Yeah Groucho, hopefully there is a trial, I think there will be eventually since like, every MMORPG seems to have one now.

Another option is to do like they did with Xbox Live: no subscription fees for the first year. Get a big initial fanbase and large sell-through, and then kick in the fees.

Is space fighting still an add on pack planned for the future?

That's never going to happen for SWG.

First of all, that's the first time I've ever heard of a free trial for both games. When did they start doing that? Anyways, both of those games are considered online failures and would need the free trial period to attract people. SWG won't have any problems getting people to try it out.

The second reason it'll never happen is that they still make money off of people buying the game and deciding they don't like it enough to pay the monthly fee. They've already paid $50 for it, which helps cover the initial development costs and hefty licensing fees.

What MMORPGs have free trials? The only free trials that I know every MMORPG has are called beta tests.

:hscratch:
Xbox Live costs $50 a year and has been since they launched it.

Getting a big initial fanbase is both good and bad for MMORPG. It's good in that a larger initial fanbase leads to high amount of retention through sheer numbers.
The bad is that the first few months of a MMORPG are always the worst and first impressions are very important. Games are usually not 100% ready and would still be considered in beta stage by most. More bugs are exposed and the large amount of players compound those bugs which affect the server, causing lags and crashes. Anarchy Online was especially bad and even if they have improved it dramatically and offered me a free trial, there's no way that I would consider playing it again. The most successful launch of a MMORPG was probably Dark Age of Camelot.

Anyways, the large fanbase for Star Wars will bring in the casual gamer, but it's the hardcore players who stay on and pay the monthly fees. MMORGP's involve a lot of time and dedication, and a casual gamer simply doesn't have the time to devote to it to get anywhere.

The main reason I'm not going to devote my time and effort is simply because I don't have the time to sit around playing it enough to level up to a point were it would be enjoyable.. I don't want to also pay 15 bucks a month to be in retail stuck on some planet with a shop either so that's not an option.

Well, Everquest, I believe DAoC and AC/AC2 all had the first month free. That can be considered a free trial, can it not?

AC2 , AO, E&B all have free trials now. They also all have a free month.

EQ only has them for former players in that they sometimes reactivate your account for a period for you to try it. (I received a free month and 2 weeks already this year).

Not if you have to buy the software.

Well, you can't run the software without the service, and it's a free trial of the service. Now yu're just being picky ;)

i want to be a jedi!

have you guys seen the conan o' brien bit w/ the puppet dog?
http://www.redcoat.net/pics/Conan-Tr...-Star-Wars.wmv

I play Medal of Honor Allied Assault online every night for almost an hour or so. If I had to pay $15 a month to do so, then I would. Being able to play games online is the main reason that I have a cable modem, so I guess I am already paying $45 a month to play games online. I am not going to pass judgement on this until I have played it. I have been waiting since C2 where I first saw this for a chance to play it. So, I will buy it and play it. If it's not worth the $15 a month, then ebay here it comes.

In that case, I've been using the free trial for Diablo 2 for years! I wonder when that expires?

We're a bit off subject now... but I don't mind paying, charging for a game usually reduces the number of immature fools by at least 90%.

I pay for piece of mind, it means I dont have some kid named D00D31337 call me a f***ing piece of ***** or the kids who seem to have only discovered the difference between male and female and can't stop talking about how they are 15 and getting some at school during each class by the teacher and 4-5 students.

Hmm...when I paid to play Everquest this was a fairly regular occurance.

Being a Jedi in this game is going to be really hard and require a lot of dedication. When you become a Jedi, the Empire immediately issues a bounty on your head, so you have to stay low-key. And if you die as a Jedi, it's permanent death: start a new character. UNLESS you make it to Jedi Master, in which case you become a blue spirit, which is pretty durn cool.

Hey, if Lucas offers me my $15 a month back to hunt down Jedi, I'd be happy to join the Empire!

I'm sure the place will be flooded with would be Boba fett's. It sounds really dope, but I really don't want to keep on paying for this service since for 15 bucks, you feel you need a certain amount of time put into it or else it was a waste of 15 bucks and like others said.. the first few months will be slow to say the least as everyone is just getting into it all. So that's 45 bucks down the drain.

NDA be damned - the game sucks. Boring as hell - I'm not keen on spending 15 bucks a month playing Fed Ex man for a bunch of people standing around. Whoopie-doo!

Gimmie Jedi Academy - now that's going to rock the house over this lame-o game.

The NDA has been lifted
 

Here are my thoughts:

First, you start the game with a rather poor tutorial. Believe me, this game is not easy, the learning curve is extremly high. You don't know what to do when you start and everything is somewhat hard to learn. You have 2 modes really, an action cursor and a regular cursor which you have to change between to do anything. If you want to stick to the one action cursor, its terribly hard as you then need to do CTRL- [key] to do anything. Since many binds are not existent, it's about impossible to play without alternating cursor. To make matters worst, you can hardly move with one cursor as the camera is not locked and fighting with it is near impossible.

Now, to picking a class and what not. I went easy, I picked a wookie marksman, equivalent warrior basically. This is simple as I only run out and kill everything. Killing is easy enough, I just used the same move over and over and over and over to kill everything. There are no spells, everything is basically a move you learn when you level up. My wookie was easy, I had choice of 1 type of armor which I dont believe provided any defense at all. (Basically, NO armor at all shows the defense they provide so it's up to you to find out). Weapon wise, you can use 1 weapon type when you start and you gain them up with levels. It's not levels really, the more you fight, the more points you gain which then enable you to train to higher skill meaning more moves and damage. It's simple to chose a weapon as there are maybe what... oh, 30 different weapons in all the styles (unarmed, rifle, pistol, carabine, heavy) meaning everyone and their grandmother in the game has the same weapon. It's the same with armor, maybe 5 types I saw in the game. If you want variety, this is not it.

Now people can craft, but the market was so bloody laggy and unstable that I could hardly ever get anything done. To boot, the market only sold maybe 2-3 types of weapons at any given time and nothing high enough level for anyone, you had to find a crafter. This was hard as few people advertise their class. I ended up buying from a crafter who had his house smack in the middle of nowhere. Yes, the map will be full of mining equipment and houses in a month unless they restrict it (I think they might).

To gain money, you basically do missions. Missions are easy, there is destroy or deliver. They can word it the way they want, there are only 2 styles of mission so you get bored fast. There might be more when you join a faction or if you become a bounty hunter, I didnt get far enough to do that. I heard there were quests, I never saw any as all NPCs just said to me was 'get out of my face' or 'deliver this for me to this guy'.

Looting is nothing special, I looted maybe 1000 mobs and I found nothing special, crappy weapon, crappy armor and more often than not (which is to say the majority of time), nothing at all. You do find locked containers, but I didnt find anyone with skill to open them in the game. The scout skill means you can harvest crap from mobs, hides, bones or meat, they are used to craft other items, you stack thousands of those when you fight... can maybe sell, its up to you if you want to.

Oh, grouping was fun too, its based on damage for exp, not on group. I joined 3 guys to give them a hand, I received 90% of the exp while they split 10%, talk about fun. I never even found a group my level as you cant con other players that I saw so you never really know who is weak and who is strong. I solo'ed 99% of the time I played and could kill yellow conning mobs due to lag making the mobs very docile as in they maybe hit me once per battle, preferring to stand there following me around. When they did fight, it was stupid because melee mobs could hit me from 50 meters away. I guess they had some sort of whacky ESP powers that made every mob be able to hit me when I could hardly see it.

Other than all of this, I found the graphics far from spectacular, the clip plane was low and everything loaded at the last minute. The towns are full of NPCS who do nothing but lag you to 1fps per second and they are a bitch to wander through (use /find if you get the game, example, /find bank, this will save you hours of searching). There was also a fun bug where NOTHING loaded, EVER. I walked for 10 minutes on the world map and saw nothing at all, no mobs, no bases, no nothing at all. I think they might have fixed it though.


Anyways, all in all, I won't buy the game due to lack of content and fun and being extremely hard to learn. Oh, I didn't cover it, but this game has the lamest sounds around. Very little music except players in the cantina and a gazillion laser blaster firing (with maybe 3 different sounds between all weapons in the game).

Rating :
Graphics : 8/10
Gameplay : 4/10
Value : 4/10
Sounds : 2/10
Tilt : 5/10

Wow, SWG sounds worse than AO and I didn't think that was possible.

I'm done with you ;) Don't you have some homosexual cartoons to protest or something? :lol:

here are a lot of comments.

http://boards2.station.sony.com/ubb/...ML/134768.html

from what I see in screen caps. the game looks like crap and a whole lot of nothing going on.