I paste here a post I wrote on Corpnews. A chaotic list of random comments, focusing on the negative parts I’ve encountered during my experience in the beta of Jump to Lightspeed, the space expansion for SWG that is going to be released the next week, ready or not. I still have somewhere on my hard disk a long text file I was writing a couple of weeks ago with a deep analysis, pointing up all the bugs, issues, design problems, and broken mechanics I was finding. I didn’t manage to complete it and it became obsolete after a few days. As I wrote below the team is working hard and they fixed many of the issues I was pointing out in my essay/analysis. I’m actually happy to not have posted it on the boards because it was also too harsh.
Here’s my comments anyway:
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Soukyan:
Is there collision detection with other ships in space, player or NPC?
Yes, faked client side as a quite lame graphic effect. You do not change direction, do not loose speed, do not get interrupted. Nothing at all. You can completely enter another ship and stay “inside” it, even shooting at it from the inside. Often you finish to chase one with half your ship in physical contact. The only real collision detection is with space stations and very large ship. When it happens you sharply bounce away, still no damage.
Very poor “flow” also. You are forced to reload between each mission to switch to the ground game just to go see a trainer to get the following mission. Because of the long load times this is really boring. If you fail the mission and finish to get killed, you respawn at the space station with the ship broken, then you can repair it but the mission is lost and you have to reload the ground game to reget the mission and switch again to space to retry. The sensation of “space” and “distance” is zero, you feel always in the same place. You get a mission, warp inside the space zone, get a randomly placed waypoint and then start to fight as the target pops up. The space is empty and you can only see things inside a specific range, so you see asteroid fields and the space station appearing from the void, the rest is empty space till you reach the exact location where something else spawns near you. It’s obviously a technical limit that you cannot “solve” but a lot could have been done to give a better feeling of distance and space. There’s also a massive flicker of textures and adjustment of detail as things appear for the first time and move near you (this on max detail and a geforce 6800GT 1Gb ram and 3500+ Athlon64). A lot, lot of problems with the lag and client performance, at least a week ago. The game ran better with my old pc (geforce 3) than with the new one, exactly at the same details.
Combat is sluggish and only faked as twitch. The ships are too slow to really involve ability about dodging or maneuvering. The weight of your skills is minimal and if an enemy is set stronger, you’ll die no matter what. Exactly as in every other mmorpg. As a note: this game considers the inertia, something that NEVER happened in the classic games. This means that the ship needs time to adjust its direction. The result is a very repetitive combat scheme where you run in a circle with your target till one gets killed. Most have defined the sensation as “sliding on ice”. Or turtle spacecombat. You can actually yawn during an intense fight. Still way more fun than what you do on the ground game, though.
I have to say that when I joined the beta the game was in an horrible state. Basic gameplay mechanics (like the speed having an effect on your maneuvering possibilities) were /completely/ missing (the A-wings could fly backwards, shooting as if they were turrets). The targeting system was completely unusable, same for the radar. There were many more problems with the interface, from glitches to game-stopping issues. In a pair of weeks A LOT was fixed.
My impression is that SOE started to develop this expansion a month ago. I really don’t understand what damn they did in the last year. I’ve seen how much they are working NOW, but at the beginning of October the game felt like an early alpha (and if you go see the movie from the E3 of more than two years ago you see it looking WAY BETTER than how it looks now).
I also dislike many choices on the design side. The lack of real space makes the whole thing still faked. The newbie experience I had was awful and I reached various point with abslutely zero clues about how to progress (I still cannot figure out what can I do with the skills I unblocked since I don’t know where I can get a new ship and all of the skills weren’t usable on my newbie tie fighter). Plus all the standard mechanics/controls you expect from the old games are missing.
At a point (after having just unlocked my first two skills) I get stuck completely. My trainer gave me a mission way too hard for my ship and it was the only possibility I had. So I tried various time, got frustrated and left. I didn’t see any other solution to advance.
A note about the new races: yes, you have a great possibility of customization, but the animations are cloned. The new Ithorians with the funny heads still use the exact same animations of the other human races. Because of this you can see the long hands melt inside your body (for example when you pat your chest) and other glitches. It looks really bad to choose new race and finish just with the same default human character with just a different head. Imho this completely wipes the sense of having a different race when you are effectively swapping just the shape of your head.
They are doing a great work. They work hard. But the point is still exactly the same, they move in the wrong directions and despite all their dedication they aren’t able to “deliver”. Too much dispersion, too much chaos. They need to actually slow down and start to make the development simpler, more essential, focus on less elements and polish them, analyzing what is important, what is broken and what needs to be changed. It’s evident that they are under an extreme pressure, this is damaging the game and its potential. Along with basic broken core elements inherited from the “old” game (the whole client performance included).
And the technical forum looked completely ignored and unanswered.