The Dramamine Twitch

A lot of the people on the ground in SWG can't stand the space game 'cause its "twitch."

And a lot of space guys can't stand the ground game, I mean, I personally thank the gods there are dudes willing to waddle through all that eyebrow lag in their underpants to dig in the mud and harvest resources and build us ships and ship parts, 'cause that's the frickin' tortures of the damned in my book, those ship-builder guys are freakin' heroic heh.

The ground game is sorta stuck somewhere between supporting the people from 2D Isometric View UO Macro Land and Every Other Game in the Universe, it really was just a fancy upgrade to UO, complete with a 2d map and a medieval carried-by-foot economy and ostards and halberds.

Not that they didn't do a good job on recreating the houses and cities and furniture and all the other Star Wars minutia from the movies, 'cause they really did do an incredibly good job of that, I remember the first time I saw Jabba's Palace and I got this weird feeling and I realized that I was standing exactly where the camera was in the movie when C3PO first saw it at the beginning of Return of the Jedi.

But I do expect a little more from a Star Wars game than a fancy Star Wars Version of UO, y'know?

Well, maybe you don't know.

Anyways, when the game first came out, I was one of the first master weaponsmiths, 'cause everything seemed like ass to me except the crafting game, especially when there wasn't anything to buy to kill stuff with 'cause, y'know, the game had just come out.

But then I got bored of just standing around being super rich and waiting for the space game to come out, so I went on another server and I tried to make a bounty hunter and the combat game really sucked some serious ass and I had to hang around the star port and beg people to let me train them and kiss a lot of dancing twi'lek butt so I quit and went around playing other games for a while.

'Member all that kneel-shoot-prone-shoot-standup-shoot stuff?

"This game has more sitting down and standing up than a catholic wedding."

And Han Solo playing a trombone while doing the Riverdance to cure his own battle fatigue?

And waiting forever for doctors to fix your black HAM bars in hospitals by applying eight hundred pitiful little HAM Bandaids over the course of forty-five minutes 'cause they're all newbs trying to train up skills while everybody else who knew what they were doing were afk-heal-macroing against an afk-macro-tumbler?

And then they always forgot to check out your damaged attributes, right?

And tips aren't just appreciated, either, 'cause I definitely don't work for Sony, baby.

Yah, those were some damn Good Times we had back in the day ahaha.

Even kiting in a pack archers in Horizons was better than Pre-CU combat in the earliest days of the game, seriously, the Doctor Buff Line Trapped In Composite Armor Age, even though everybody was prostituting themselves out for medical experients at the time, was much more fun than the game originally was, but that didn't actually happen 'till much later in SWG's life, when I came back to try it again, and then left again after maxing another character out.

And then the first CU came out, that was right about the same time a bunch of us were finally getting sick of punching the hell outta thugs in City of Heroes, a WASD game where I could Super Jump up the sides of skyscrapers in 3D at a blistering (hah) 60 frames per second and send enemies flying all over the place with pseudo-ragdoll physics.

So that's what it had to be compared to, for people who weren't stuck in UO land because they couldn't play a game like that.

And compared to all the cool super powers we had in CoH, the combat in the CU didn't exactly make us CoH guys tingle all over, but for the exact opposite reason that the people who thought it was too fast hated it heh.

But we both hated it, so we could agree on that!

Problem was, the solutions we wanted went in completely different directions.

And so I quit again.

Yah, see, I wanted Jedi Academy, the Jedi Knight games were absolutely kick ass, I'll never forget the first time I shot a blaster in Dark Forces and heard the sound effects from the movies and thought "holy shit man this is gonna be awesome!"

"Stop, rebel scum!"

And it just got better and better and better, y'know, with the unbelievable lightsaber fights and force powers and stuff in the sequels.

I still don't understand why my powers don't LOOK like they go off as soon as I hit the frickin' button, like they did in EQ, which was just about exactly as rinky dink and hit-a-and-pray as SWG used to be.

Okay, combat in EQ was a little better heh.

Okay, combat in EQ was a lot better, when you consider stuff like backstabbing quake-stepping rogue duels in pvp ahaha.

But I do sorta love the way my jedi still blasts corpses in the crotch with force lightning 'cause it takes so long for the graphics to catch up to the fight.

Anyways then the NGE came out, and that was about a year after WoW had been around (I'm not sure exactly, 'cause I was in WoW Beta for like six to nine months or so before WoW went live and I played it for about six months after WoW went live and just happened to come back to SWG about two weeks before they announced the NGE).

And BOTH of the KotORs had been out by then, fer sure.

So that's what it had to be compared to, y'know, WoW and the KotORs, for people who weren't stuck in UO land because they couldn't play games like that.

But by that time SWG had Planet of the Apes, and that Mustafarted thing, and all the legacy quest stuff, and all sorts of new toys, which made it a million times better than it used to be when everything was a bunch of kill-a-dungpile hide-skinning-and-egg-collecting missions out of those damn mission booths heh.

Yah, 'member solo-grouping?

"MILK THE ANIMALS!"

Part of SWG's problem has ALWAYS been that making a game for a guy who gets motion sickness and hates WASD that won't bore the living shit out of all us guys that played all the other Star Wars Games, and stuff like Halo and Unreal Tournie, is really frickin' hard.

But everybody like me, except me, is too frickin' nice to say that.

And the guys that are like me tend to just put up with all the mud in the ground game and hope some starving game dev shmuck can figure out a way to fix it somehow so we're all happy, even though it seems pretty goddam impossible to me, especially since people think KotOR was too twitchy heh.

But the biggest problem of all is that this is a Star Wars Game.

And Star Wars is much bigger than me and you and Raph and UO and even WoW.

And you know this.

You know there is something very wrong going on.

You KNOW that hardly ANYBODY that plays WoW even KNOWS wtf KINDA GAME Warcraft and Starcraft was, so how could its IP really matter?

So if I'm totally off the mark, then how the hell is it possible that a Star Wars IP game HAS ALWAYS been doing this badly?

Do you really think it woulda done better if it was even more like UO (if that's even possible) and less like WoW and KotOR and Jedi Academy and Halo and Unreal Tournie?

Well, whatever, I know that many of you are just waiting as patiently as you can for the next not-too-3d UO Upgrade house-decorating avatar-emote-fest halberd-and-ostard macro-thingie that Raph is gonna make, or that Free Pre-CU Emulator, so you can jump ship and go where you'll be happier.

Just like I'm trying to wait patiently for them to build a Star Wars MMO that a guy like you can't even begin to play without taking a ton of Dramamine.

Yah, I'll admit I've never done a very good job of it on my end.

But neither have you.

With your "this is for twitch kiddies" shit.

But don't worry, I really can't sink to your level.

And its not because I agree with you.

Or that I'm afraid of the combined wit and charisma of you and all your friends.

Or anything else.

It's because attacking people with all these disabilities and disadvantages is generally against the rules even for an asshole like me.

And I really do feel sorry for the guy that can't play the space game and can't aim his gun.

Especially when he's always so goddam polite about it and all he wants to know is how he can get past that stuff.

But that's because I like flying spaceships and I like aiming my laser gun.

And it happens to be especially good in a game about spaceships and laser guns.

And I feel bad that this guy can't do that stuff.

And I feel guilty that I want so much more than that.

And I feel especially guilty 'cause Ex-bouncer has that motion sickness stuff really bad and he's got one leg shorter than the other and rickets and a lazy eye and webbed fingers and he can only see in black and white and he actually does have to take Dramamine sometimes to hang in there with me.

But he's just as good as me at all these games.