Star Wars Galaxies: An Empire Divided

It was launched earlier this year in the US. There were many complaints about screen and processing errors - 'bugs' - and about the difficulty of 'power gaming' which means rising to the top of whichever particular race or profession your online character sought to attain so that you can beat up everyone else.

Having now played this game on the two recently established European servers, I honestly believe that these complaints are the result neither of slapdash programming nor of lackadaiscal planning.

The opposite is true. This game is so astonishingly sophisticated that some programming errors are understandable - and, in my experience, Sony's server staff has manfully corrected and balanced day-on-day. As for 'game play', no, it's not for kids or for 'power gamers' - it's no 'shoot 'em up'. It's far, far more. And if you wish to advance, you have to be able to do a lot more than dodge, duck and shoot. This game is not about clicking and pointing quickly.

It isn't really complex - it's easy ot learn - but it is nuanced. It's not like the previous gold standards in Massive Online Gaming. Here, you don't just interact with the game system, you have to interact with other players - they support you in battle against wonderfully realised alient creatures, they build your weapons, they design your clothes, even your tattoos. And they do more; they can run entire cities as Mayor and Council, they can train giant lizards for you to ride and they they survet barren wastelands for the minerals needed to feed the factories that supply the shops that sell every necessary item to each player character.

Since the US launch, the game has been updated on a daily basis. Somtimes the players applaud the changes, sometimes they don't (especially when an 'exploit' - a programming glitch that gives a character an anomalous advantage - is 'nerfed' or removed).

To be fair - the game is so rich visually and structurally that you will certainly need a high specification computer. A super-fat broadband connection will also help.

And it is rich. You can do anything - but you have to work for it. And even the work is fun. In the cantina at Anchorhead, the town in which Luke Skywalker met Han Solo in the Stars Wars film, I heard two player characters in conversation: 'I have to go now. Need to do some work', said one. 'Come back soon. This is your real life now', said the other. Yes, it is as addictive as that. Despite all the vociferous and mostly sincere complaints at the launch of the game, it's now six months later. And the game is a universe away from the problems of its uinitial launch.

I'm not a member of then Sony team or associated with Lucas
and his various companies. I didn't even really like the films. I'm not a traditional player of online games either. If you're not too, then Star Wars Galaxies maybe for you.

Graphics:
Simply stunning. I have a large collection of games and this one is the top of them all graphicly. I have almost all of my graphics settings turned down due to my computer not exactly being the best thing to run this game on yet still I am stunned at just how good the graphics are. I have seen screenshots on the official website of games that have the graphics all the way up and those look 10 times better than what I see and what I see is already great.

Gameplay:
You get to pick from 8 different races: Human (if you don't know what one of these is have a look at yourself), Twi'Lek (the dancing girls in Star Wars wearing very little), Trandoshan (big nasty looking lizard things), Wookiee (what Chewbacca was in the Star Wars films), Iridonian (Darth Maul was Iridonian), Bothans (look like a cross between dogs and horses), Mon Calamari (the fish things from Return of the Jedi) and Rodian (the alien thing that tried to kill Han Solo at the beginning of the first Star Wars film - that's episode 4 not episode 1).

All these races have a large variety of things that you can change to make their appearance however you want. For example humans you can change height, muscles, weight, chest size, eye shape, eye size, eyebrow shape, facial hair, hair style, eye shaddow (for the ladies), skin colour, freckles, hair colour, jaw size, chin size, nose size, nose shape, age, lip size, mouth size and lip stick colour (for the ladies). I may have missed something from that list as it has been a while since I made my character.

Once in the game you can pick to go through the tutorial (I recommend this even if you have read the manual) or to skip straight to the planet of your choice. Most people that complain about this game are impatient and don't read the manual and skip the tutorial then their main complaint is that everything was difficult to control. The user interface is very simple and easy to use providing that you read the manual plus the tutorial can help if you only skim read the manual. How hard can it be to figure out that you have a radar for finding your enemies, friends or others, a chat screen that works just like MSN Messenger or Yahoo! Messenger, health bars for you and your target, hot keys, and a toolbar to access world maps, help screens, inventory and others.

Fighting does take a lot away from the individual in the early stages. But once you start going up the combat skills you learn new special moves that you, the player, have to control or initiate. Plus you frequently find yourself needing to do a bit of running and dodging giving the enemy a bigger chance of missing you.
Not everyone is cut out to be a fighter though. Maybe you fancy yourself as a musician or dancer so you take up the entertainer skills, or maybe you like crafting things so you take up the artisan skills, or you could be the healer and patch up the other player's wounds as a medic.

Sound:
For each planet there are different cuts of Star Wars music for different environmental conditions. For example on Corellia when it starts to rain a sorrowful piece of John Williams score plays and when the sun sets a different piece plays. This really adds to the feel of the game, I would go out in the rain on Corellia just to hear that bit of music. Also when you get into a fight with another player, the NPCs (non-player characters) or the hundreds of different animals, an exciting action piece of music plays. However none of this music is constant, it is only short pieces. To have constant background music in this game would only cause you to grow bored of the music and it would not add anything to the atmosphere of your gaming experience.

Other:
When I first started playing this game it was still a little buggy and crashed randomly. But even then I got a lot of uninterupted game time. Now nearly all of the bugs are gone and the ones that are still there are only minor problems.

Every month something new is added to the game. Just after I purchased this game player cities were introduced so that guilds and clans could build their own cities on their favourite planets. Before that mounts were introduced so that people did not have to run around all the time spending 5 mins just to travel between jobs. Vehicles were added at the beginning of this year and the next addon to come is combat droids and a possible AT-AT (NPC use only). What is coming after that, I have no idea, but the Space Expansion pack is coming soon and that will add new player races into the game, new vehicles (obviously) and possibly new planets.

So what are you waiting for? Buy this game and come join the thousands of people from all over the world.