Wednesday, March 16, 2005

Now everyone can have a bent Wookie

SOE has released information for the new SWG expansion. It's called Episode III: Rage of the Wookies. It includes a new planet, Kashyyk, the home world of the Wookies, a hundred new missions, and some new items among them the Jedi starfighter (As seen in Episode III: Revenge of the Sith!). All this and the assembled host of bugs, glitches, disappointments, and outright lies that accompany all of SOE's products can be yours for the bargain price of $24.99.

This will be the second expansion for SWG, the single most disappointing game in MMORPG history, the first being Jump to Lightspeed, which brought us the ability to play in space. RoTW will actually come with JtL for free, which if it follows the economic model of MMORPG expansions, has not made the portion of the user base who bought JtL when it came out very happy.

Besides the obvious marketing tie with a movie whose events take place some 25 years before the setting of the SWG game, there are plenty of other reasons to believe that the expansion will suck. At present there is no evidence to indicate that the "100 new missions" will be any better than the thousands of cookie-cutter UPS or destruction chores already available. Furthermore, Kashyyk will in all events end up as nothing more than another high level adventure planet, which in itself isn't all that bad, but I hardly think another Endor or Dathomir is worth $24.99.

Most of the SWG population awaits RoTW because the much anticipated Combat Balance will be released simultaneously. SWG users await the combat upgrade as fervently as the Jews await the messiah, and SOE has only fuelled this urgency by promising, for more than a year, that the combat rebalance will be that answer to all the game's ills.

I personally anticipate disappointment both from RoTW and from the combat rebalance, because SOE has never given us a reason to expect otherwise. Nonetheless, I'm pretty sure I'll be shelling out that $24.99, and I hate them for it.

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