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Addicting, but repetitive... expect more from Sony and Lucas
I've been playing this game for a while now. Here is what I see from the game.
Positives:
1) Addicting!!!! I'm talking "I'm gonna lose my job because I stay up all night playing this and almost fall asleep at my desk" type of addicting. Yes, this is more addicting than Bejewelled.
2) Creating Characters. Bar none, this gives you the ability to create the most unique look. I've never seen two people look exactly the same. I mean it literally when I say that there are a million possible looks.... even down to the arrangements of the freckles on your face. And that is just the human race. There are other races and so many options you can take with each.
3) Different types of experience/diversity of professions. There are so many professions you can undertake. You can be a medic/doctor and heal yourself and others. You can be a scout and trap animals. You can be a merchant. You can be a dancer/entertainer. You can even be a politician and run for office!! There are just soooooo many things you can do and become on this game.
4) Even if you can play for 15 minutes a day, you can still get stuff done on here. Or, you can spend hours and hours playing. You can even set up a macro to do some things for you and then walk away from the keyboard for an hour or two and come back to see how you did. Very useful for surveyors and medics!
Neutral:
1) Limits on skills. I think this number is waaaay to low. You can master two or three professions and then, that is it!!! You can unlearn these professions and start learning another one. This is good so that no character gets too powerful, but this is also bad because you can't have two characters from the same account on the same server. See negative #5 below for more info.
2) Graphics/sound. This is okay. I'm not blown away by the details of anything out there, except for the character generation of course, but I've also seen much worst. The sounds are okay and I find it a joy to hear a lot of sounds from the Star Wars universe. But from a game sponsored by Lucas and written by Sony, I would expect more in both categories.
3) The $15 per month to play. Yes, you need to pay to play MMORPG's but I would expect much more for the $15 I'm spending. I would be more than happy to pay it if I was getting my money's worth. I don't feel I am, however because there is very little variety in game playing and questing.
Negatives:
1) Lag. If you are around others or have just entered a town, the lag is unbelievable. It is hard to imagine some people play this on dial-up. I get a lot of lag for a high speed connection to the game.
2) Grinding for experience. Sometimes you need to do something again and again and again to build experience in a certain profession. If you want to be an artisan/crafter be prepared to make a lot of something that ends up getting destroyed and never used. Prepare to make it again and again and again and again..... This can be very boring. Almost every profession requires something boring like this. The only exciting one I've found is being a marksman or brawler where you get experience points for fighting and even then this is rather boring. See #4 before. For $15 a month, I'd expect more. It would be nice if there was tasks you could take on for some professions to help build the experience and add variety to the game.
3) This is a resource HOG!!! Half a Gig of memory and 4GB of hard drive space?!?!?! Come on!!! With this type of demand on my system I would expect much more.
4) Same-ol' bad guys. Okay, I do quest after quest and they are all almost the same. I fight the same small band of bad-guys, get my reward, and then repeat. There is not much in the ways of getting different quests to perform.
5) Can only have one character per server. This is the reason I'm not going to play anymore. I wish I could build many characters on one server so I can still play with my group of friends. I would like to have one character with a certain skill set and be able to swap him out for another character with other specialties for a certain quest. However, each character you create has to play on different servers.
So, if you like Star Wars, give this a go. You might find it addicting to. As for me, I'm bailing as I am switching over to World of Warcraft which seems to overcome many of these weaknesses... especially negative #4 and #5. That just kills the enjoyment for me.
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