinate getting people together, working out strategy, deveoping tactics, etc. OK OK so an organised player would set up a channel and macro in basic squad commands, but c'mon...

Clone Zerging and Clone Camping.
With the battlefield being less than 1km across this becomes a major issue.
Last night the Rebels stormed the 400m from Rebel Base to the town, flushed through the city and out the other side in a matter of minutes. There was some resistance from the outnumbered Imperials but through attrition and sheer weight of numbers they were forced back.
A large part of the Rebel force continued out of town in pursuit of the retreating Imperials and, after 400m or so, were within the Imperial Sanctuary. This resulted in SF Rebels being right outside the area the Imperials were cloning into and much complaint about clone camping. (Simple answer, don't declare PvP in the sanctuary zone, heal up, get out of Dodge and THEN go overt)

NPC AI
It's crap.
Long lines of ~24 Imp or Rebel troops, marching in single column is the least 'starwarsy' troop movement I have ever seen. Hell, the meatwads in SWBF2 are smarter with their AI turned right down.
They didn't act like soldiers, they didn't even behave like the ordinary faction NPCs. They were just there as cannon fodder. (This refers to the troops spawning in town. Those out inthe free fire zones did seem to have different AI but were all silver elite, lol)

And that's sad, because it WAS fun.... kinda.


(First posted at Star Wars Galaxies with Yivvits and MrBubble 25th June, 2006)