New Players, New Galaxies

We had a chance to take a sneak peek the revamped beginner area, which is referred to internally at LucasArts as the working title "NPE," or "New Player Experience." The publisher plans to take the bold step of making the NPE free to download and play for anyone who wishes to try out the game. This new package features a brand-new character customization interface that puts the game's 10 different playable races front-and-center with a series of icons on the right, and your character's current appearance (complete with starting clothes that can be changed into different outfits), on the left. Once you've chosen your character's race and name, you'll then move on to Galaxies' well-known character appearance chooser, which still affords many options with respect to eye color and size, nose length, hairstyles, and even cosmetics for female characters.

Han Solo isn't the only famous character you'll bump into.

After creating their new characters, players will awaken to the sounds of blaster fire and crackling circuits. Your character has apparently been abducted by the Empire because of your exceptional talents, and you and must escape the ship with the help of none other than the prim and proper protocol droid, C-3PO, who walks you through the basics of the game's modified, streamlined interface, and helps lead you to your eventual rescuer, a fellow by the name of Han Solo, whom you may have heard of. In fact, you're rescued by Han and his good buddy Chewbacca, as well as the diminutive droid, R2-D2, who lead you to the docking bay. There, you'll eventually board the ship that made the Kessel Run in less than 12 parsecs--the Millennium Falcon, but not before you fight your way past a group of stormtroopers using the game's new combat system.

MacIntyre states that although not everyone greets changes with open arms, "the game is a living, breathing thing. And we want to get this to a movie-caliber experience," which is perhaps part of the reasoning behind the redesigned combat that Galaxies will offer. For starters, even though the original game used an "autoattack" system that caused your character to repeatedly attack enemies automatically as soon as you gave the order, the new version of the game will feature real-time, mouse-click combat. That's right, you'll actually target your enemies (and allies, and other objects in the world) with a mouse-controlled reticule, similar to a first-person shooter (but far, far less demanding in terms of reflexes). You'll then left-click your mouse to attack with your selected weapon, and right-click to attack with your currently active special attack ability--you'll be able to swap special attacks in and out on the fly.

The mouse-clicking scheme actually seems similar to that of Diablo II, in that you can either click repeatedly or click and hold your mouse button to attack repeatedly. You'll need to keep your reticule on enemies that flee, though from what we've seen, this won't be terribly challenging in terms of requiring twitch reflexes. We're told that this new combat system will still be built around groups of characters with different strengths. Certain characters will still be better than others at soaking up damage from enemy attacks and should remain up front, while support characters, like medics, will still want to hang back from the front lines.

Traveling through hyperspace ain't like dusting crops, boy.

Character development and adventuring will also be streamlined, along with the game's interface. The game's original three character "meters," which originally represented the strength of your torso (red meter), legs (green meter), and head (blue meter), had already been streamlined so that your character's health pool was governed entirely by the red health meter, while the blue and green meters instead acted as a reserve to power your characters' special abilities. This will remain the case, although the way characters gain experience levels will change as well. Characters will gain experience through combat, and will gain generalized character levels, though they will also be gain character skill levels, which will let them advance along a tree of skills that will be instantaneously unlocked as soon as they've gained enough experience (rather than having to run back to a trainer character). The new character screens are part of the game's streamlined interface which, where possible, is being modified so that everything can be accomplished in a single click of the mouse, rather than relying on Galaxies' traditional radial menus.

Details on other aspects of the game, such as the ultimate basis of the upcoming story, as well as exactly what will happen to the game's space travel and space combat gameplay, remain scarce. However, MacIntyre suggests that the fact that the game has incorporated elements from other Star Wars games (such as how the homicidal droid HK-47 from Knights of the Old Republic appears in the Trials of Obi-Wan expansion pack) may be telling, and that players shouldn't be surprised to see Galaxies look to other such games for inspiration, if that inspiration can, in fact, lead to a more-cohesive Star Wars experience. For example, MacIntyre suggests that the on-foot-in-vehicle mechanics of LucasArts' upcoming shooter, Battlefront II, might figure into the way space vehicles will work. We'll have to wait to see what's in store for those systems later. For now, the massive update to Galaxies, and the free-to-play new player experience, are scheduled for launch on November 15.