For the last couple of weeks, I’ve been able to re-experience Star Wars Galaxies. After eight years, I noticed that I might have forgotten a few things. OK, I have forgotten a lot of things. Many of the things that I forgot are great; others could be fixed still. I do wonder how much freedom the Legends team has and how much time it has to put into the game’s construction.
Before I jump into my first impressions of actually playing SWGL, I want to give a huge tip of the hat to the developers at Legends. These folks put a lot of heart into their work, and it shows. It’s a labor of love for them, and as a former community leader of the original SWG, I appreciate that. I know how much work goes into building something like this, and I really look forward to what the developers continue to do with this platform.
Now, let’s talk about the game and this emulator.
Legacy questing
For those who don’t know from our other articles and experience in the game, Star Wars Galaxies: Legends emulates the game that existed about a year before the original game shutdown. All the expansions are included: Trials of Obi-Wan, Rage of the Wookiees, and of course, Jump to Lightspeed. The developers also dropped in some of the later-in-life additions like the boss instances, like Axkva Min, Exar Kun, etc. But since I have only been playing for a couple of weeks in my free time, I have not been able to advance far enough to experience any of that yet. The Legacy quests, as they are called, have taken the bulk of my time.
The Legacy quests are never really called the Legacy quests in-game, so when a helpful dancer called them that, it took me a minute to remember what she was talking about. The Legacy quests actually start in the tutorial zone. The Han Solo rescues you from an Imperial medical facility and takes you to Tansarii Point Station. There you can opt to do a series of quests that are designed to get you familiar with the game. I didn’t really. I did just enough to get my butt on solid ground again.
Combat difficulty check
If you’re unfamiliar with the game, I would probably suggest doing a few of those quests, but the problem is that you will drop on Tatooine at about level 10, and this will place you above level for the first part of the Tatooine quest series. Since there is no level-sync for anything like that, players have to be careful about whom they attack as well as how long they spend killing enemies. If you’re too low in level, enemies will kill you very quickly; if you’re too high of a level, you will not gain any XP from the kill.
Right now, I’m on my way to Jabba’s Palace, having just “rescued” an R2 droid from Watto. And I feel that I’m a bit above level, probably because I stopped to grind a couple of levels by just killing mobs over and over. I’ll explain why in just a bit. I am on the cusp of not gaining any XP from my kills. Many of the enemies I’m killing are green or light blue at this point, which means they are easy kills. The breakdown from the original dev post from years ago is found on the SWGANH Wiki:
- A green icon indicates that the creature should be fairly easy to defeat;
- Blue indicates that you will probably kill the creature, but it will prove somewhat difficult;
- White indicates that the creature’s abilities are on par with your own, it should be an even match;
- Yellow indicates that the creature is slightly stronger than you, and will be very difficult to kill;
- Red indicates that the creature is much more skilled than you, and will most likely defeat you easily.
While taking on the White Thrantas just outside Mos Eisley, I was given an E-11 blaster as a reward. But I couldn’t equip it. It was CL14, and I was only CL12. It’s been 8 years; I forgot about this little misstep in the questline. Since I was given a reward that was two levels higher than me, I thought that I was not high enough level to continue. My thought was that because I left Tansarii Point Station early, I was not high enough level for the quests on the surface. However, the truth was that this reward was not leveled correctly. So when I stayed in the base to kill mobs to gain levels, I ended up over-leveled for later quests.
Macros, macros, macros
But this did give me an opportunity to explore something I have not touched since I left the game: macros. Some people take pride in not standing around AFK and gaining levels. You’ll find a lot of Dancers and Musicians who wear it as some kind of badge of honor. I believe in working smarter, not harder. So I’m a fan of macros.
Although I was technically at my keyboard as I was letting my Wookiee shoot blaster bolts at the White Thranta personnel, I set up a macro to do it so that I could work on other things. The macro was simple but effective.
/ui action cycleTargetOutward;
/pause 1;
/ui action toolbarSlot00;
/pause 1;
/ui action toolbarSlot01;
/pause 1;
/ui action toolbarSlot02;
/pause 1;
/ui action toolbarSlot03;
/pause 1;
/macro attack;
This is far from a complicated macro. The ones I set up when SWG was live were a lot more complicated and had a much better timer than these. At level 90, I also have a lot more abilities than these. Essentially what this macro did was target the nearest enemy and fire off all my abilities at it, with a one-second pause between each ability to account for cooldown and lag. As long as I didn’t attempt to hit too many enemies at one time, this macro kept me alive and leveling while I could catch up on other things.
At some point, I will make a whole article on macros, but for now, that will give you a tiny peek under the hood of what I’m doing in-game. I don’t have a vote this week, but I will next week as I start to think about which direction I want to take my character in piloting, and also I want to build a crafter. Until then, may the Force be with you.
Every other week, Larry Everett jumps into his T-16 back home, rides through the hypergates of Star Wars online games, and posts his adventures in the Hyperspace Beacon. Drop him a holocom on Twitter @Shaddoe or send him a transmission at larry@massivelyop.com. Now strap yourself in, kid — we gotta make the jump to hyperspace!
