Star Wars Galaxies - The Beginning

As you begin Star Wars Galaxies (referred to as SWG here after) you select the race, hair and eye color, and build of your character. You can pick from eight different characters all plucked right from the movies. Would you like to be the familiar Humans, Wookies, or Mon Calamari, or maybe the less publicized species excite you, such as Zabrak, Twi’lek, Rodian, Trandoshan, or Bothan. Even from the beginning your choices have an affect on your game play experience. Each of the races has their own attributes that can help you or you may have to overcome along the way. These attributes such as strength, speed, and stealth can be boosted as you gain experience points (XP) along the way. Even though these attributes can be changed they do have their limits, a Human will never be as stealthy as the born spies, the Bothans, and a Twi’lek will never be as strong as a Wookie, so considerer what profession you plan to choose and choose the race of your character wisely.

There are other less important aspects to the character selection process such as the build of your character, add muscle or add a few extra pounds, whatever you wish. Choose the clothing your character will wear to star the game, choose from casual outdoors and formal to military uniforms and utility clothing. The clothing options are not set in stone as you progress through the game you will earn new uniforms depending on your profession or which of the major factions you side with. Also customize your character by changing the eye color, hair style and facial hair. While these customizations have no affect on your characters abilities or performance they do allow you a little bit of individuality while gaming.

This brings us to the next phase of entering the SWG universe, Profession Selection. There are nine professions you can choose from, Entertainer, Medic, Smuggler, Bounty Hunter, Commando, Trader, Officer (political), Spy, and what Star Wars game would be complete without Force Sensitive. Each profession will require your character to develop a different skill set in order to advance in your chosen profession. While each of the professions progress rather slowly, the Force Sensitive Jedi is by far the most tedious, so tedious in fact that there is still some skepticism about how to actually become a full-fledged Jedi Knight.

As I began, I found that all the professions offered their own spice to my gaming experience. I did however find the entertainer and medic professions to be exceedingly monotonous and not very interesting. While each profession does have its own required skill set, you are not limited to the tasks you can perform and the skills that you are able to learn. Even if you are a bounty hunter you can learn some skills from taking on quests for spies, commandos and piloting. Each skill set you learn will help you along the way no matter what path you choose. You still should be careful of your profession choice because you cannot create another character on the same server, only one per account. So you may progress to a mid level entertainer and discover that you no longer like this profession or it has become boring and you wish to change, you only have 2 options; 1) you can trade in your skill points and hope that they will be of use to you in another profession (regardless you will still lose a lot of the hard work you did to get where you are) or 2) you can create a new character on another server, losing any associations and friends that you may already have on your current server.

While this is, in my opinion, a flawed system it does give a few advantages; it promotes good behavior among gamers, because players can’t just be jerks, then switch characters or move their character to a different server, their bad reputation will stick with them. Also it restricts using higher level characters to earn money and more advanced equipment for lower level characters which promotes players teaming up in order to accomplish bigger quests and goals together.

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