Long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away... There was a MMORPG named Star Wars Galaxies that atracted a lot of people because it was the first game of this kind in being ambiented in one of the most exciting stories of the cinema: Star Wars. But time has passed and what once was a great game with thousands of fans it has been converted in a mad house where caos reigns on every corner, perhaps we should talk of the Mad Star Wars. Because that's what seems the game with the recent politics of Sony Online Entertainment and LucasArts Entertainment, developers of Star Wars Galaxies, making abrupt changes in the gameplay and all the structure itself without any official reason to make that so quickly.
The chronicle about what had happened could start of this form: In a first moment, the awaited expansion of Trials of Obi-Wan is launched at finals October with a new planet and missiones focused in the etern conflict between Jedi and Sith. But the shocking surprise comes for all the community when few days after SOE announces that will change for complet the fisonomy of Star Wars Galaxies, a changes that, of course, were surely planed from months ago. The question is: If the known that why don't announced them before launching the expansion or why they didn't introduced the changes into it? The answer, easy: to get more benefits in a safety form, so it was very posible that most users changed their minds and decided not to buy Trials of Obi-Wan if they had known these abrupt changes.
These changes gone live the 15th November with the name og New Game Enhacements(NGE), almost two weeks after their announcement and after an practically inexisten test stage in the Test Center that haven't had to much use because the developers haven't payed attention to most of the advises and claims of the testers about the interminable bugs lists that will provoque the implementation of NGE. To make a quick idea of what suppose these changes I will resume the principal: The number of available professions is reduced from 36 to 9 iconic ones, this includes all allready created characters and implies the completely delete of Creature Handlers, Bio Engineers, Scouts and Rangers, the rest are reconverted and compacted; the Jedi are no more an epic class, everyone can have his own jedi when creating a new character; a new combat system in pseudo real time similar to fps games, like Neocron for example.
At this point, NGE is live in all the game servers and when a player enters in the game he finds out that has to respec his character and select one of the available professions for good or bad and star enjoying this new point of view of Star Wars Galaxies. But things coult not get worse, because the launch of NGE has supposed a lot of bugs in the game affecting most of them seriously to the gameplay.
To start, players that were Bounty Hunters for example, find them that now are Jedis with their equivalent Combat Level, but without noone of the essential items of it's new profesion rewarded in the special quests from level 1 to 80, the result?, so the weapos, armours that we were used to use dont work now, and if we want to progress better in the game we have to regrind all these quests. This bug was denunced in the Test Center and it was assured that would be fixed in the launch, but nothing was solved. For luck, SOE has announced that soon, noone knows here the meaning of "soon", they will launch a fix for that, and when the players does the respec he will get all the items.
We could spent hours and hours talking about de bugs and the ilogic situations introduced with NGE caused for a catastrophic planification, a thing that is actually happening in the official forums where someone could say that the Galactic Civil War has been alocated there and there is no more in the films or games. If you check the posts there you will find lots of flames but lots of constructive posts with very smart ideas and reviews of what is happening now in the game.
