Various

It’s been a while since I’ve posted.  I’m still kicking around LotRO at the moment.  I was subscribed to SWG but my old PC bit the dust and I had to get a new one.  SWG is a moderately fun game but, with the new machine, I don’t feel like reinstalling a game I’ll hardly play across the Internet.

I’m interested to see what will come up in the Siege of Mirkwood expansion for LotRO.  There’s a dev diary about the skirmish system – sounds neat.  I’ll have to wait and see how the whole thing turns out.  I know MoM was devastating for my kinship.

 

The Road Not Taken: Star Wars Galaxies

I’ve been enjoying the new content in the Lord of the Rings Online but I’ve also been poking around for something different.  I’ve spent a lot of time playing game in the fantasy genre (WoW, EQ2 and LotRO) and wanted to see what things were like in some of the Science Fiction games I hadn’t picked up.  I had an unused fourteen day trial of Star Wars Galaxies (SWG) sitting around so I thought I’d give it a go.

Once the software was all set up, I logged in; created a character on the first server recommended to me and away I went.  The first character I made was a smuggler.  Smuggler at first seemed like a really cool choice.  I could do a decent amount of damage (both ranged and melee).  The intro quests had me helping out Han Solo and Chewbacca.  I shot down TIE fighters, got parts for the Millennium Falcon and did a bunch of standard MMO-type quests (kill ten x, get parts by killing, click-the-glowy, etc.).

Once I made it to Tatooine, I decided I didn’t like my smuggler.  I rolled him as a squid-looking guy and didn’t really feel like looking at him the whole time.  While I was in town I also noticed that there was basically no one else there.  There were a couple of lowbies like me, but running into people was a rarity.

I made a bounty hunter on a different server.  Bounty hunters also seemed pretty cool.  They have lots of ranged damage and snares.  Their armor also looked cool and the fact that I chose a human this go-around also improved my disposition towards the character.  Away I went, blasting the snot out of stuff for Han and Chewie and also getting to interact with Boba Fett this time.  This time I also started running the space missions right in the tutorial.  Very cool!  One of the things that keep me from trying out Eve Online is the lack (as far as I know) of personal avatars.  You are your ship, it would seem.  SWG allows characters to play as a normal walking-around toon or to be in their spaceships.  I like it.

Once out of the tutorial as my bounty hunter, I was again greeted by a low population world.  As I did more quests without seeing another living soul, I decided that, while the bounty hunter was interesting, it wasn’t going to be my thing.  So I rerolled again.