XWA and SWG?

For those who have played X-Wing: Alliance and Star Wars: Galaxies; Jump to Lightspeed, who similar/different is the piloting of space craft and combat?

 

SWG is much slower, and the controls are more clumsy. Although you can reduce this issue by finding better equipment, the controls still never beat out XWA. You can use a joystick just like you do in XWA.


In SWG each ship is fully customizable(Whether you like it or not). You can switch shields, weapons, engines, missiles, armor, etc. And some of these have changes to the visual image of your star fighter. Sometimes a Y Wing will have the engines of the USS Enterprise, or an Xwing will have gigantic Rockets for engines. And if you don't like it, you really don't have a choice. If you want to have the best equipment you don't have the option of choosing how you want your Xwing to look. You simply install the engines that work best and bite your tongue about wanting to actually fly a real Xwing, and not some makeshift Ugly.

All fire in SWG is linked X 4, you can't fire single repeating shots. This has the effect of making combat slow as well since there is a large gap between shots that are fired.

Also, if your flying in space as a Rebel in an Xwing, and you fly by an Imperial in a Tie Fighter logic would dictate that you could destroy this enemy. But if the enemy is a real player chances are all you can do is watch him fly by and destroy any Rebel NPCs in the area. Players can't attack enemy players unless they activate their "flag". This has also put me in the position of actually working WITH the enemy in space by default when you end up attacking the same Pirate NPCs. Xwings and Tie Fighters fighting hand in hand, its actually quite quaint, untill you realize that you wanted to play a Star Wars game, then you get bored pretty quit.

 

SWG:JtL is an RPG dressed up as a space sim. XWA IS a space sim. That's about all that needs to be said. I haven't played JtL, but XWA is the perfect evolution and perfection of the flight model running through X-Wing TIE-Fighter and XvT. I'm assuming from your post that you're familiar with the X-Wing series, and put simply, (based on what I've heard) JtL isn't at all similar. The graphics are swish, but the play style is totally different. Sort of like what Deus Ex's shooter mechanics are to, say, Quake's. With Quake, it's all about the player's skill with aiming, use of weapons etc, but with Deus Ex's RPG-type play mechanics, the player's skill matters less than the game character's XP, stats, weapon upgrades, etc. SWG is an RPG. You can't (sadly) expect it to play like the mighty X-Wing (I'm still praying for a new installment....sadly, it's probably never going to happen with the way the industry's going )

 

Well, the flight portion of Star Wars Galaxies(From the Jump to Lightspeed Expansion) is as twitchy as XWA. You move your ship, evade, and fire all on your own. There is no behind the scenes "number crunching" to see if you actually hit or evaded.


But even with that, SWG is still not a worthy emulator of the Xwing series.

 

JtL definately sounds like a not very thought out afterthought. It it would be better if it was the RPG-style 'number crunching' game or a XWA-style sim.

Of couse I would like to see a XWA-style sim (or MMO sim) with the interface cleaned up a bit. Too many hotkeys, too many commands that do very little. Also change the weapons and shields to OFF, ON (with basic recharge with 100% as max shield strength) and INCREASED POWER (with higher recharge and 125% to 150% max shield strength). Why you have to slow your vessel to recharge the guns at a basic rate is beyond me. The speed should given should indicate the speed the vessel will travel at in all be the most extreme combat situations.

As for upgrading the vessels you have in SWG: JtL, I can see modifications, but if you want a better ship that means you should get a better ship. I don't care what you do to a Y-Wing, it won't be an agile dogfighter and a TIE will never be a heavy attack fighter. I can see modifying Light and Medium Freighters as well as 'modular' craft like the Corellian Corvette and a few others, but that's it.

 

How does SWG handle astronavigation? The jumping from planet/system to planet/system.

 

well... you can launch into space in your own ship at the starport, each planet has four 'zones' of space around it, occupied by different people at different levels of risk to yourself. Pirates, imps or rebs or whatever, and onc ein space you can jump to any of those points in space, then you can travel to a space station to repair if need be and land at whatever part of the planet you want that has a starport, or you can just skip the whole space bit and travel straight to where u wanna go