The skill system in Star Wars is quite well conceived, and would probably be quite serviceable ported over to a pen-and-paper game. There are a half dozen basic profession trees, each with four branches. You can choose to master all for branches and earn a “master” title in that profession, of just focus on one. After that title, you may move on to an elite profession, or hone another starting profession in order to qualify for a hybrid elite profession.
An example: A character starts as a novice marksman, and quickly learns the novice scout skill. The marksman skill tree has branches for pistol skills, riflemanship, carbine skills, and ranged support, each with four skill levels. The scout tree is similarly divided into hunting, survival, exploration, and trapping. The character might chose to focus solely on pistols in the marksman tree, learning all four pistol skills in the tree, and graduating to “novice gunfighter,” an elite profession with its own four-tier skill tree relating entirely to pistols. They might choose to master all four tracks and earn a “Master marksman” title, and also master the “Scout” profession. Mastering both these skill trees entitles them to pursue the hybrid elite profession “Bounty Hunter.” Or they could master the ranged support branch of the marksman tree, and the survival and exploration branches of the Scout tree; qualifying them for the “Squad Leader” profession, a class that gives bonuses to a group. Or the player could simply choose to pick up a smattering of ranged skills while he masters the Scout profession and graduates to “Ranger.” Clearly, there are dozens of ways to gear and advance a character. You aren’t required to stick to one class, or continue in any skill branch. Perhaps you’d like to be a great Bounty Hunter with a smattering of Medic training, or a Commando who knows how to play a mean Kloo Horn as an Entertainer. Advancement works through the mechanic of different types of experience which you get for using skills. For example, trapping and killing a womp rat with a carbine and then skinning it will earn you Carbine, General Combat, General Scouting, and Trapping experience in small amounts. When you have enough experience to qualify for the next skill level, you must find someone to train you and “spend” the required amount of experience. The players who offer this training benefit from it as much or more than the students. Earning a “master” title in any profession requires “apprentice experience,” available only through training. I could go on about the interdependency among the various professions. Suffice it to say, there are strong mechanical incentives for people to band together, and crafting and support professions are, with a few exeptions, indespensible. In fact, virtually everything a player will ever own will be made by PC craftsmen. There are no NPC shopkeepers. Beyond your starting equipment and a few quest items or special faction award items (like Stormtrooper armor), everything needs to be crafted, from your clothes, to your blaster, to your home. This has created an interesting dynamic economy that might not reflect the actual Star Wars universe, where the laws of supply and demand sometimes run amok. Just as an example, my character spent several times the credits on an extremely masterfully crafted blaster as he did on his first house! While there is a great deal of interdependency built in, some professions are definitely left behind. For example, my character really only needs one house and one set of furnishings, but his blaster will eventually need to be replaced- thus making it a bit tougher on the architects financially. I’ve seen small homes sold for a pittance. And as of this review, the Chef profession is a joke. Eating is not mandatory in the Star Wars Galaxies universe. It does provide some brief, limited attribute enhancements, but most players don’t bother. The crafting system is almost a mini-game to itself, for those who enjoy micromanagement. There are numerous types of resources, each with statistics of their own. Various item schematics call for general or specific types of resources, depending on their complexity. Basic armor might just require “Metal.” More complex might specifically call for “steel.” Above that you might specifically need “Duralloy Steel.” There are even sub-types of that, which you can experiment for various effects. There's a lot to do and a lot to see, but like most online games it's up to players to provide content. They give you the playground, you have to meet your friends and make up the rules for your games. PVPUltima Online’s free-for-all mentality taught MMORPG designers that players, by and large, do not want to be fodder in a victim simulator. Any MMORPG worth its salt now has some kind of mechanic to make PVP a consensual practice, allowing those who would keep their virtual social interactions less violent to have a satisfying experience, while still giving those who want to test their skills against live opponents an outlet. Star Wars Galaxies uses the framework of the Galactic Civil War to accomplish this. Players may ally themselves with the Rebellion or the Empire, and chose to be either “Covert,” (Allowing them to fight opposing NPCs, but being at risk from nearby opposing players when doing so), or “Declared” (Opening them up to the threat of attack from opposing PCs at all times.) Player Guilds may also war with each other, and Jedi must take extraordinary measures to protect themselves from other players (more on that later). EndorQuest
Of course, for all its many fine qualities, SW:G has fallen into some of the same ruts as other MMORPGs in some areas. The play experience can range from an immerse Star Wars experience to a fairly banal and typical MMORPG with a slight, watered-down Star Wars flavor.
Nearly all of the missions (“Quests”) for combat types are variations on the same old quests MMORPGers have been doing for years, in two different flavors. Fetch and deliver, or assassinate and destroy. Perhaps more unforgivably, as you align yourself in the Galactic Civil War and move up to taking your orders from none other than Darth Vader or Mon Mothma, you’ll be getting the same types of orders with a minor facelift. Here’s an anecdote about a special “event” quest that illustrates the game can change radically from a Star Wars game to Just Another MMORPG, going from 60 to 0 in a matter of seconds: An armor smith hears a rumor about a rare new type of powerful armor, but the only one able to impart the schematic is a recluse on the dangerous world of Dantooine. Gathering her more combat oriented friends, they fight their way though the dangerous plains to the hut where the recluse dwells. He won’t speak to anyone but the armor smith, and demands fifty thousand credits up front. After taking payment, he gives the ingredients for only one component of the armor, and demands the his new apprentice return with a completed prototype before he will teach him the rest of the technique. This is complicated further by the fact that it calls for rare organic components from exotic creatures on such dangerous worlds as Lok and Yavin IV, which the group must prevail against to get the materials. So far so good, right? Not exactly unique or inspired, but with a good cast and special effects it’s a serviceable Star Wars tale. The components are on unique creatures that spawn in a single location on their planet. The components are lootable items that in some cases appear on them only 20% of the time. The creatures take any where from 30 minutes to an hour and a half to “respawn” once killed. You do the math. Players mobbing these “spawn points,” arguments over who’s turn it is to slay and loot the Recluse Gurk King, “ninja-looters” swooping in to harvest the components in a blink of an eye. The kind of frustration, metagame foolishness, and grief play born of bad design present in many MMORPGs. The problem exists doubly with Holocron-bearing NPCs. The response of the development team? To make the item occur as loot even less frequently. WHAT ABOUT THE JEDI?The box blurb proclaims that the player can take on the path of the Jedi. This is true, but for anyone but the most hardened gamer dedicated to little but spending time playing, it’s virtually impossible. To be faithful to the source material, Jedi have to be kept rare. The devs are mum on the specifics, but the leading theory is that the primary requirement to unlock one’s “Force Sensitive Slot” (which allows the player to make a Jedi character on the server) is that a character must master three or four elite professions. Since there is an absolute cap on skills one can possess at a given time, this means not only grinding out the professions, but surrendering them to move from one to another. The professions are random for each character, but “Holocron” items will tell the player one profession they must master before being used up, putting these items in ridiculously high demand.
The Jedi characters are, appropriately enough, in constant danger. Merely using a Force power grants them a Temporary Enemy Flag to every other player, allowing them to be attacked by whomever cares to. Bounty Hunters receive special missions inviting them to track and eliminate Jedi players. And a Jedi character, after dying three times, loses all skills, equipment, credits, et cetera and must begin again. THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE UGLYOverall, my impression of the game is this: It is at times a great Star Wars Game that you play online. At other times it’s a so-so MMORPG with Star Wars related content. There is so much to do and see, so much content, that it changes drastically. There is a lot here, but the whole is sometimes less than the sum of it’s parts. Also with this scope and complexity come inevitable bugs and balance issues.
If you really crave an escape into the Star Wars Universe, and are willing to forgive the game’s foibles, I’d recommend it. You have to be willing to put up with some of the same basic problems that have plagued persistent-world games from the beginning, and you have to be able to put up with the MMORPG mindset. It’s a difficult game to recommend without reservation. I enjoy it, but sometimes it seems like the bastard offspring of EverQuest and bad EU fiction, other times it really hits its stride. I’d recommend trying it for yourself if at all possible and weigh their own experience. Not helpful advice from a review, but it’s a difficult game to either recommend or warn off from. When it’s good, it’s amazing. When it’s bad, it’s buggy, frustrating, and altogether mundane. My experience has been entertaining enough that I’m going to keep playing, but then again, I do enjoy me some Star Wars.