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	Star Wars Galaxies: An Empire Divided
	Developer: Verant Interactive Publisher: LucasArts Genre: Online Role-Playing Game Players: 1-(Oodles) Similar To: Dark Age of Camelot Rating: Teen Published: 09 :19 : 03 Reviewed By: Ryan Newman Overall: 6.5 = Fair

Screenshots

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Players will get to pick from 8 races, including Human, Rodian, Wookie, Bothan -- which is shorter than the initial amount that was to be included, but the 8 is a solid enough variety -- and then alter their avatar in every way possible. Players will be able to alter their character's height, weight, nose length, nose width, eyes' shape and angle, hair, cheeks, lip, jaw, facial age, and much more. It's exhaustive and definitely a watermark that other titles should follow. If I may pass on a word of advice: be careful, I created a character that looked cool in the creation screen, but ended up looking like a transsexual whenever it was placed in the world (yowch!).

After getting dolled up, an opportunity is given for players to give themselves a little background info; I found this to be a pretty cool feature, and one that not a lot of people took advantage of, despite it being a great way to actually role play. Whenever everything is set, it's time to pick a class, and there is a varied and enjoyable lot. There are some traditional roles (brawler, marksman, and scout) and others not so (entertainer and artisan). What I definitely like about Galaxies is that each one of the classes has a multitude of roles, and those are reached by a branching level system. Unlike other games, a player doesn't level up from a squire to a footman, instead, the player evolves based on what they do within the game. For example: a novice brawler that prefers to fight with a two-handed weapon, like an axe, will become a swordsman, while one that prefers a single-handed sword will become a fencer. Some of these higher status levels will also have more than one profession to choose from; a brawler that does more unarmed combat can become a commando, smuggler, or a Teras Kasi Artist. Those are only limited examples, as the tree is huge and players will be able to cross over to other professions or continue to advance a single one. And, to keep from players advancing too rapidly, there's an underlying amount of general experience needed to advance to the next plateau of choices within a profession. It's definitely a great system and one that really motivates the player to try out whatever they can, and that goes a long way in keeping the experience exciting.

When it's time to begin, new characters (even if someone has multiple characters, they can't skip this) go through a brief tutorial that will teach menu and world navigation, as well as give them their first weapon and choice on which planet to start on. There are nine massive worlds to choose from and each has a various number of cities. The cities themselves will have a transport station (for going to other planets), trainers, a hospital, cantina, guild halls, clone and insurance facilities, and a few buildings there for show. For those with systems near the box's minimum requirements, I'd advice you to take the detail down a bit, because the cities will really test your system with results that range from minimal to serious slowdown.

Initial jitters are just one of the problems that the player will have to take on the chin once they're ready to start their new online lives. Once they are ready to go, what will they have to do? Ah, like most online role-playing titles, the player will have to start killing them some lovely alien rodents, bats, etc. There are even low-level bandits -- renamed, to lovely monikers like goon and clunker -- to take down. Now, I understand the need to get low-level players something to kill, but couldn't something more interesting be done? Or, at the least, provide more bandits to kill since the animals don't provide any credits or items - hey, it's unrealistic for a pig thing to drop a dagger, but it's also a stand-by for the genre and it just makes sense that players can go about their humble beginnings with more than a few credits and crappy items.

For those who are just wanting to get down to business, they can either go to mission terminals and mark themselves down for delivery or destruction missions, or go to a NPC for a mission. The beginning player will find combat missions extremely hard and will find the delivery missions to be arduous. Being a digital FedEx man within the city isn't bad, despite the low payoff, but having to go other planets or farther out into the planet is a pain. Missions requiring the player to go to another planet offer nice rewards, but after subtracting the price to get the ticket to travel there (which tends to be around 50% of the reward), the time spent just doesn't seem worth it. The missions that require the player to adventure out into the world, which is what the NPC generally wants since most missions require the player to do some recon in a remote area, will mean a good deal of walking. Without speeders or any sort of personal mechanical transport, players will be ready for marathons in no time.

That is assuming that the player takes a more combat-intensive role. It's very possible that they will want to be an artisan and set up shop as a creator of the most elaborate goods in the city or an entertainer to help brighten up the fighters. While artisans are important for what they can provide, entertainers and medics play a crucial role in that they allow the fighters to function up to spec. In combat, players will not only suffer from battle fatigue, but also artificial and serious wounds. Battle fatigue will affect their performance and can be alleviated by sitting in a cantina and either watching an entertainer dance or listen to them perform - the cantina is, by far, the best part of the game, rarely has an online world seemed so right. Fighting causes more serious problems as the wounds players will incur can be detrimental to their overall experience; as artificial wounds can heal over time when the player rests, serious wounds will actually decrease the player's stats - if they have 100/100hp, after a day or so out in the wilderness and fighting will lower the overall hp, say to 90/90. Players can either attempt to get medicine or hope that there is a player who can heal them in the local hospital. Let it be known now: I love medics. Without medics, which is a pretty selfless role, the game would be a horrible experience for fighters. For those who want a more free-willing life, they, and the scout class, provide great opportunities.

Healing really exemplifies the overall theme of Galaxies, and that is, it's up the players to make the world turn. Players create everything within the game: they pump resources out of the land, they extract them from dead animals, they make weapons, power-ups, clothes, houses -- everything that's possible to do in the game, players do it. Here's the good and the bad. The good: it works. The bad: it makes the game more difficult than it needs to be. The system requires that there be a massive amount of people who are willing to sit in a hospital and be readily available to heal people or that there is someone willing to continually craft goods. Players can cross professions, at the expensive of skill points that have been earned, but I'm not too sure how many will want to do such tedious acts. Again, for those out there that enjoy doing it and will continue to do so, it's appreciated. But that doesn't save the others from the frustration felt when they need healing and there's no medics in the hospital and little else they can do to heal their wounds.

Likewise, using the e-bay-esque market system is interesting, and some good deals can be had, but it's frustrating when an object that could really help out is on another planet or in another region. Some artisans can set up NPCs to sell their goods, but I can't say how useful that is since I've yet to meet one. Another vital role that players contribute is helping others to advance in skill sets within a profession; once an ability's training has been completed, the player has to either pay a trainer (something I'm very against) an increasingly high fee or hope that there's another player around who will train them for free. Sometimes the help can be hard to find because, even with the large number of players, the worlds are so vast that it's rare to see anything more than a handful of players within a significant amount of game space.

There are a few things that are also unique to Galaxies: cloning, insurance, unconsciousness, and pooling points. Cloning and insurance have to do with the player in the inevitable event of a death. When cloned, the player will come back to life without taking any serious wounds, which can be substantial, and insurance means that they will come back to life with all of their gear. While I can see the benefit in cloning, insurance I'm not so sure about since I've yet to lose any items once I died. Being unconscious is unique in that, unless an enemy or another player delivers a deathblow to the unconscious character, they will have 3 instances within 10 minutes to be rendered knocked-out before they finally die. This is a really nice feature and goes a long way in granting adventurous players reprieve for whenever they get too bold, and it makes dueling with other players a blast (since a deathblow is required, it can be all in good fun when the parties opt to not kill). Galaxies also pools the player's points, which can be a real life saver in some sticky combat situation. If an enemy makes contact, instead of health getting taken away, something like stamina might be affected; so, if it's down to the last few blows and the enemy ends up getting a head shot, the player's mind ability (which is also kind of new and affects things like technical tasks and aiming) is affected while the health remains unthouched, that gives the player the last opportunity to make the decisive blow and walk away with a smidge of health and some experience. As one will find, Galaxies is rife with great ideas, although they aren't always executed properly.

The game also boasts an exceptional waypoint system that can show the way to cities and areas from miles away, and missions having points that can be activated at their leisure. While PlanetSide can claim the first fleshed-out waypoint system, it's definitely done better here than any other game in the genre. Another semi-unique feature is the fully realized cantina. Unlike other games where the player may sit, if that, and just loaf around in a tavern, the cantinas are bustling with other players going to town on their music instruments, having friendly duels, and sitting at tables having discussions. While these features may not seem like much, the waypoint and relaxation elements are actually crucial for games that are so expansive and rely so heavily on social interaction, and these are two things that Verant definitely did right.

Since player-owned cities and political classes were scrapped, the politics of Galaxies falls on standings with factions and, of course, with the empire and the rebellion. Standings with townsfolk and whatnot is how it is in most games, the player kills a bandit and that lowers their standing with them (they become more hostile), but increases their standing with the town (the benefits of this are debatable). When choosing to fight for the empire or the rebellion, the player simply walks up to their local recruiter and does whatever missions they have. There are some prerequisites, but players who stay with the game long enough to entrench themselves in the universe will most likely have met them after a little while. Once good enough, the player can join the sides on the battlefield. Honestly, I spent 2 months with the game and spread over 2 classes, so I never made it to there. But, I hear it's both interesting and upsetting: interesting in the fact that players will combat AT-STs, and upsetting that there's no real distinction of levels, so someone who is a high marksman can kill someone from far away while the downed opponent may not know what happened. I think I'll experience this when the space expansion is released.

The problems with Galaxies are many. There are both the technical and design flaws. For the design, it's more that the game just doesn't feel like a Star Wars title. Sure, I see wookies and I see C3PO robots taking tickets, but it just feels like small mods made to another game. The architecture belies itself to the universe, but the feeling of it being a true representation just isn't there. There's also a lack of content. If you don't enjoy doing recon, delivering an item, or killing a swarm/group of bugs/bandits, then there's not much else to do. There's no playing in the large role of the Star Wars universe, no interacting with the mythos. The lack of vehicles is also hurting the game. When talking about technical aspects, there's the fact that the minimum requirements are so minimum that it hurts. While it has gotten better, I still have a problem with combat not synching with the telling of damage taken and an escaping enemy being killed with no final swing being shown. There's also the fact that most recon missions show absolutely nothing. While I'm suppose to be finding, and indeed see, a bustling camp filled with smugglers and their cargo, all I really see is the waypoint shining on a rock. To toss salt in the wound, the NPC character are rude a majority of the time, so the player is getting their assignment from a smug character and spending about an hour of traveling to see nothing and gain a few credits. It's hard work living in a galaxy far, far away. Patches are constantly being released to address these problems, but some unintentional frustration can come from these too; one recent one took the server down and made my day long battle with an entire encampment of bandits useless, as jumping back to a server save of the day before erased the camp, remaining bandits, and my objective. Bah.

I will give a hand to the players and the community as a whole, they are really making the game what it is. Most of the other players are very friendly and do what they can to make the universe a better one to be in. Without such commitment, this would be a mediocre game. However, because of the lack of content, any real feelings of it being a Star Wars universe, and a lack of any real sense of itself, the developers have nixed most of the positives and turned this into an above-average affair. They have some great ideas in Galaxies, but they are great ideas implemented into a game that lacks the refinement needed to take full advantage of them.

Graphics: 8.5/10
Galaxies is certainly a looker, but it's also a system hog. This bad boy will chew video cards up and spit them out like nothing. Cities can bring even mighty PCs to a crawl and the sprawling countryside can make those gorgeously detailed mountains turn into giant polygons of brown. The character designs and details are fantastic, not to mention some great effects. The animations, on the other hand, are pretty limited and there are a handful of random oddities. One of the more annoying problems is whenever a player is sitting in a cantina, they have to either view themselves from the outside or put up with looking in a awkward first-person view that tends to shows the polygon edges of the inside of their face; this seems to happen more now than before, perhaps due to a patch, I'm not entirely sure. One not worth mentioning is that Galaxies sports some of the largest creatures I have ever seen. Massive animals that are the size of buildings will roam countryside's and look not only imposing, but also magnificent. The qualms are there, but this is just one section where so much was done right.

Sound: 8/10
The sound effects are fairly generic when fighting, with some clanks and umphs for melee combat and the traditional laser sound when using a ranged weapon. When the effects do stand out is when a storm rolls in and the player can hear the thunder crackle over the countryside or whenever a giant animal stomps so hard that it feels like the entire computer is shaking. Combat and peace also have different background tunes, which accompany some decent tracks. Music in these games tend to fade out after time since traveling through wilderness with enemies everywhere makes the attention focus on navigation and not so much on sound. What I absolutely loved were the entertainers when they played their instruments. Beginning players will sound bad with some high-pitched noises that sounded horrible, but as they progress, they end up sounding like a full band, playing fantastic tunes that really make the hustle and bustle of the cantina seem alive.

Control: 7.5/10
The menu system is also a chore with tons of things to do and there is a feeling of being bogged down when going through them. The layout is efficient enough, but I always felt like there was some sort of lag in-between me clicking on something and it either being selected or moved. I do recognize the fact that there is so much to do in the game and only so much can be streamlined, but there's still this feeling of wading that I always get when trying to find something. On the other hand, there's oodles of information about the game just a few clicks away.

One thing I had a problem with was targeting. Now, the game has two ways of control, a first-person method (turning the mouse turns the player) and a traditional method (mouse cursor moves the camera when it hits the edge of the screen and player turns the character with keyboard commands), but I had problems using either method when I would target something, particularly flying creatures. Whenever clicking on an object, even if it was still, I never seemed to get it the first time; even though the sound might have made it seem like the lock was registered. Flying creatures where a pain since they tend to swoop down after a second or two and trying to get a lock on them was a chore. The menu system also operates in a way that the player simply holds down the select button and a menu comes up, but in situations when combat is going to occur, that's more of a hassle than going the traditional way of clicking on the hotkey assigned to the attack icon in the action bar. The methods are there, and they work, they just feel like they could use a little more polishing up.

Overall: 6.5/10
As of now, Galaxies has a great core game. It's a shame that what has been built around that core isn't so good. I love the social interaction, the ease that the waypoint system creates, and the branching profession tree, but there's so much that doesn't work, doesn't seem to work, or isn't implemented. Fans of this genre looking for something different should really enjoy the unique classes and opportunities they offer, and that's really where the bulk of the game's score is coming from, with the rest really due to the way players can actually mingle in something that feels exactly how it should. Now, only if Verant can get the rest of the game to feel as natural and seamless as the cantinas, then that's when Galaxies is worth looking into. But for now, it's an above-average experience; however, it has a long way to go before it can call itself a representation of the Star Wars universe.

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